This post may seem a bit, “well duh” to some of you, but it’s the kind of thing that you often see on a site like Lifehacker and think, “why didn’t I think of that..”, so what the hell, here we go:

For my last few holidays i’ve been using Google MyMaps to help with planning where to stay and what to see. If you’re not familiar with MyMaps it’s the offshoot of the main maps.google.co.uk which allows you to stick your own pins in the map and create sharable collaborative maps.

I’ve found that it really comes into it’s own when you’re visiting a strange city and you’re not sure of the relative distances between things. Typically when visiting a European capital i’ll already have a shortlist (rapidly growing) of bars and restaurants I want to visit, museums and attractions I want to see and other points of interest.

There’s also a rather handy tip at the end of this post to help you take all that info with you….so how do we get started?

1. 1. Voodoo – Gather materials and start sticking in pins
   Ok, lets get this party started. First thing to do is gather some resources. If you’ve got a travel guide, great, if it’s online even better and if you’ve started making a short list of things to do and see; even better. Divide these up into categories. I typically go for Bars, Clubs, Restaurants, Shopping, Attractions (Museums etc)

   Fire up maps.google.co.uk, click on the My Maps tab and select Create a new map. At this point you’ll need to name the map and select whether it’s public or private. Public maps are great if you’re travelling with friends as you can share the results with them or even edit it collaboratively.

   Now run a search on the map for the first of your tourist attractions (or bars, or whatever), check you have the right place and either select “Save to My Maps” in the speech bubble that pops up when you click the pin. Or use the tool at the top of the map to drop a new pin at that location. Choosing an appropriate icon at this stage can be helpful. Eg. Knife and Fork, Cocktail glass or just a plain ‘ol pin for an attraction.

   Repeat this until you have a good spread of the main attractions/bars etc marked. Doing this in Firefox or IE7+ is a good plan, as you can open lots of extra browser tabs to check details, confirm street addresses or find other things to mark using other city guide sites.

2. 2. Now zoom out and look for clusters
   The result of our labours should be some clusters of attractions allowing you to scope out the best areas to stay in. Typically i’ll be looking for the clusters of bars/clubs.

   The reason? In the morning it’s usually no trouble to hop on public transport and whizz off to see the sights, then spend the day working your way back to a hotel. In the evening however, (or the small hours) when you’re a little the worse for wear, a hotel in staggering distance from the main bars is a godsend!

3. 3. Start finding hotels in the areas you’ve marked
   If you’re anything like me you’ll be looking for that happy medium of a good hotel, in a great location at a fantastic price. At this point it all starts to get a bit crazy flipping between sites and comparing hotel deals. I tend to use a combination of:

   kayak.co.uk (an excellent hotel/flights scraper and comparison engine)
   laterooms.com
   hotels.com

   All of the above will find you great deals, my next step is to check out any that sound good on tripadvisor.com, after some narrow escapes I now never book ANYWHERE without checking out the reviews first.

   Hopefully by now you’ve got an idea of 3 or 4 hotels in the right price range and roughly the right locations. It’s at this stage I stick some pins in the map for that shortlist of hotels and one of the big payback points of this whole exercise comes in.

   Now you can play around with the map and start to find patterns in the data. Several times i’ve realised that the hotel I was about to book is on a noisy main road or actually a lot further from where I wanted to be than it suggested. Many hotels say they are “just a few steps from…” to mean 10 minutes walk!

   Often while you’re realising this, you also spot another hotel nearby that’s better, cheaper, quieter or all three.

   You’ll start to see, very easily, how well located the hotels are in relation to the bars and attractions and even more importantly, in most major cities, how close they are to a metro/bus/tram/tube stop and by clicking that stop which lines run from there.

   MyMaps also enables you to use “Mapplets”, little bolt on applications. The Distance Measurement Tool mapplet is really useful at this stage, it’ll let you draw lines on the map between points and see how far they are apart in miles/km/olympic swimming pool lengths etc.

4. 4. Tidy up the map
   Ok, so we now have a nice personalised map, we’ve hopefully booked our hotel. So we can now delete the pins for the hotels we’re not using and remove any other stuff that got added and is now redundant.

