Engadget alerted me to this GPS data logger from Spark Fun Electronics.

The device records up to 440 hours of data to a 256MB SD card in either a simple text file or KML-compatible format that you can display in Google Earth.

I like it, I want one (actually, I want three, and I’ll eventually post about why), but the ad copy tweaked me a bit:

Pull the SD card, insert it into a card reader, [...] and wammo–you can see what Casey did over lunch with a satellite image overlay. Take a look at the example screen shot. You can see what lane Casey was in! When he stopped at the light, his data points piled up. Fancy. Real fancy. Speed is also datalogged – it’s like Big Brother in the palm of your hand…

electronics, engadget, geolocation, GPS, gps data logger, kit, location tracking, Spark Fun Electronics

Though we imagine the Dutch to be a rather unexcitable lot, I did anyway, it turns out they have a history of getting rowdy at football games (yes, if this all happened back in the States I be calling it “soccer”). So it can’t be so much of a surprise that fans rioted again in April. What is surprising is that mobile phone companies got involved in the investigation. This AP report tells the story:

Phone companies voluntarily handed over the mobile phone numbers of people who were in or around Feyenoord’s Kuip stadium on the day of the match — traceable using broadcasting masts in the area.

So that’s what the aGPS sticker on our cellphones is about.

Via Engadget.

tags: 5-0, agps, cell phone, cellphone, crime, engadget, feyenoord, football, gps, hooliganism, location aware, location aware technology, mobile, mobile phone, mobile phone companies, mobile phone numbers, police, police investigation, riot, rioting, rioters, sms, sms message, sms messaging, soccer

Old news from Gizmodo and Wi-Fi Networking News (quoting WiFi NN):

Skyhook has assembled a database of information about 1.5 million access points across 25 major cities in the U.S. by driving every street in every city. Their software records multiple data points per sample for directionality. Fire up their software on a laptop, and it compares the Wi-Fi information it sees with what’s in the Skyhook database, popping out a latitude and longitude within 20 to 40 meters.

Also geolocation related: Monopoly Live: London style.

tags: access points, geolocation, gps, mapping, monopoly, skyhook, wifi

Last week I got excited about the as-yet unreleased geolocation API for BBC Backstage. Now Larry D. Larsen of the Poynter Institute is excited too. In a post titled The Future of News (… Hint: GPS) he talks about putting news in geographic context with geolocation tags.

Eventually, clicking an article in a news/Google Map hybrid might zoom in to a 3D model of the area where an automatic pop-up starts playing a slideshow with pictures of the scene or streaming video along with the text news content. Imagine integrating Google Maps into your classifieds so readers could search for jobs based on what is close to their house. The possibilities are endless.

It’s aparently an old saw of his, but I hope his message starts to get through.

Credit goes to Ernie Miller for the blinking this at The Importance Of….

Technorati Tags: api, bbc, future of news, geolocation, gps, news, poynter institute, reported

Geolocation by GPS my be the most straightforward approach, but we mustn’t forget the other ways to get lat/lon coordinates.

All current cell phones support aGPS positioning to comply with federal E-911 mandates, but not all phones make it easy for the user to get that information out of them. Still, some do and GPS-enabled moblogging is becoming common in Asia and Europe, and there’s at least a public proof of concept going in the US.

Then there’s ethernet/WiFi. Plazes is a kind of social networking application that allows users identify their location based on their network fingerprint. Using the assumption that networks are typically stationary, Plazes then associates lat/lon coordinates to that network based on information submitted by user who ‘discovered’ the network. Plazes’ real trick, however, is to show me who else is online nearby. Problem is, I live and work in New Hampshire where I appear to be the only user online north of Virginia.

But the Plazes folks didn’t invent the concept of using network information to identify location. If I wasn’t so lazy I’d find the story I read a couple of years ago that mentioned it, but this June 2004 article in New Scientist tells the story of one such effort: PlaceLab (extra coverage at Engadget and ExtremeGPS). A Google search turned up Herecast and now Engadget is reporting on AllwaysOnGPS, a replacement GPS driver (for Windows PCs) that mixes GPS and WiFi derived location data to provide the most accurate info despite changing coverage.

Finally, one of my favorite solutions is to use Earthcomber in manual mode. The Palm application allows you to scroll around a map and mark locations as though they were waypoints in a GPS. And though that’s neat, it’s the mapping features that make it a winner. It’s far better than those lousy tourist guides in cities. I used to go to AAA for maps and guides in preparation for a trip, but now I check Earthcomber for area maps and updates.

Technorati Tags: agps, cell phone, coordinates, geolocation, gps, lattitude, longitude, map, mapping, maps, moblogging, network, networking application, palm, picture phone, social networking, wifi

The above image is my followup to my Nevada Test Site Tour post from last month and comes courtesy of Adam Schneider’s very useful GPS Visualizer (you really need to see it full-sized, though). I still don’t have a cable to connect the ancient Magellan GPS I used to a computer, so I manually entered the waypoints I marked into the form and selected a few options, and viola.

Here are the points so you can have your own fun (the image above doesn’t include ‘A’):

name,desc,latitude,longitude
A,Atomic Testing Museum,36.114444444444445,-115.14916666666667
B,Main Gate,36.645833333333336,-116.00194444444445
C,Mess Hall,36.66083333333333,-115.99722222222222
D,HazMat Spill Test Facility,36.801944444444445,-115.96944444444445
E,Railroad Bridge Test,36.79944444444444,-115.93666666666667
F,Control Point,36.93444444444444,-116.05111111111111
G,Bilby Crater (208KT),37.06027777777778,-116.0225
H,Ice Cap,37.08083333333334,-116.04555555555555
I,Sedan Crater (100KT),37.177499999999995,-116.04833333333333
J,Aircraft Anti-terrorism Ground Training Site,37.055,-116.10166666666666
K,House Damaged By Effects Test,37.04555555555555,-116.07833333333333
L,House Damaged By Effects Test,37.04222222222222,-116.07

Click on the links to go to Google’s high-res images for each area.

Related: Vegas Guide Part Three: Nukes and Moon Hoaxes and Chernobyl Tour.

Technorati Tags: gps, las vegas, map, mercury, nevada, nuclear

People are going wild over Google Maps, but I honestly didn’t get too excited about it until I saw Glen Murphy’s Movin Gmap project. It’s a Python script that reads location data from a connected GPS and pans the Gmap to follow. Upon seeing this hack of Gmaps, I went looking for more. Hack a Day shows us how to get maps for a set of decimal coordinates from both Terraserver and Gmap (Terrabrowser will do some of this for MacOS X).The folks over at libgmail found themselves enamored of Gmaps too, and posted a page of hacks. And, before I knew it, I stumbled across a Keyhole BBS discussion of how to find the latitude and longitude of a ‘place’ without a GPS handy. The answer comes from Lat-Long.com, a browsable and searchable database of locations of many types across the US.

Update: The Maps API is out.

tags: gmap, google, google maps, gps, hack, keyhole