The internets move fast. While Seth and I have been distracted, others have made progress mating MBTA data with Google maps.

After I posted on Seth’s blog that I was finding the Lat/Long of T stops by hand, Steve Pomeroy chimed in to let us know that this data was freely available on the Mass GIS website. He cleaned up and made it available here.

Craig Thrall (I think) has gone ahead and gotten all the T lines drawn with polylines. As Seth suspected, when the map has lots of points used to draw polylines, things get really slow. So our plan has been to use a combination of overlay images and points. To see an extreme example of this, the 400+ NYC subway stops have been plotted using points. Warning, the link made firefox chug away for long enough that I got bored and force quit.

Joe Huges has used the MBTA trip planner data with google maps.

Seth got mentioned in a piece in the Boston Globe: Thinking maps.

And a blog has popped up to keep track of Google Maps projects: Google Maps Mania

I played with syncing my photos to my iPod. It is a handy way to have my photos backed up. You can also look at the photos on your iPod which is potentially useful. Unfortunately there is a annoying side effect. Derivative photos get created which are optimized for the iPod. Makes sense since the iPod doesn’t have the processor power to display the full resolution 6 megapixels photos. The annoying part is that it also stores these derivative photos on your mac. My laptop’s hard drive is full. While trying to figure out where all the gigs went, I realized there was a 9 GB (!) folder called “iPod Photo Cache” inside the iPhoto Library directory. My entire iPod library (12,500 photos) is 19 GB. 9 GB of derivative files is a little excessive. Not sure why the derivatives can’t ONLY be stored on the iPod. Must have something to do with speeding up the sync time? What is worse, when you disable photo syncing, the cache directory doesn’t get removed. According to this knowledge base article, you can just delete the directory by hand.

MP3’s on an iPod (with firmware 1.2 anyway) now have the ability to be bookmarked. You start to listen to a file, go to another file, then come back and it will start back up where you left it. However, they’ve been a little shady by only making it work on mp3 files that are in the official Podcast section of iTunes/iPod. So if you use another client to download your podcast and then import them into iTunes into a self-created playlist, it will not be bookmarkable. I’m sure Apple would call this a feature since you might not want your songs to be bookmarked. However, as far as I can tell, it is impossible to put any file from your Library into the Podcast area of iTunes. That means, if you want to be able to bookmark an MP3 podcast, you are stuck using the iTunes download functionality.

Odeo (Blogger creator Evan Williams new podcasting startup) has opened its doors to the general web public. It is overall pretty slick. Unfortunately the create section is still not ready. This part distinguishes Odeo from others, so hopefully they make it live soon. Also interesting is that my Unofficial StoryCorps Podcast is a featured channel in every category that it is tagged under (ie. Documentary, Public Radio, interviews)

A few weeks ago I sent an email to StoryCorps suggesting they make their interviews available as a podcast. I never heard back, so I’ve I just went through the trouble of creating one. You can subscribe here: Unofficial StoryCorps Podcast. It currently contains the 72 interviews (about 1 minute each) from their website.

With the purchase of a, yet to be delivered PowerBook, I managed to get in on the latest iPod deal from Apple. Essentially, if you buy a computer you can get $180 off an iPod. I took advantage of the deal before my official day at Marlboro expired and got a shiny new iPod with color display which arrived this morning. They aren’t calling it a “Photo” anymore, so I’m not sure what to call it.

During lunch today I tried an experiment. Apple’s new ChapterTool allows you to embed photos inside AAC files. I was disappointed, but not surprised that this won’t work with MP3’s. I decided to experiment with it anyway.

Recalling Engadet’s hack to get video to play with audio on an iPod Photo, and also seeing screen shots of how the iPod displayed chapter art on this page, I thought why not give it another shot by embedding still frames in an AAC.

I downloaded the Apple 1984 Commercial, converted the audio track to an AAC, and saved a frame each second as jpeg’s. Next I created an XML file that had 60 chapters (one for each second of the video.) For each chapter, I embedded one frame. Ran the ChapterTool command and it spit out my AAC audio file with an embedded movie… Well, a movie with only one frame per second. The chapter tag uses a starttime attribute to designate when the photo should be used, however, the examples only show it used in “mm:ss” format… so I’m assuming you can only have one frame a second. However, I haven’t actually tried adding microseconds to the mix.

I opened the AAC file up in iTunes and sure enough it plays like a crappy video with one frame per second in the “now playing” box.

Next I transferred the file to my iPod and fired it up. This is where a crappy hack turned into a pathetic one. I played the song and the photos actually moved frame to frame, in a tiny little square. Pressing the center button (I think) made the embedded frames larger and they did change. Unfortunately, after a few seconds, the larger photo returns to the normal view (with the tiny image, song title, and position in the song.) I couldn’t figure out how to make it stay with the large image. Even worse, several seconds into playback, the embedded images just stopped updating. No idea why.

If you want to try the file in iTunes or on your iPod you can download the file: 1984_video.m4a (1.1 MB)

And in case you want to try fiddling with stuff, here is an zip archive (1.1 MB) that contains the individual frames as JPEG’s, the extracted audio track, and the XML chapters file.