ian@animal:~> uptime
2:14pm up 600 days 5:37, 5 users, load average: 0.03, 0.02, 0.00


I’ve also fiddled about with the style sheet and given the site a bit more texture, looks nicer now I think. Big new section coming soon…

It took me a good few years but I managed to get back to my great, great, great Grandfather William Atkinson, born about 1817. I found him on the cencus and, unbeknown to me at the time, made a fatal misreading of his place of birth multiple times on the cencus.

I read the place of birth as ’Litton’, and when I searched I found that there is a place called Litton in the Dales, near Settle.

To make things worse there was hundreds of years worth of Atkinsons from that area and a website all about that.I even went up there for a day out and thought it was really nice!

Well it turns out that I have a cousin John who works over the road from me at the University, William is his great, great Grandfather so he’s a generation older than me as it were. John had read Litton correctly as Silton, in other words Over Silton or Nether Silton near Northallerton.

This has lead to us being able to go a generation further back to John Atkinson, born around 1785 and has put an end to the brick wall that I hit years ago with William.

It just goes to show how badly even small mistakes can affect your research and this is why I triple and quadrouple check everything! I don’t know how I made the mistake in the first place, I suppose my only excuse is that the old script on the census returns can be really very hard to read!

To be honest, I think this is a really shoddy substitute for a GPS chip and is no more use than an as a gimick. Neither 802.11 nor GSM were specifically designed to be used in this way; it’s a classic example of using the wrong tool for the job.

The location finding, from what people have reported, is accurate only to within a few thousand square metres at best, at worst it could be a very generalised area indeed. This means that it’s no use at all as an in-car sat nav replacement and certainly no use for walking and hiking (where there’s unlikely to be WiFi and possibly no cellular radios either anyway).

So what use is it? None as far as I can tell unless you can find somebody who doesn’t know GPS exists and want to mesmorise them for a few seconds. Apple always seem to demo these things by finding the nearest Starbucks or Apple Store but how often do people really want to do that?

I suppose it’s good that they’ve at least acknowledged the fact that people need to know where they are, I just hope they do a proper job of the next hardware release and squeeze a GPS chip into it, then I might buy one!