randomosity

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.

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The HKL Helsinki’s Public Transit has a moving, real time map of bus locations available via their website. Now that’s what the public wants to know. Where is my bus? Why its right there. That’s what real time GPS reporting is for. I love this. You can even click on the bus icon/number and choose to display its routes, the stops it makes and make the connection you need. You can even choose to ‘follow’ the bus and have the map scroll with its progress. It is most fun if you do this in satellite or hybrid view (note: the buses don’t run 24 hours, so if there are no buses on the map, they aren’t on the streets either, so check back later).
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One of the more intriguing social networking applications that I have been enjoying over the last year has been Plazes.com. I blogged about my initial experiences with this spatial addition to the social sphere. Plazes uses your cyberspace IP to place you in physical space. If you are at a previously defined Plaze, then you are pinpointed. If you have discovered a new place, you supply some info about the place, refine the location and it is stored for future reference. You can discover if there are other plazers in your nearby space or plazes that have been recommended and you can also get a Traze (a spatial and temporal indication of where you have been over time). You can also use your mobile phone to plaze yourself or to find nearby plazes. The system works, is a hoot to use and you can even provide a little map to your blog readers showing where you are in real time –-> see my own sidebar.
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This one could also be called…another great time waster…but it is well done. FlickrVision uses streaming photo posts from Flickr that have locational references. It displays geo-referenced popups of the images as they are posted to Flickr. Hovering over a popup will display a large image of that photo for appreciation. If you are looking for the kooky, eclectic, or for the occasional flash of brilliance, check out the site. rather like StumbleUpon with a geo-twist.

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.

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Am trying out the Plazes service. I am still plugging away with it, but from what I can share, it has found me and I am here:

There you go. Have embedded same in my header, but like all the little baubles and doodads I have overloaded the header a bit. I will tweak with this, but kind of like the little locating service, as I am always very confused about where I am … now even I will know. What this pace for further mods.

One of the software engineers at Google Book Search has posted examples from his group’s experience in creating their own mashups. They created mashups from the places mentioned in particular books. As he states, he moved to New York and was in the gradual phase of getting his bearings and made a connection between what he was doing and where he was. Even more profoundly the mashups result from a connection between the context of the works being catalogued (ofter imaginary worlds, but nonetheless disembodied worlds) that have some reference to the real world in which he found himself. This in a pervasive realization and falls very much down the idea of traveling in history as well and the impetus for my own NapoleonicTourist concept. David Petrou was cycling to work past specific places which were noted in the works that he was indexing and by noting them on maps he made a concrete connection between the work and the real world and further is establishing his own sense of what his community means to him. To me this has far reaching consequences that build on Kevin Lynch’s work with mental mapping and communities to, in a sense, extend these through perception more known than seen aspects of your own neighbourhood. The ability to convey this added context has the potential to change the perception of visited locales as well by enhancing the experience and directly tapping into the way in which we perceive our immediate surrounding and augmenting this through this connection of place to context.

Check out the Travels of Marco Polo for a great example of a geographically broad application of their mashup technology.

The release of Google Earth 4.0 features the addition of Panoramio to their georeference layer. I was using a competing product for geotagging, but the seamless flow between Google Earth and Panoramio intrigued me. After tagging a few pictures in the product, I am reminded of the fun. This is one more wonderful time sink, but its also a wonderfully collaborative project. I added some of my pics from the CaSTA conference in Fredericton and I am waiting to see how long it takes for them to show up. The weather and time of season was optimal when we were down and I was quite pleased with a few of the snaps.

Also take a look at the tour of high-rise buildings in London’s downtown core. Superb integration of a temporal slider into the spatial world of Google Earth.

This constellation of researchers working in overlapping fields of knowledge, information, software and data visualization is a great jumping off spot. Visual-Literacy.org is a collective course spanning several institutions and involving a number of leaders in the field of visualisation. Sounds rather cool. As part of their prospectus they have constructed ‘maps’ of the visualisation constellation as geo-spatial map, periodic table, and a syllogism. This is a real practise/preach exercise and a wonderful overview of the wide range of activities in this field and their inter-relations. The periodic table is particularly impressive. Hover will popup a graphical representation of the technique noted. The syllogism makes a lot of sense. The periodic table must be complimented for the breadth of information conveyed and the attempt to systematize the volume. The table itself is a bit of a challenge to use and the metaphor of periodic table questionable, but a pointer in an interesting direction.

Everybody talks about the great artificiality of the existing borders in the Middle East…remnants of early 20thC colonialism. Now I am not sure that I would expect anything tremendously thoughtful from the US Armed Forces Journal, but there is some interesting points raised in this article. It strongly supports the partition of Iraq and condemns the US for gutlessly not pursuing such an option initially when there was an opportunity.
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