Week 394 - Interesting links

Missing Maps

My friend, Nick, who works at the humanitarian mapping charity, Map Action, told me about the Missing Maps project. It’s an open, collaborative effort to improve OpenStreetMap in areas where humanitarian organisations are working. In particular, I really like the idea of their volunteer-organised Mapathons. — JM

Jupyter

The language-agnostic parts of the IPython Notebook were split out to form the Jupyter Notebook. This is a web application that allows you to create and share documents that contain live code, equations, visualizations and explanatory text. Back in Show & Tell 6, Ben mentioned that there was Ruby support for the IPython Notebook. This now takes the form of a Ruby kernel for the Jupyter Notebook. I recently had a play with this and, although it was a bit painful getting it installed, I was pretty impressed with its capabilities. — JM

Enspiral

John Bevan of the We Are Open cooperative told me about Enspiral which is a network of social enterprises based in New Zealand. The origins of the organisation were in the Occupy movement. A few years ago I remember Josef Davies-Coates telling us about the online collaboration tool, Loomio, which is one of Enspiral’s ventures, so it was interesting to be reminded of it and see where it’s got to. — JM

Windyty

This is a weather forecasting website with very pretty animations of e.g. wind speed & direction, and wave height & direction. VentuSky is another similar website. — JM

Wildboy Adventures

We met Brando on Wharariki Beach in New Zealand. His mate had come out of his kayak in some pretty big water and we watched with trepidation as Brando went back out to find him. His mate eventually washed up about 300m down the beach. Shaken but otherwise unharmed. I’ve since learnt a bit more about Brando and really admire the way he managed to take control of his life. — CR

Webb Chiles

We heard of Webb Chiles while staying in Opua. He was moored up in the marina while attempting his 6th circumnavigation of the globe. This time in his tiny 24 foot boat, GANNET. I’ve enjoyed what little of his site that I’ve read. This quote, in particular, struck a chord with me:

I love entering the monastery of the sea.

(I started to write ‘A solo sailor’ instead of ‘I’, but realized that most solo sailors never enter the monastery of the sea. They blog via satellite devices, call home on SSB, send emails and messages. One almost wonders if they really want to be alone.)

Note that while I’ve linked to his main site above he mostly seems to be writing on his blogspot site at the moment. — CR

The Timeless Ride

Hubert Kriegel is another fascinating person we were fortunate enough to meet. He’s currently in his twelfth year of travelling the world on his bike and sidecar. You can read about our encounter with Hubert in Amy’s post, “Hubert and the incredible life-changing cucumber salad”. And you can learn more about Hubert on his website, “if you can handle the truth !!!” — CR

Say Yes to Adventure magazine

This beautiful magazine is produced by a friend of a friend. The couple of issues I read were full of incredible photos and stories. Stories of everyday people pushing themselves to do extraordinary things. I’m not sure that it’s available in the UK but if you spot a copy then I can highly recommend taking a look. — CR