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Graphics Software

GPS Drawings 180

Posted by CmdrTaco from the way-to-waste-some-time dept.
With all the less then happy things happening, I thought I'd share a link sent in by mustafap. The site is GPS Drawing, and the idea is to record your path driving around with a GPS signal, and then graph the results to draw pictures. It's fun seeing the routes superimposed on maps. Simple and fun. I hope you enjoy it too.
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GPS Drawings More

GPS Drawings

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  • Taxi drivers? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Quasar1999 ( 520073 ) on Monday October 08, 2001 @09:42PM (#2404670) Journal
    Can we use this against taxi drivers, the next morning when we sober up and realize that fastest route from the bar to our house was not the 45 mile route the driver took...???
    • It's especially incriminating when you show everyone that the path he took draws out an extended middle finger.
      • Shouldn't it be rm -rf /bin/ladden? This way you wuold erase his subordinates also. :-)
      • > It's especially incriminating when you show everyone that the path he took draws out an extended middle finger.

        Never mind a taxi driver. I have visions of pilots doing this right now over a certain part of the world ;-)

    • I've actually had a taxi driver, who, in order to get me to 29th street and 6th avenue from Park avenue downtown, went north to 32nd street, west to 7th avenue, south to 28th street, east through 28th street, and north through 6th avenue. That is, his route was like this:

      S
      v____6 ave
      v ____+{ { {+ 28st
      + 29st o____^
      v _________^
      v 32st _____^
      +} } } } } } + 7 ave

      S is the starting point.
      o is my final destination
      The v,},{, and ^ characters indicate the direction of the route.
      The _'s are there as place holders; try to ignore them.
      The +'s are specific streets. They correspond to the nearest label.

      Sorry if this is cryptic, I couldn't think of a better way to do at the moment.

      Oh yeah, he was on a cell phone the whole time. I'm sure that contributed to the formation his route. Needless to say, instead of a tip he received an argument.

  • So how long... (Score:4, Funny)

    by mmontour ( 2208 ) <mail@mmontour.net> on Monday October 08, 2001 @09:46PM (#2404680)
    So how long until one of the slashdot trolls starts posting a GPS drawing of that goatse guy?

  • Pointless? (Score:1, Flamebait)

    by __ne2k ( 113416 )
    This really has to be one of the most completely pointless things I have ever seen in my entire life.

    • Re:Pointless? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by toral ( 267417 ) <nzoschke@parrett.net> on Monday October 08, 2001 @11:53PM (#2404912)
      I'll bite:

      More pointless than covering a hotel room with melted cheese, or submersing a Jesus figurine in a jar of urine? I see this as art; a creative form of expression. In that respect it isn't any less pointless than your favorite architect, painter, or sculptor.

      Sure, this fits into a niche. Many people can't or don't understand gps, tracking software, or data interpreters. Nevertheless, the end result is the same: people translating an idea onto a medium. Painters use canvas, musicians use tape, these people are using pure space. If you think about it for a second, it doesn't seem pointless at all (to me at least), but rather nifty.

      This may not be your thing. I don't care much for landscape painting. But that doesn't mean it is lacking a point. If nothing more, it sounds like the people doing this are enjoying it. Judging from the comments, it looks like they aren't alone. In fact, getting a reaction from someone who doesn't like it even validates it's point...

      -toral
      • I see this as art; a creative form of expression


        The article put me in mind of the Echo and The Bunnymen UK tour at the start of the 1980's


        The tour seemed to be a series of random flits from town to town, with no consideration for efficient routing or logic of any sort, and including gigs in village halls on obscure islands in the back of nowhere, even the Northern Isles, miles off the coast of Scotland.

        But when the New Musical Express asked the Bunnymen's manager, Bill Drummond (later of The KLF, Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, Timelords, K Foundation etc) why they were following such a random route, Drummond's reply was:


        "It's not random: if you look at a map of the world, the whole tour's in the shape of a rabbit's ears."

        Sheer unmitigated genius.

        TomV

      • on art theme, this kinda idea was used in Paul Auster's New York Trilogy novel (small spoiler)

        private detective is following this guy around every day, eventually notices that there is actually a pattern to the guy's daily wanderings: each day he draws a letter
        tower of babylon (IIRC)
        cool novel
      • Does anyone else see this as a complete waste of fuel and clean air more than a waste of time? Go ahead and make a giant invisible Etch-A-Sketch drawing using gallons of gas and spewing noxious fumes into the atmoshpere, and then get all excited, like you just made some art. While some people ride a bike to work to save gas, these people are driving around just for the sake of driving around. Not to mention the safety concerns of running the equipment, and trying to follow a nonsensical route. Sheesh.

        • If you had actually read the article, instead of reacting so quickly, you would have noticed that some of them were done on foot. While you might have had a good point, your reactionary stance and hyperbole has made you seem like a fool.
          • Hi.

            I do not deny that some of them may have been done on foot. Those that were not were small-scale wastes of non-renewable resources, which, if you were not so contrary, you would have agreed to. I was the only person to point this out, so you're welcome.

            You do know that reactionary [dictionary.com] means "conservative", don't you? And hyperbole [dictionary.com] means an exaggerated figure of speech? Can you point out an example of conservatism or exaggeration please?

            Just checking, because you didn't use these words properly, which makes you look as if English might be your second language. That's no big deal, a lot of people don't read and write English all that well, but they usually don't try to impress other folks with words they don't understand, hoping those folks don't understand them either.

