Great post by Dr Andrew Hudson-Smith at Digital Urban about using the N95, the new object of desire from Nokia with a freely available geotagger and photo uploader called ShoZu.
ShoZu in fact supports a lot of models so you don’t need to through away your current one just yet.
The post explains in great detail how to get up and running with the product.
Via OgleEarth.
Today I marked down another item from my someday I will do list. Nisene Marks Forest is a beautiful park and the weather was perfect. Friends of Santa Cruz Parks has good info on Nisene Marks and does good work to keep its trails.
I wanted to have data to use with MTBGuru and today was the day. I rode my bike for about 20 miles within the forest and then out of it through the Old San Jose Road.
The map below uses JavaScript code generated by MTBGuru (modified to adjust the size of the blog post) after I had the trip data uploaded.
MTBGuru has a pretty clean interface. You upload your .gpx file, pictures, grade it in someway, add a description and you are done.
The pictures don’t require geocoding information on their Exif headers. You can synchronize the GPS data with the time the pictures were taken by adjusting them in the trip page itself.
The whole process took me less than 5 minutes, not counting the time I took to crop the photos. From the trip page you can download its corresponding .gpx file, or a KML version to load in Google Earth.
Kudos for MTBGuru and its use of Ajax for creating a nice experience with its easy of use and clean interface. You can get out of Beta now (in fact, real beta apps now have to be named something else at this point…).
This cartoon from Baby Blues become available now, published two weekends ago. Still funny.
Microsoft is killing the PPC 2003, obviously. I explain: to use GPS on a PPC now running WM 5.0 it is easier to use the API provided by them.
But, no access through a serial port no more. So, if someone develops code with this API, no way to run it on a PPC 2003. In fact, you might try if you find the gpsapi.dll around. And also bypass the install checks for OS requirements.
Or you find a way to extend this library to add serial port support (which is used by Bluetooth anyways).
Guess either you have a way to emulate it, which in the case of serial access is a bit hard or you move up to Mobile 5, or 6 (video on it available at MSDN/Channel 9), now that it is out anyway like in the just released Xda Terra. But in Germany, by O2.
BTW, all this triggered by the release of EveryTrail GPS Connector for Windows Mobile 5 users.
MapQuest and OnStar are now working together to let you send driving directions straight to your car. Via TruckTrends.
Want to make some money testing your carrier wireless network performance? Then check InCode (a Verisign company) and its Wireless Barometer. You need a Symbian S60 or Windows Mobile (2003 or 5.0) phone with GPS. You will need to install software to help track the network throughput based on your location.
Tele Atlas announced the finalists of its LBS Innovators Series including among them 509 Inc, InterCasting, Locatrix, plazes.com and Spark Parking.
Presentations by Kanwar Chada from Sirf (who also gave an interview to GPS World) and Frazier Miller from Yahoo’s Local Search given at the Location Intelligence 2007 Conference are available at AllPointsBlog.
PNDs (Personal Navigation Devices) are now banned in Switzerland. Via TechnoRide, from PC Magazine.
Gizmodo interviewed Bill Plummer, Nokia’s VP of Sales for Americas with questions about their GPS strategy and offers. Nothing really new there.
CNet tried Delphi Nav200 with traffic updates. And lots of talk on a SIM card by BlueSky that can provide A-GPS for old GSM phones. Not sure why all this buzz around it…
I feel it like crossing a river right now. Like going over this big wave that still comes roaring from this 1967ish unfolding event. Uranus must be playing part in it.
Still vibrating, not over yet.
I fell it as a big river. Watching PBS about Hippies, Frisbee, reading Rolling Stones. Like going back and recognizing its familiarity. Find the pieces that I can try to put together here and that in some way make me part of this Boomer Generation. Transplanted from South America. Latin if you like.
Looking back today seems like a treat. Able to recognize what a 9 year old was doing. Ready to launch the planet into a new era.
The late 60s. That wave of love and growth hit me first slow then it turned into a tsunami.
I rolled in it for quite a while, under the confusing waters of the Brazilian land. And only from a distance now I can see that back then all I needed was my own permission to be.
So now I can see the mix of openness and repression waving towards me and how dysfunctional that can be.
Trying to be open to the love of the 60’s while fathers ran scared of their own sons and abuse them. Shutting them down.
Being in America for me now is to live throughout a full reboot.
Now I can say what hit me.
Reading the 40th edition of Rolling Stones I can see pieces of me still floating on that 60s riverfront. Its resonance is present and takes me to that next level. It is still palpable. You gotta fell it.
Relax, fear not
In each one of those interviews I can see myself in some timepiece I played back then.
{Idea for Movie about Peace: Cut time pieces and make this one movie rotating 46 through 64 in news headlines sounding the radio news and moving forward, calendar pages falling, moving with news from Sputnik in 57’s, Beatles in 64, Playboy in 68. You got the picture, symbols with those year’s references.}
Then keep going all the way to 07 but keep going. That’s the trick, till 23 or so. Paint it. With hope for our kids, those inside our own selves and those outside, waiting for a world to live in.
Stop playing Kids
And I’m not quite done with those interviews yet. I can see a piece of my own trip. But threading into a Time conversation involves planning. It is like watching Deja Vu with Denzel. Trippy.
This time I can say that either I spend my time to help our cause and mine course, but putting time if you will to keep our planet’s beat healthy. And to have something to share with each other.
I see myself within this big crystal, monad if you want some an older reference. Playing notes that match what is coming out of my speakers and my neighbors vibes. And then I can see how families are key.
I fell communities as the way we grow these crystals. Families. Relating to each other.
