Today’s gadget du jour is the Royaltek RGM-3800 GPS Receiver and
Datalogger. I have long wanted to experiment with one of these and today one arrived in the post from the UK. It’s a small ticket item (€50), but after a short test here I am very, very impressed. A GPS datalogger is just like your fancy GPS car receiver that projects your track on an LCD screen with the difference being, there’s no screen, and it simply records your position to flash memory at regular intervals. You can then download the datafile to your computer and plot the data on a map using google maps or similar.
It arrived this morning and I popped the batteries into it. It’s not much of a test as I sit here in the office, but Matt had to go out to run some errands and I asked if he would take it with him. I installed the software (Windows only unfortunately - Parallels to the rescue). The install was smooth and the device was recognized immediately. I access it and changed to logging interval to 15 seconds. The device itself is about half the size of a current mobile phone. It is powered by two AA batteries which supposed allow it to fill the memory a few times.
I am a Digital Humanities Specialist at 


The HKL Helsinki’s Public Transit has a moving, real time map of
This one could also be called…another great time waster…but it is well done.
On the flight down(?) to Montréal the other day, it was a sharp and clear early morning so I kept the camera with me in the cabin in hope of catching a few neat snaps from above. There were about 10-15 of the 300 or so I shot that were worth actually keeping. Those of you that know me of course realize that I will keep them all as I am a pack rat, both digital and materially. However, of the ones that were worth keeping, a few of the marginal ones were of something that both caught my eye and on processing scared me. Halfway through the journey I was keeping my eyes out the window and there was this orangey-brown ribbon on the landscape. It caught my eye and on further examination it was not ‘on’ the landscape, but was instead floating above. It was a stream of exhaust from a source that eventually hove into view. I say eventually as the plume was about 10-12 km right across Prince Edward County. I had no idea what was there or might have been creating the massive amount of pollution.
One of the software engineers at Google Book Search has posted examples from his group’s 

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