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 <a href=“http://books.google.com/books?vid=OCLC02715307” target=_blank”>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. <a href=“http://www.visual-literacy.org/” target=“_blank””>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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