   Your map should now have bars/clubs/museums and your hotel marked. For extra credit you can now start doing stuff like working out the best route in from the airport on public transport.

5. 5. Take the map with you…
   Right, this is where it all falls down.

   Obviously the next thing you’ll want to do is take the map on holiday and keep a copy with you while you’re sightseeing. But, having built a fantastic mapping application, Google seem to have tacked on the printing functionality in a bit of a rush at the end of the day and never got round to improving it.

   Printing your MyMap doesn’t really work that well, you get a map with all your pins on and an accompanying list of pins and symbols. Unfortunately, that means you have 5 cocktail glasses on the map and 5 bars listed at the side…and no way of knowing which is which. Unfortunately there’s also no way of adding numbered pins on a printout, or adding small tooltips to the pins with the venue name.

   In the past i’ve had to resort to printing out a few copies of my map, usually at different zoom levels or zoomed into various cluster areas of pins and then scribbling the names next to each pin with a pen. Not ideal.

   Until now. Someone rather wonderful (and unnamed on his site unfortunately) has created a script which sucks in the .KML file of your MyMap (a link to which is at the top of the MyMap screen as “View in Google Earth”) and spits out a version with numbered pins and a list underneath of what they all are. Perfect for printing and taking with you.

   You’ll find it here:
   http://maps.taurich.org/cgi-bin/print-kml.cgi

   Of course, in these enlightened days, taking a paper printout with you all seems a bit luddite. After all, surely we could just look at it on our iPhone?

   Sadly not, the iphone’s built in Maps applet doesn’t support MyMaps, or any of the more fancy custom features. Putting a maps URL into the built in Safari causes it to ping you into the maps applet and if you do manage to get it running in the browser then it’s not terribly stable or usable in mobile Safari.

   I guess in the meantime you could PDF the printout and load it onto the phone via an email? Better ideas greatfully received in the comments…

Wordpress have been putting out teasers for their open source iPhone client for a couple of weeks now and I’ve been keeping one eye eagerly on the app store ever since.

Finally it’s here and I’m typing this post on my phone and do you know what it’s pretty damn good. They don’t seem to have compromised on functionality to cram things in to the interface and hooking it up to a self hosted blog is a snap.

They’ve even done a very nice job of integrating safari into the client to show a live preview of your post. Only drawbacks I’ve spotted so far is that any photos added to a post just get dropped to the bottom rather than being able to insert them as you go and you don’t seem to be able to add links to posts which is a pretty major omission.

On that note, below is a little sign I spotted at kings cross that made me smile.

So, there I was this evening, with unusually a free evening and nothing planned…and there’s nothing on television. Apart from Heroes later, but i’ve already recorded that. So I fired up the iPlayer to see if it had anything to offer.

Since I last looked (and apologies if this is old news) they’ve launched a new beta version with a much more comprehensive interface. It makes it much quicker to browse through programmes with a more TV guide like approach. They’ve also made it easier to find multiple episodes of the same programme and group them together. But best of all, it certainly seems like you have to wade through a lot less daytime dreck like Doctors and Flog It! to get to the good stuff.

But as with most software, more choice brings more confusion and the array of new ways to slice and dice the data is, at first at least, quite arresting. Not so bad for me, but I can see my mum, who’s only just getting to grips with the whole TV over IP thing getting a bit of a surprise next time she logs in.

But the thing that really made me smile, and that I really hope is a deft little nod to Spinal Tap from the developers is that the volume control when streaming a programme, goes up to 11. That’s one louder. Marvellous.

Friday just gone saw my birthday present to myself, an Asuseee PC 701 , finally come into stock. I ordered it about 2 and a half weeks previously from of all places Toys R Us, which didn’t help with trying to convince people at work that yes, it was a real laptop. So, a few first impressions…

These things are like hens teeth at the moment in the UK, extremely hard to find, with all of the online retailers almost constantly out of stock and generally whenever they do get a delivery only having enough to satisfy their ever growing lists of backorders. A tip off over at the eeeuser forums had suggested that Toys R Us had a fairly reliable supply and following calls to some other suppliers who were quoting late March delivery at the earliest, I figured what the hell and put in a pre-order.

