Category: Blogged

Tour de France goes 3D with Google Earth

When you’re trying to understand the Herculean effort that these cyclists go through in stages like L’Alpe d’Huez, or which streets in Paris the final stage will pass through, 2D maps just aren’t as compelling.But now you can make sense of it all by flying around the route yourself. A new KML file available on the official Tour de France website lets you see the entire course overlaid on satellite imagery for Google Earth.This special Google Earth tour is available in French, German, and Spanish as well as English.

This was reported on Google’s blog. Here is the direct link on the Tour de France website

Posted by Peter Birch, Product Manager

I don’t know about you, but with the action and excitement heating up in the Tour de France, it’s hard to keep track of exactly where everybody is riding. When you’re trying to understand the Herculean effort that these cyclists go through in stages like L’Alpe d’Huez, or which streets in Paris the final stage will pass through, 2D maps just aren’t as compelling.

But now you can make sense of it all by flying around the route yourself. A new KML file available on the official Tour de France website lets you see the entire course overlaid on satellite imagery for Google Earth.

This special Google Earth tour is available in French, German, and Spanish as well as English. Pick your language on the Le Tour site, and once you’ve done that, look for the “Tour on Google Earth” link in the lefthand navigation under Route. Then you can see the starts, the finishes, even information on each of the cities along the way. Just move the KML file into your “My Places” folder on Google Earth, and follow along day by day. (Did you know that Huy has the unique privilege of hosting stages for the Tour de France, the Giro and the Tour of Belgium this year? We didn’t either.)

Be sure to try out the tilt feature to see the truly daunting magnitude of all of those climbs where riders are battling it out in this year’s wide-open race. “Beyond Category” climbs? No thanks — we’ll stick to the flats and leave those verticals to the pros!

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Ben Harper in Sydney

Last night I saw Ben Harper at the Sydney Entertainment Centre I have never liked the entertainment centre as a music venue and last night made me hate it even more. I was seated to the left of the stage 3/4 of the way up and the sound was appalling.

Last night I saw Ben Harper at the Sydney Entertainment Centre. I have never liked the entertainment centre as a music venue because of its size and sound quality. I was seated to the left of the stage 3/4 of the way up and the sound was appalling. The bass was really boomy and was all you could hear. It totally drowned out the other instruments and Ben Harper’s voice. The only songs that sound good were a couple near the end with Ben Harper performing solo on stage using an acoustic guitar.

Leaving aside the bad sound, Ben Harper spent over 2.5 hours and stage, performing 2 encores . It virtually got to the stage where the crowd were happy to go home but Ben kept playing. The most memorable song of the night was “With my own two hands” which really got the crowd going. The percussionist Leon was dancing up a storm and I am pretty sure the keyboard player had some sort of Moog synthesiser on top of his Hammond organ.

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new hardware found

A few days ago I posted about a blue screen of death I saw on a plasma screen at the Westfield shopping centre in Chatswood, Sydney Australia.A few days later I was walking through the same building, except I was one floor down, and came across this multimedia phone booth that had detected some new hardware. I guess this building just does not get on with Windows driven hardware and is just crying out for some Linux devices.

A few days ago I posted about the blue screen of death I saw on a plasma screen at Westfield shopping centre in Chatswood, Sydney Australia.

A few days later I was walking through the same building, except I was one floor down, and came across this multimedia phone booth that had detected some new hardware. I guess this building just does not get on with Windows driven hardware and is just crying out for some Linux devices.

new hardware found