Where’s the nearest Rainbow Trout to London? How about the nearest cow to Malaysia? or Everything near Brighton? www.wildlifenearyou.com is a site that allows you to track where you’ve seen wildlife all over the planet, allowing correct classification of the animals, and indexing the locations where they were found. It’s a great example of building a useful service on top of several APIs (inlcuding Flickr and Google Maps) and utilising social tagging to glue the data together.
Simon tells me there will be an API for WLNY soon, so you can write an app to find out, for instance, where the nearest Komodo Dragon to Basingstoke is, or perhaps you just want to go somewhere interesting at the weekend and find out what you can see and where. I could definitely see myself using the site for that.
Check out my profile – several of my favourite photos are linked from there. For now, here’s a photo of a European Robin from Pulborough Brooks:
This is an update to my previous post on my beloved Z5500 surround sound suddenly dying.
I really wish I’d taken the time to challenge Insight UK and /or Logitech over the sale of goods act, but the fact that the replacement part was only £8.90 from Farnell won me over. After it arrived, a Google for PCB repairs in Sussex found R and G Technology in Worthing. A quick email and a phone call later, and I went round the same day to have the part replaced. I gave the board and the replacement IC to David, and waited for 10 minutes while he removed the blown IC and put the new one in, all for £25. I’d definitely recommend them if you’re in a similar situation.
After taking it home and connecting the control pod it works perfectly. That cost me £35 compared to buying a new surround sound system. Yey for taking things apart! 
This is not an entirely happy story though, as literally as soon as my 5.1 system started working again, my big TV died. But that’s another rant..
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