Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

I was trying to plan a route in Google Maps on my iPhone this morning, only to discover that even though I'm in the US, I can only get distances measured in kilometers...

After some googling I discover that there's a bug in the 2.2 and 2.2.1 OS releases that treats the UK regional settings as metric (not as a mix of metric and imperial). It's an odd approach, and not one I'm happy with. Surely mapping conventions are to use the distance measurement prevalent in the country that's mapped, not the regional preferences of the user?

What I want is a mapping application that uses kilometers where they're used on the roadsigns, and miles where they're used. After all, it's those roadsigns that will help me make the actual journey.

Is that too much to ask?

Ah well, the Windows Mobile device we use as a GPS is charged now, so I'm going to use a real mapping tool. Time to fire up CoPilot.

John Lennon would be boggling, and Lewis Carroll would be thinking of many things, if they read this news story:

Danish scientists are to put satellite tags on walruses to try to understand where the great beasts migrate.

They will track animals for two months off west Greenland - and gauge how hunting, oil exploration and climate change may be affecting the animals.

The project is being run by the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources and the Danish Polar Centre.

The satellite data will be shared with BBC News and posted on its website so readers can follow the migration.

ping walrus1.gl
pinging...

ping walrus2.gl
pinging...

If you live in the South West US (and Texas), and have a GPS, you can make a bundle tracking down fallen balloon wireless repeaters.

Space Data's SkySites are weather balloons with cellular repeaters that provide mobile communications to desert areas - but they don't stay up long. As they're expensive beasties, they radio where they've landed to their replacements. The company then posts an approximate location on its web site - where local geocachers can reserve the detailed coordinates of a specific device for 48 hours, enough time to head out into the desert, find the balloon, and claim their bounty.

Apparently one chap made $10,000 last year...

link via Engadget

Walking through Clerkenwell Green today, I spotted a Smart car with a rather odd roof mounted camera system, with a fairly hefty GPS antenna.


click through to see image annotations

The vehicle would drive a short distance, then the camera would take various shots around the car. The camera appears to have a very wide angle lens. Gaps between photographs seemed to be of the order of 20 feet or so.

I suspect that this was photography for a street façade mapping function, similar to that offered by Amazon's A9 maps. There are other possibilities - codepope suggests that it could have been capturing backgrounds for a video game, much as was done for The Getaway.



The GPS link to the mount and the laptop that was being used to control the whole process are clearer are in this view.