I get a lot more comments on this site than you get to see. Comments and messages via the contact form include offers of SEO services, things that will enlarge portions of my body, suggestions that I could earn a fortune by posting their irrelevant content etc. The nice folk at Automattic make a great WordPress plugin that filters out the spam that seems to perpetually arrive, when I get round to checking what they have blocked I usually find that they have a 99%+ success rate. So when I got a mail forwarded from the site with the subject “MapWheel: a personalised toposcope for you!” my first thought was that the spam filter had missed one. Fortunately, I had a bit of time so I read on through the mail and even clicked on the links.
To be honest I didn’t know what a toposcope is! In case you are wondering, it’s that sundial like thing which shows you the direction to points of interest from where you are standing. You often get them at scenic lookout points. MapWheel is a newish start up that let’s you create a personal toposcope centred on your home and pointing to the places that are of interest or are memorable to you. You build your personal toposcope in a web app, select the finish (wood, stainless steel or coloured aluminium) and place your order. Seems pretty simple, I haven’t finished building mine yet so I can’t attest to the quality of the finished product. 
They are running a kickstarter to raise funding to get into full scale production, for about £40 you can back this neat idea and get a MapWheel shipped to you before Xmas.
Pretty damn neat, I reckon. Could be the new geo-geek gift.
