Sam Sargeant

A few weeks ago, Radio New Zealand kindly released their schedule data under a Creative Commons licence. This has allowed me to hack together a simple project that reformats their timetable into an iPhone friendly site.

To see it in action, visit http://radionz.resultpath.com/. It looks best in Mobile Safari, but should be understandable in other browsers. Currently it only works for Radio NZ National, and only for the current day. Next I aim to add support for RNZ Concert and the ability to browse other days.

It’s running on Google App Engine, which is fantastic for these sort of scratch-an-itch projects. I write a small Python script, and Google does the rest. I’ve also put the code on Github. Many thanks to Richard for help with bootstrapping the project with CSS/Javascript.

Amazon have a product called the Kindle. It’s an electronic book reader. They have a huge collection of books on their site you can browse and purchase. I don’t own their hardware device, but I do own an iPhone. They recently announced the Kindle application for the iPhone which allows users to download eBooks purchased from Amazon and read them on their mobile device.

This is fantastic. I love reading and badly want a collection on my phone. I love being able to read something when I’m awake at night but don’t want to disturb the wife. I love reading on the plane when travelling. Carrying dead trees around strikes me as stupid. I’m perfectly happy with reading on a small screen and have a great desire to buy all my books in electronic form.

But my hopes were crushed.

When it came out yesterday, I gleefully downloaded the Kindle application from the iTunes store. I then spent a while browsing the excellent selection on Amazon’s Kindle Books store. Given the exchange rate is terrible right now, I searched for some good books at a reasonable price. I made a list of my favourites and hit purchase.

We could not process your order because of geographical restrictions on the product which you were attempting to purchase. Please refer to the terms of use for this product to determine the geographical restrictions.

Well damn. It turns out that since my credit card is for New Zealand, Amazon won’t sell me eBooks. There’s probably some licencing problem with the publishers, or some international tariff, or some treaty, or some mind-control device by space-aliens, or some other rancid excuse why I can’t give them money in exchange for their product. Who knows. I was really frustrated that I wasted nearly an hour looking through their store, while logged in as an NZ customer, only for them to deny me at the last hurdle.

So for now, I find other “online distribution sources” for the books I want, and load them into Stanza.

A friend of mine hacked up a sweet iPhone styled page that shows movie times for Wellington cinemas. On your phone, check out http://www.phirate.com/movies/

It also has a nice icon so you can add a bookmark to the home screen.