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.

So Matt wandered off a hour ago and I he reports that the device did a cold start out in front of our office in 30 seconds and that the light remained solid for the bulk of his journey. When he returned to the office he handed me the device and I said well, we’ll see where you have been. I connected the supplied USB cable and started the data logger tool. It reported that the device was operating (and had maintained contact inside our office here — I guess our window is large enough). All I had to do was click to send the data file (tagged with date and time) to an NMEA folder on my drive. It immediately showed up in a Google map window as part of the application. Plug and play indeed — colour me impressed.

We looked at the path plotted on the map and he confirmed that it was surprisingly accurate. It appears that the first few readings as it was getting a first fix were a little off, but it quickly got a decent accuracy. It actually seems to have tracked him crossing Pembroke to visit the ATM at the Ulster Bank and when he went inside and to the counter at the pharmacy around the corner. He spent about 45 minutes in the Grafton Barber and it seems to have been taking readings the whole time and getting some variance. By and large however and lacking an augmentation, the wee thing is quite acceptable accurate. I am looking forward to some further testing. One of the uses I was hoping to put this to was as a dongle on a knapsack when I go biking as a means of tracking routes and determining distance and velocity. You can set device parameters to track altitude and velocity in addition to long and lat should you want to. The supplied software also comes with a photo tagger that will coordinate the addition of geo-reference information to a series of jpgs from you camera after a day of shooting. So far, very impressive.

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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). Wouldn’t that be absolutely useful on a brand new iPhone …oops its Finland and I suppose that should be Nokia N95 ;-) (no comment on the fact that all the mainstream blogs felt compelled to echo each other when 29 June was announced as that release date — just barely avoiding going down that rant).

I wish the HSR Hamilton’s transit authority provided the same. There may well be other transit authorities now providing this real-time info, but this is the first one I have seen in action. Awesome! Yay Finland.

On a personal note, I find myself sitting staring at a chosen bus, watching it speed up slow down, stop and take on passengers. A decade ago I used to occasionally tune into one of the many traffic/weather cams that the Finns had on line. I particularly liked watching the border crossing to Russia. It was a virtual vacation, if only for a few minutes. This bus thing is strangely similar…the strange aspect being me and my fixation with this I am sure. Is this a form of escapism? The system also lets you do simple route planning by inputing start points and end points. I had to chuckle over the request to “write the address you seek,” its sounds so mystical and you know, this is some cool magic!

Updated: Just saw that the Google Blog just had an article on their interaction with transit systems. No link to Helsinki, nor to real time reporting that I can tell, but some additional discussion.

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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.

Last week, the Plazes folks opened up their final beta testing on a new version that will shortly appear. With the new version, not only can you identify your plaze to the world, you can also share information about what you are doing there– ala Twitter. Additionally you can add past plazes to your locations and indicate where you will be in the future. All of this is accomplished with little effort on your part and takes the social promise to a new level. The service is designed for arranging meet-ups, indicating wifi availability or a good restaurant amongst a circle of trust. It also feeds the current fascination with sharing your current emotions, locations, thoughts etc. with your friends and the world at large ( eg. Twitter, Facebook).

The spatial dimension fascinates me. Wouldn’t it be cool to have a real time moving map plazing your acquaintances with respect to your current plaze (this all presuming that you have friends that use Plazes). Imagine if you will a scalable map of your neighbourhood/world in which your friends are all pinpointed with a small bright object and their name or picture, all moving around like a radar display…oh the pursuit of omniscience (I guess it’s a matter of time before we all have embedded RFID ;-) I like the new Plaze and it opens up some new avenues to how I would consider benefiting from Plazes.

Hearkening to Kevin Lynch’s mental maps of personal perception of space, the ability to use Trazes (past record of where you have been, how long you have been there and what you have been doing) to learn more about your habits and how you arrange your time and define your space. Privacy factors aside and I admit that there are many, Plazes allows for learning as much about yourself as your friends.

ps. Had to also see how effectively this little ‘compose in Word and post directly to your blog’ function actually works. Nearly flawless as it turns out…just missed the more tag that I inserted…can probably escape that out to make it work.

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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.

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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.

As it was so clear, the source is actually very obvious and when I turned to Google Maps I was quickly able to identify the source as the Essroc Cement Plant near Picton, Ontario. A little more investigation turned up a report by the Clean Air Alliance that indicates that this plant is the second largest creator of air-borne Nitrogen Oxides and the ninth-largest overall emitter of air pollutants and respiratory toxins. How appropriate to discover such a place, with such a visible presence from the air, on or about the Tory announcement of their ‘new’ environmental policy. Will I see a noticeable reduction in this plants output? I certainly doubt it, but would love to be proven wrong.
I have uploaded a set of higher-res photos to a flickr set ‘Ribbon of Death’.
In case you are tuning in the geo-referenced portion of this blog entry, I have pinpointed it at the location of these photos, and not geo-referenced to where I am writing this as I normally do.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. Nonetheless, many of the other adjustments proposed seem to smack of a need to establish chain of client states carefully balanced by their adherence to western (read US) interests. Moreover, there is a tenor of assumption that Iran should be carved up and that there is not that self-determination is not respected. Nonetheless this is a wonderful exercise, even if the conclusion smacks of the omnipresent black and white appreciation of the situation describing states as in one of two camps as a result of the shifts — winners or losers.

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