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i've seen edushi (stands for e-city in chinese) before with their awesomely detailed 3d pixel art maps of shanghai. now they've done a little part of hong kong and it is truly amazing!

you can scroll around, zoom in and zoom out. mouse over a building and it'll tooltips will tell you what building it is. the most amazing thing is they've even painted in reflections to over buildings

:

i don't know how they are doing it, but i suppose they have a bunch of aerial photography and getting some cheap labour in china to draw this out pixel by pixel. shows you what you can do when labour is cheap and skilled.

here is a shot where the camera angle is from the north looking at wanchai and the hong kong convention and exhibition centre:

compare this to google maps satellite view from overhead:

there is a massive price difference between buying a macbook air in the united states versus buying it in the united kingdom. in short, for the cheapest price you can get the macbook air for in the uk, you can afford to buy a round trip ticket to new york and buy it there instead.

the price of the macbook air in the uk is £1199.

macbook air in the US is $1799 (£916)

and a cheapest flight from london heathrow to new york jfk on british airways is £271.70.

therefore, if you fly to new york and buy a macbook air, it will cost you (£916 + £271 = £1187). if you get the macbook air in the uk, it will cost you £1199. you would still have £12 left over.

of course, it would only just break even as you would have to pay for a ride from the airport to the apple store on the 5th avenue. but it is open 24 hours, so you could forgo a hotel room and just sleep there overnight.

and that is with the cheapest version too, if you wanted to get the solid state hard drive option, you could probably even fly business class there.

underground art @ stockholm
Originally uploaded by pineapplebun

i went to stockholm for a break with pp and one of the cool things there is that every underground station was themed and decorated in really amazing ways. here's one of them (from pp's photo)

today, someone pointed out to me that my other webpage had me listed as living in cambridge. well, i don't live there any more, i live in london and i love it.

how many cities have FIVE international airports under their name? heathrow, gatwick, stansted, luton and the city airport. before i moved down to london, i didn't even know there was a london city airport, even less so that commercial airlines actually flew out of it. one day, when i'm rich enough to afford their investment-bankers-priced flights, i will try it out. for now, i'm satisfied with living only 20 minutes from there.

one thing about london is that there are always tourists everywhere, just like on this bus:

awesome news. quicksilver is now open sourced.



oh yeah, blacktree.com is back up and it's looking sexier than ever.

web clips is an awesome feature in the new mac os x. any part of a web page that you find interesting, you can click a button and put it into your dashboard. move over igoogle, my yahoo and any other those widget/gadget pushing pages.

i have my super flexible and sexy "homepage" right here and its accessible with just one click (of F12):

zelda the phantom hour-glass for ds i talked about way back in may 2006 is now out in the uk!



we happened to be near oxford street with virgin megastore, hmv and game all in the same place. i had scoped out the price for zelda on amazon.co.uk at £25. on the ground, virgin was selling it for £27, game for £28 and hmv for £30.

however, despite it being the most expensive in the shops, hmv online is selling it for £25, game.co.uk also at £25 and virgin megastore online at £23!!

i am still alive!

there hasn't been much action on the blog front lately, but there's heaps of updates on my tumblr (lqdx blgr) and my flickr pics.

on the code front, i've started moving the plotkit svn tree to code.google.com because my trac instance keeps on falling over every couple of days.

i managed to spend a couple of days in stockholm over the last weekend and it was awesome. i really loved stockholm. heaps of awesome swedish designed goods, massive ikea, really loved the moderna museet and the abundance of waterfront properties.

at some point i should spend some time in stockholm, live in an ikea apartment, drive a volvo and use a sony ericsson phone.

sydney fenced in for APEC summit. friday on the week of "festivities" is delcared a public holiday and the opera house fenced in.



what a load of bull shit. quickly someone vote out the liberal federal government, and the nsw state government for shutting down the sydney economy for a week to let george w bush go on a freaking holiday.

i noticed something interesting today. bbc news now has these common "digg", "delicious" and "reddit" buttons on the bottom of their news articles. i don't have a well formed opinion about it. bbc is one of the more innovative news providers on the internet, and it is nice that it is experimenting with being more inline with the "hip" web 2.0 people.