So, having finally got my mitts on one, what do I think? It rocks! It’s a fully featured laptop (pretty much the only thing missing is an optical drive) in a tiny package. While it will never be a desktop replacement, it’s perfect for chucking in a bag for a train journey or to take away for a couple of days. Also, unlike pretty much every other laptop i’ve ever used, the charger is the size of a mobile phone one. So you don’t end up with and ultra small laptop and a sodding great power brick to carry around!

I very quickly decided that the bundled xandros linux while pleasant enough was a bit to Janet and John to make the cut in the long term and plumped to install eeeXubuntu (a tweaked version of Xubuntu for the eee)

Installation was pretty simple, download a live CD, boot from it on my desktop machine and run a script to create a bootable image of the CD on a USB stick.

That stick was then in turn used to boot the eee, and a click of the install icon on the desktop started off the installation process. Having done a bit of reading up i’d worked out that I didn’t really want to use a swap partition, having upgraded the eee to 2GB of RAM, not using swap saves wear on the SSD Flash drive. So instead I opted for one big 4GB partition, this caused the installer to error fairly unhelpfully, but eventually I worked out that the installer needs some free space left for some reason during install, so setup a 3Gb partition instead. (Later, once fully installed I used gParted to resize the partition to just under 4Gb.

Once installed there’s a few tweaks you can install to get things working perfectly and generally soup things up a little, the eeXubuntu wiki details them all. The best though is Compiz Fusion, which does the whizzy desktop window effects, everyone i’ve shown it to has really been impressed by it, it’s also damn useful for managing multiple windows on the eee’s smallscreen.

Speaking of which I had worried that the 800×480 screen would be a little too small, but so far it’s been ok. With the addition of a mini theme in firefox to make best use of the space you can watch youtube vids just fine and most sites render capably in the space.

Getting fusesmb working reliably to mount some shares on my Windows XP desktop PC was a bit tricky, but I got there in the end, I also found a neat little script which runs when the wifi connects, checks if the connection is to my home wifi network and if it is, then it mounts the shares, if not it doesn’t.

So overall, i’m loving the eee, some minor niggles like not being able to hibernate it (2Gb of RAM requires 2GB of free disk space to hibernate) but shutdown and bootup is still speedy enough for that not to be a massive problem.

Interestingly though, while the eee may sell a lot of units to people who’ve never used linux before, I doubt many of them will venture beyond Xandros, getting it working just right in Xubuntu still required quite a bit of effort (and I’m no linux wizard) but I guess that can only get better with time.

The only depressing thing about that is that it means they’re likely to sell a lot more eee’s with XP installed, and I doubt (though haven’t tested) that it will be nearly as fast a little machine under XP.

“I’m not a fan of the modern railway system. I strongly object to paying twenty-seven pounds fifty to walk the length and breadth of the train with a sausage in a plastic box.”  – Kitty

Over the past two years, i’ve spent A LOT of time zipping up and down the east coast of the UK on the train to meetings in either London or Slough. One thing that’s made it more bearable has been GNER (and more recently National Express East Coast’s) wifi service.

For those who haven’t experienced it, each carriage is fitted with an access point, which is in turn connected to an satellite modem and an array of GSM modems. All that connectivity is then aggregated together to offer a pretty much unbroken connection throughout the journey.

Back in the days before GNER lost the franchise it cost about £7.99 for 2 hours or £9.99 for 24 hours, which was just about justifiable if travelling on business and meant you could crack on with dealing with email and other work while on the move. You also got access free in first class, which made paying £25 for dinner in the restaurant car on the way home an even more attractive option.

Since the move over to National Express East Coast, they’ve made it free to all passengers, which while wonderfully egalitarian, has made the service considerably poorer. Now that everyone can get online for free, the speed has dropped like a stone and it seems a lot less reliable than it once was.  

However, in their favour, the support line are excellent. On a few occasions the system has gone down, a quick phone call and they’ve either remotely rebooted the server or otherwise solved the problem. They even call you straight back if you get cut off using the caller ID from your mobile phone.

However, the support line has never been particularly well publicised, so should you ever need it, here it is: 0845 1254455