Ideas for my council

You can click on the mockup above, to see a full screen view of the mockup.

This mockup is part of a submission that Guy Dickinson of Participo and I are submitting for the UK Government’s “Show Us A Better Way“ competition to create innovative and socially useful applications with Government data.

Update: You can see the idea on the “Show Us a Better Way” site now, Ideas for My Council.

Update 2: Guy and I have now submitted this idea to the “Building Democracy” site. Fingers crossed (again).

Phew. My calendar is synced to my phone again

My phone used to sync with iCal several times a day, but when I upgraded to Leopard it wiped my cron tab file and all that goodness stopped. (Your crontab file is a way of scheduling tasks on your Mac using the Terminal application.) I’ve just googled around for the solution and found it again: Use cron to automate iSync at non-standard intervals. Nice neat solution, to which I would only add the following: 0 8,10,12,14 * * * osascript -e ‘tell application “iSync” to synchronize’ >> /dev/null Whenever a Cron command runs, any output is sent by email to the account handler. This simply builds up as unsendable email in the system, or spams you every time the script runs… either way it’s not good. The >> /dev/null simply sends any output into a black hole so it doesn’t bother me.

Originally I’m sure I had this set so iSync closed down again when it was done… so maybe more to follow.

Why do the trains have to stop?

Fantastic idea from China for a transport system where the trains don’t stop at stations, but where people still get on and off. Most of the energy in public transport is spent in getting the train/bus/tram moving again only shortly after you’ve stopped it at a station. So how do we remove this wasteful but presumably vital step from the process?

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