Some time about 15 years ago, I spent way too much time creating fractal images on my mono-monitored, 10MB hard-disk 286 PC, using BASIC I think, or maybe Turbo C. It took a long time to do those calculations and showing a Mandelbrot set at anything like an interesting level of definition could require an overnight run to complete. My wife used to tell me off, because if you left a computer on overnight, it would probably catch fire.

OK. For some reason I was reminded of this when I found something with which I could lose an equivalent amount of time doing something cool, but senseless.

I don’t know when it happened, but the satellite images for Google Maps went global. OK, so some areas are not very hi-res, but it just feels so cool to zoom in and out, particularly to zoom out and drag and drop your way from London to Seattle in a couple of clicks. It’s like you can pick up the world and roll it round (and it scrolls – well horizontally at least, you can’t flip over the North Pole yet).

This is the Perfect Path Penthouse.