D
Dracos
dracos.co.uk · Personal blog · on HN since 2009
Matthew Somerville builds small civic and data web projects, such as a UK postbox locator, Odeon accessibility pages and coronavirus data tools.
What HN saysCommenters call his site full of awesome things, citing the postbox finder and the Accessible Odeon project.
15HN people shared it
4linked it in comments
15stories submitted
39story points
4 months agolast shared
2009people per year2026
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What HN people wrote when they linked it
revorad · 2011-01-05
Matthew Somerville who made this has a bunch of other awesome things on his website - http://www.dracos.co.uk
One I used just yesterday was for finding postboxes in the UK given a postcode - http://www.dracos.co.uk/play/locating-postboxes/.
imurray · 2010-06-21
Matthew Somerville has done a bunch of cool stuff as well as this:
http://www.dracos.co.uk/
Just this weekend I stumbled onto his site again when wanting to know where the nearest postbox to my new flat is.
Incidentally there is an official "real time map":
http://journeyplanner.tfl.gov.uk/im/RD-T.html
It's less cool, but actually tells you at a glance what you really want to know: where disruptions are.
polymatter · 2014-01-17
The original site is at (http://www.dracos.co.uk/odeon/) where you can read about Accessible Odeon and how it was shut down.
ZeroGravitas · 2009-09-16
It's worth plugging all the ways in which UK citizens can contribute to independent reverse engineering this info in a clean room manner:
If you've got an iPhone, Android phone or other GPS device:
http://www.freethepostcode.org/
If your house was built before 1940 then locate it on an out-of-copyright map:
http://www.npemap.org.uk/
Just type in your streetname and postcode:
http://postcodedb.sourceforge.net/index.php?p=submit
Identify the location of nearby postboxes:
http://www.dracos.co.uk/play/locating-postboxes/
You can see the results here:
http://old-dev.openstreetmap.org/~random/postcodes/
Click on the names of the three different sources in the top left to compare or use the + sign in the top right to switch the underlying map as well.