That’s the cell. Without it, hard.
One Now
I fell this poll of energy as this river that we all flow through. Now.
One single all inclusive moment.
And please loop the last phrase a couple of times please. Comfort yourself in the recurring wave of love.
This is love. For each other. Praying to have your message of love reaching ashore.This is how I can say I relate to you if you got this far.
In a way to communicate with my own.
As a member of the 46~64 crowd I can relate to.
Belong
Let’s say that I wanted it bad, and still want it.
Lovingly express my own being. Express yourself, what else can you do if alive?
That’s what nature is about I guess. Seed growing, natural growth. If you can’t be yourself in your own own blog, where else can one be? As in putting hope in a generation that might not see 5 years old laughing at them as often as they used to.
That can be sad.
Hope
Trying to introduce the concept. Something that put us all, in the same Earthboat.
Let’s call this Boat, Our Hope, as in hope from one member of my Generation to yell the urgency of this moment. This is it. This can be over soon let’s pray for a longer existence as a race by meditating towards a view of our single skin. How can we include all in this planet in this single skin.
Accomplish what the 60’s where about.
Learn how you can generate a lot of energy, like during the 60ths but added to it focus and realization.
Grateful Dead
Read Weir’s incredibly lucid view of the current time. What an open head.
Do I want to make a difference? Yes. That is the Hope. Leave the planet with something to say about it. Our times together. As a Generational Family if one can call that.
I feel that well, guess I will take on this one by myself first so I can prove the thesis, but I fell that this is it.
Matches my own productivity cycles and a time to act. Gore comes to mind.
I wish I could have told him at his keynote at the Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose, CA, please let me vote for you. Please.
It is ours generation turn. It is now or never boys & girls. We have to take this bull by the head. Or we will head down a precipice without turn back.
Jung seen it, he can be trusted.
Now @ The Energy Pool (Quanta Boys Play the Field)
Let’s all realize our own potential (does one realize itself only when light shines its path?) and let’s lighten up the planet, baby. This one big self consciousness’s, selfless if you might say so.
Imagine this pool. Of Energy. Indivisible Universe.
This is Our Love. Now. 40 years cycle. We boomers can relive it now.
Can fell it now.
One People. Zawinul style.
Love is our Salvation, Help, Healing.
Sorry about the prophetic tone, but if we don’t wake up as a brotherhood right this minute. We as a Race (All Guys, Uni, Al Gore??) everybody in. We are definitively and royally screwed. This is it.
We either wake up now or never.
This is my turn, Ours?
[Update: Check this article from the SF Chronicle with a more formal way on the same subject.]
Before you put your trust on some gadget, here are some ways technology can let you down from recent news and how they can interfere with location-based technology including GPS satellites and its signals:
Solar Flares
CNet reported on a study by NOAA on the effect of solar eruptions occurred last December and its accompanying radio bursts had on GPS signals.
[Update: And today NOAA released a study pointing out that a new cycle of sun spots is likely to start around March 2008 peaking up in 2011. Via CNET.]
DARPA’s Backup System
Boeing is developing for DARPA the concept of a non-GPS based system named Robust Surface Navigation (RSN). From the PR:
“[the] program is to develop technologies that can exploit various “signals of opportunity” — electronic waves emanating from satellites, cell phone towers and even television transmission towers — to provide precise location and navigation information to ground troops when GPS signals are being electronically jammed or blocked by natural or man-made obstacles, such as foliage or buildings.”
[Update: Rosum will be working with Boeing on this project, providing its GPS over TV signals technology. Via NewsFactor]
Frequency Interference
Today Tech.co.uk pointed out a study from the Swedish Defence Research Agency saying that CPU’s running at close range to a GPS receiver can interfere with its accuracy.
Unreliable Location-based 911
And the San Jose Mercury News published an article on the study being developed by APCO on the reliability of location-based information provided by 911 services over cell phones.
GSM networks are known to provide poor resolution while CDMA provides a much better accuracy by the nature of its own network (time-based signals).
Shirt with GPSOverIP
But that won’t stop someone to dress for the occasion with a shirt that transmits your current location using GPSOverIP and comes with its own data plan from Vodafone.
Keep your maps around, you might need them.
If you noticed the QR-code (Quick Response code) on the right pane you might be wondering what is it about.
Instead of entering data through thumbing, you point the phone to a code and reads it.
Recently URL’s are being coded this way to make it simpler for mobile phones users to enter them.
The idea now is that certain phones can read these codes as a way to subscribe to mobile feeds.
The Kaywa reader is one of these packages that allows Java and Symbian S60 models to make use of this functionality.
GisTeq announced Photo Trackr, product similar to the Sony GPS-CS1 which allows photos taken with any digital camera (and not only Sony models) to be sync’ed up via USB with the corresponding GPS coordinates of the location where they were originally taken.
It includes a clock synchronization function, a tag button to remember waypoints, re-chargeable Li-ion battery and according to the specs [pdf] its software provides integration with Flickr, Google Maps with history and playback display functions of recorded routes.
Windows only. MSRP $129.00 (not for sale online yet).
This is just awesome…
USGS made available EarthNow! A real-time viewer of the images collected by the Landsat satellites 5 and 7 (Java required).
These birds circle the Earth at 705 km of altitude (exosphere) and according to the FAQ they provide images with resolution of 30 meters (each image pixel corresponds to an area of about 250 square meters).
Replay of past flights are broadcasted to fill in for real-time data acquisition.
Amazing. Riding above the Earth during your lunch break. And for free.
USGS… You guys (and gals) rock!
First at AllPointsBlog.