The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

  • My badges

    Mastodon

  • Twitter Updates

  • My Flickr Stream

    20140508-Delphi-2007--Project-Options--Cannot-Edit-Application-Title-HelpFile-Icon-Theming20140430-Fiddler-Filter-Actions-Button-Run-Filterset-now20140424-VMware-Fusion-6.0.3.-no-reclaimable
    More Photos

  • Pages

  • All categories

  • Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

    Join 4,262 other subscribers

Posts Tagged ‘transportation’

Lufthansa does not get that plus (+) is a valid email character. @Lufthansa_DE

Posted by jpluimers on 2013/02/08

Plus is a valid character in email adresses, but many sites thing otherwise.

From the Lufthansa booking site:

Please review the fields below to continue :

  • Contact Details – E-mail must be 1 to 60 characters (valid characters are a-z, 0-9 and arobase (@), hyphen (-), underscore (_), dot (.)).

–jeroen

Posted in LifeHacker, Power User | Tagged: , | Leave a Comment »

Waar mag je nou wel of geen 130 rijden?

Posted by jpluimers on 2013/01/26

Waar je nou wel en geen 130 mag rijden is voor velen een zoekplaatje, ook voor mij.

Zelfs op de weg is het vaak niet duidelijk met een oerwoud aan borden en onderborden.

Ook on-line is er eigenlijk niet heel veel nuttige informatie te vinden, onderstaand is wat ik heb gevonden.

Veel plezier ermee (:

Samenvatting:

  • in de randstad mag je vrijwel nergens 130, zeker niet overdag
  • buiten de randstad liggen de grootste stukken 130 in het noorden (kop van Noord-Holland; Flevoland, Friesland, Groningen, Drenthe, met uitzondering van een fiks deel A28)

En de links:

Helaas zijn de JPEG kaarten slecht, die hadden PNG moeten zijn, maar ja, ze zijn verminkt met JPEG artefacten want veel web editors hebben geen oog voor beeld kwaliteit.

–jeroen

Posted in About, LifeHacker, Opinions, Personal, Power User | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Google Flights: needs a bit more work, but first look is promising

Posted by jpluimers on 2012/12/24

Just saw that Google Flights was introduce: for searching and booking flights online.

It needs some more work (see below), but it is a great start for a couple of reasons as compared to any of the competition I have seen:

  • A much more intuitive and clutter-free user interface 
  • A blazingly fast response (SFO – AMS: response in about a second, all others took at least 10 seconds)

Try the user experience for yourself. A few things I liked:

  • In addition to selecting preferred airlines, you can select preferred Airline Alliances
    (they share miles anyway).
  • Shows flight duration and allows you to sort on it
    (ideal for business passengers)
  • Shows if you can have WiFi
    (for geeks like me)
  • Uses hint-panes when you hoover the mouse over certain areas to fill in more detailed information
    (like the airline that operates the flight, or the stops you make).
  • Shows a graph with fare-rate over time
    (so you can pick days with lowest fare more easily; the sweet spot for SFO-AMS seems to be 2-5 day trips that include a saturday/sunday night).

Some things they need to work on:

  • You can search from USA to destinations outside USA, but not vice versa
    (for instance, it finds SFO – AMS, but you are not allowed to enter AMS – SFO).
  • You can enter IATA airport codes, but not ICAO ones (like EHAM)
  • It is not included in the Google – Products list
    (right now you can go from Flights to Web search, but not the other way around).
  • It always starts with a departure in SFO
    (it would make sense if you can select your faviourite departure airport; I live about 10 minutes from AMS / EHAM).
  • It always starts with a departure date 16 days from now
    (The last link is pun intended:  it tests the Google search cache for refreshing pages that calculate information).

–jeroen

via: Flights from San Francisco – Google Search.

Posted in Google, GoogleFlights, Power User | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Downloading TomTom POI files for Germany/Austria/Switzerland and for Italian LPG & CNG filling stations

Posted by jpluimers on 2012/10/22

LPG is Liquefied Petroleum Gas. CNG is Compressed Natural Gas. Both are good fuels for cars. I favour LPG, for two reasons. First, it often can be obtained as a rest-product of cracking crude oil, second it has a much higher energy density than CNG.

For each country, you should

  1. download the POI files (preferably in the OV2 format)
  2. download the icon bitmap file
  3. make sure the name portion of the files are the same
  4. copy those files to your device using the something like the MyPOI manager or the instructions at TomTom POI updates in TomTom forum – GPS POI.

Germany, Austria & Switzerland

Note: In Switzerland, there are relatively few LPG stations, but many CNG stations.

Download section for getting LPG and CNG stations in Germany, Switzerland and Austria: LPG & CNG Tankstellen (download).

For TomTom devices, just download the LPG or CNG files for POI and Icon:

Italy and other countries

Start your downloads at LPG Autogas in Italy – Petrol GPS POI data directory for TomTom, Garmin, Navman, SmartPhones and other GPS devices. – GPS POI Data.

Then press the Download POI File button to download the OV2 and BMP file.

–jeroen

Posted in Power User, Windows | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »