G E B W E B

New user interface

Hold down shift while pressing reload to make sure the page fully reloads if OptiMap appears broken.

The first thing you’ll notice is a complete makeover of the user interface. The functionality has grown considerably since I first posted OptiMap in 2007, and the controls were scattered randomly around. Now, they are organized into neat little drawers on the left, in the order you are likely to be using them.

There is some new functionality as well. The ‘Edit Route’ section gives you the chance to re-order the trip after it has been computed. Have to visit one client first? No problem, drag to the top. You can also delete stops from the itinerary here.

OptiMap 4 also has a more powerful TSP solver routine. The new solver kicks in when there are more than 15 stops, and produces better and more robust solutions than the old engine. It is guaranteed to perform better than before, and in some hard cases I’ve tested, it improved the solutions by as much as 6-7%. That means that if you spent 8 hours on the road before, you now get home half an hour earlier.

Support for Garmin GPS units is now added as well. Support is experimental, since I only had access to one Garmin device, which did not support routes. I’m interested to hear whether this works on your device if you have a Garmin GPS.

There are some bug fixes as well: When pasting data from Excel spreadsheets into the bulk add box, the cell delimiters were lost. This is fixed. The print function used to show half a page of unnecessary white space at the bottom, thus it sometimes would print blank pages at the end. This is fixed so you won’t be wasting paper needlessly any more.

As a bonus, you may now access the service from a shorter address: www.optimap.net (the old address will continue to work, and the page will remain identical)

I hope you enjoy the update! Please post questions, feedback, bugs and suggestions here. I’m sure I broke something during the update…

For a long time now, my mantra has been optimization. To make the most out of limited resources makes sense both economically and environmentally. OptiMap was an example of this. Driving too far is just stupid. Using OptiMap saves you time and money and it saves the environment too.

There are many other wasteful behaviors we need to address to optimize the usefulness (utility) of our planet’s finite resources. When I started to learn about embodied energy, I was shocked by how much energy is spent in the process of manufacturing the products we buy. An average $20 book has an indirect footprint of 20 kg CO2, mainly due to extraction of the raw materials needed and manufacture of the book itself. This is the equivalent of driving an average car more than 130 kilometers. Given the sheer number of things that most people own, these indirect emissions certainly add up.

How can we optimize this? First, we need to realize that in many cases, ownership of these items is not why we buy them. We want access to the features that the item can provide. You don’t buy the boardgame Axis & Allies because you want to be the proud owner of it. You buy it to play it. And it probably collects dust 364 days a year.

If someone has the item I need, and it collects dust most of the time, they wouldn’t mind lending it to me, right. And I would certainly return the favor some other day. But we need to survey the resources available. Then make that information searchable. So that when you need a power drill, you can find the one closest to you. SkyLib.org is my attempt at doing this. Yes, it’s beta and yes it lacks many features. Certainly rough around the edges. But you can start organizing your stuff and building your personal library today.

Some features that are not done yet but under development:

• Friends support, invites and import from other social networks
• Buying and selling things
• User ratings
• Wanted-functionality (I need x)
• Renting and deposits
• Custom location search (Find item closest to me)
• Facebook login
• Embedding products on third-party websites
• Intro-video

Feedback is hugely appreciated! Please head over to www.skylib.org and give it a try. I’m already sharing 120+ items with you as of this post.

I’ve created a map which shows the measured radiation values in Japan (note that this map is no longer online – the rest of this post is out of date). The data is scraped (credits go to Marian Steinbach) every 10 minutes (hit refresh to get the newest data). You can also click on each measurement location to see a chart of the measurements from that station over time.

Currently, there are about 200 measurement stations, but I’m having trouble finding the latitude and longitude of each measurement station. I’m sure someone who knows Japanese would have more luck…Anyway, I’m slowly working my way through the list of measurement stations, so more locations will be added continously. Any help with this would be much appreciated. Feedback and criticism is welcome, and should be added as comments to this page.

Update 2011-03-20: With the help of volunteer “hosoyamane”, a Japanese translation of the map is now available. It’s great to see volunteers pop up so fast!

Update 2011-03-20: A small spike in radiation is showing up in the stations in the Ibaraki prefecture around 10 am Japan local time this morning. However, the levels are still low (1000 nano-Gray is still 2000 times less than the average yearly dose of background radiation).

Update: The original radiation map I created is no longer maintained. Instead, users are redirected to a map created by the Institute of Information Design of Japan.

Embodied energy is the amount of energy that goes into a product during its entire life-cycle. It includes the energy required to mine and refine materials, assemble these into the final product, transport it to the consumer, and dispose of it. An analysis that considers this entire process is called a life-cycle analysis.

A 1-litre plastic (PET) bottle has an embodied energy of roughly 5.4 MJ. This is the same as leaving a 15 W lightbulb on for 100 hours (1 kilowatt-hour is 3.6 MJ, a 15 W CFL lightbulb gives light equivalent to a 75 W incandescent light bulb). Aluminium cans are about 1.7x worse than plastic bottles in this respect.

Recycling changes the picture a little. Recycled PET has an embodied energy about 20-25% lower than virgin PET. Other types of plastic can achieve reductions in embodied energy of up to 50% by recycling.

While recycling can reduce the impact of disposables (and keeps the plastic out of landfills and nature), the impact of recycled materials is still huge. Avoid disposables whenever possible!

Source: The ImpEE Project, The University of Cambridge, Recycling Plastic

I’ve just purchased 5.89 contracts on the European CO2 emissions market, worth roughly $150. They are now effectively deleted from the market. These are meant to offset two round-trip flights from Toronto to Oslo. An extra multiplier was applied to the raw quantities of CO2, because the emissions from flights happen at high altitude and have been found to affect climate disproportionately.

View the certificate

Looking forward to go back to Norway! I’m sufficiently alienated here in Canada that it’s good to return to a sane (relatively speaking) place once in a while. Hope to see some of you there!