Categories
Computing Technology Web

Google Street View South Africa Is Here

Barely scraping it in by the skin of their teeth, Google has managed to get its Street View imagery operational for South Africa just in time for the World Cup. Yay! No more lost tourists.

They’ve also done a huge amount of work in the Google Earth platform to create 3D imagery of all the stadiums which looks quite beautiful:

Over and above the 27 towns and cities photographed, the cars and trikes also made over 40 ‘special collects’ of imagery at special locations.  Amongst others, these include:

  • For sports lovers:
    • Soccer City
    • Loftus
    • Moses Mabhida
    • Peter Mokaba
    • ABSA Durban
    • Mbombela
    • Wanderers
    • St Georges
    • Supersport Park
  • For outdoors lovers:
    • Cape peninsula
    • Natal Midlands
    • Kruger
    • Addo
    • Tsitsikamma
    • Walter Sisulu Botanical Gardens
    • Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens, Midlands
    • Tsitsikamma
    • Wilderness
    • Harkerville Forest
    • Kagga Kamma Nature Reserve
    • Blyde River Canyon
  • For city lovers:
    • Nelson Mandela Bridge
    • Vilakazi Street
    • Gandhi Square
    • Walter Sisulu Square
    • Newtown and Africa Museum
    • Adderley St and St George’s Cathedral
    • Beach Road, Cape Town
    • Company Gardens
    • Apartheid Museum
    • Turffontein Race Course
    • Settlers Park
  • For wine lovers:
    • Meerlust
    • Jordan Wines
    • Rustenberg
    • Klein Constantia
    • Bouchard Finlayson
    • Morgenster
    • De Wetshof
    • De Rust Estate
    • Warwick Wine Estate
    • Vilafonte Vineyards
    • Hamilton Russell
    • Fairview

Usually being African makes life a little less digital, but this time, thanks to Google, it’s good to feel like a 21st century citizen.
More at: Google Street View South Africa.

Categories
Computing Web

State of the Internet

State of The Internet

Cool stats in this short interweb summary.

Categories
Blogging Entertainment

10 Friday Weekly Highlights

So in anticipation of a quiet Friday, here’s a collection of links to the most interesting of the past few weeks: (Actually just an excuse to clear up some browser tabs!!).

Categories
Computing Entertainment Web

Command & Conquer Freeware Downloads

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In anticipation of the up and coming Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight, the previous releases in the series, Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun, Tiberian Dawn, and Red Alert are now all available for download for FREE from EA Games. Major bonus if you never had the bucks or the PC capability to run them previously. Get your retro-war on now!

My only concern now is the use of the word “Twilight” in the new game’s title. Let’s hope Yuri is not a glittering vamp this time round.

Categories
Computing Rants Technology

Namebench Shows iBurst DNS slowness

I just downloaded and installed Namebench, a new open source project that benchmarks DNS servers, with a view of seeing how well my DNS is performing these days. All of these developments stem from the recent launch of Google’s public DNS service and the sudden realisation that a large part of the reason for interweb slowness, if you’re not in Africa, is the length of time it takes for a DNS query to complete. I do most of my mobile connectivity via iBurst, so I guess I like them to be speedy, unfortunately as the results below show, my closest DNS provider, my ISP, iBurst, has really bad average DNS response times


And it’s got fuck all to do with latency over a wireless link – the same connection shows an average DNS response time that is 217% faster from Datapro, and MTN just a little bit behind that. It’s the Windows servers iBurst is using to try run an ISP. Sad.

All I can say is I won’t be using iBurst’s DNS servers anymore, unless I *really* have to. But wait a minute, if I don’t need them to waste money on DNS infrastructure anymore, so why should I be paying them for it?
(Yes, I’m bitching and moaning – I’m tired of being served shit. I want more, better and cheaper).