            • I have no desire to get into a flame war with you, especially about the use [or misuse] of words. Having said that, is it possible for you to be more obtuse? You deliberatly choose the definitions that allow you to mock me. Why choose 'conservative' and not 'opposition to progress'? The latter is precisely the meaning I had in mind when I used it. Furthermore, from your own link I quote:

              'hyperbole (h-pûrb-l)
              n.
              A figure of speech in which exaggeration is used for emphasis or effect, as in I could sleep for a year or This book weighs a ton.

              If you had read the definition in it's entirety you might have garnered a clue as to the actual meaning. Lastly, like all people who think they are superior to other people, you attacked me personally for no apparent reason and then condescended to me. Whether english is my first language or my seventh language is not germaine to any discussion we might be having about GPS art. You are a small person who likes to feel big at other's expense. Good day to you.
              • OK. You said I looked like a fool, attacking me personally for no reason. You used two big words in doing so. The only definition for reactionary is conservative. I choose that definition, because the other one you think you used is for a different word, a plural noun. The proper use for that one would be "You are a reactionary", not "You are reactionary". If I had called "GPS" "GNP", while flaming you on /., would you have let that go?

                You still haven't pointed out an example of exageration used for emphasis or effect, which is what I asked of you. If you're not going to answer questions asked, why would you reply? I have plenty of clues, thanks.

                "Whether english is my first language or my seventh language is not germaine to any discussion we might be having about GPS art."

                Neither is a personal attack on my level of perceived foolishness, but you came out swinging, so...

                "You are a small person who likes to feel big at other's expense. "

                Where did you get that from? Did I reply to your original and insightful post with a crappy "read the article" flame? Nope. You did. Do you know anything else about me, enough to make that kind of judgement? My post was pointing out that the price of this GPS art was several gallons of gasoline and a lot of unecessary pollution, which was a valid point. Then you replied, calling me a fool. I just pointed out that in doing so you used big words incorrectly, which you are still doing, which is ironic when questioning someone else's intelligence. I did that as a public service, so that you don't do it face-to-face sometime soon and really embarass yourself. You're welcome for that, too.

                I don't think I'm better than anyone, but I will defend myself, which I think is only fair.

    • I guess someone has a lot of time on their hands. Or maybe someone wants to recapture the experience of Etch-a-sketch with a GPS receiver and a real-time graphical display. Maybe they're perfecting the art of giving future GPS-based incarnations of Big Brother "the finger".
    • Ah...in a way all is pointless, but please be truthful, did this seem pointlessly humorous to you in the slightest way? I found it hilarious that someone would waste their time doing something like this and thus it brought mirth to the world and lost its pointlessness.
    • i thought that it was pretty interesting, but then again i used to live in some of the places they walked around (brighton -- a cool place). brighton's been settled for hundreds of years -- you can see the different parts of its growth in the different forms of street layouts.

      now i live in colorado -- if you did it here, you'd just come up with graph paper, as all the streets are laid out in grids.

      perhaps you can see people and streets and houses as information, and urban plans as the cultural algorithms (different in each place) that organise them?

  • I'm sure someone will use this to figure out weird coincidences and conspiracies. Messages written out in paths taken and such.
    • Attention, mysterious crop-circle makers: next time you liquor up and head out to Billy Bob's farm for a fun night of, uh, cornstalking, don't forget your GPS! Would be interesting to see the GPS track left behind from a crop-circle creation.

      One thing that kind of irked me about the site, "data alteration" is used in part to make most of the images. I think I'd rather see the raw unaltered images. What's the point of doing the whole GPS position tracking thing if you're just going to alter the data to make it look "right?" Seems equivalent to sketching a landscape, only to take a photo afterwards and toss the sketch into the trash.

      Shaun

      • Re:And don't forget crop circles (Score:1, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Unaltered data would be kind of useless because maps are intentionally made to be incorrect. So if you crossed a bridge and later overlayed the GPS track over a map, you'd be going over the middle of the river about a 1/4 mile away from where the bridge really is. It's not exactly informative as to where you actually were.
        • Unaltered data would be kind of useless because maps are intentionally made to be incorrect. So if you crossed a bridge and later overlayed the GPS track over a map, you'd be going over the middle of the river about a 1/4 mile away from where the bridge really is. It's not exactly informative as to where you actually were.

          I've used the Hertz navigation system in a rental car before, and it did not behave as you describe. When I crossed a bridge, you showed our position on the river with dead-on accuracy. The second the little marker went off the river was the second the car was no longer over the river.

          I was impressed. I hear performance can vary based on if you're area is well mapped though. I was in Chicago, at the time, and I'd imagine coverage in a city that size is as good as it gets.
    • will? have! new age types in the u.k. believe that there is a huge diagram of the zodiac 10 miles across drawn around the town of glastonbury. glastonbury itself is a hub of various cosmic cultural activity, ufos, crystals, standing stomes, etc. the zodiac is supposed to be outlined by natural features, and lanes and hedges. it was 'discovered' in the 1930s by someone who claimed that it was originally king arthur's ...

      search google for glastonbury zodiac [google.com].

  • Hey, this is obviously stolen from my senior project back in 92'-93. I'll have to file for a patent violation!!

    I'm rich! I'm rich!!!!

    - Necron69

  • Family Circus (Score:5, Interesting)

    by chairmanKAGA ( 515972 ) <nwzamecnik@yaDEBIANhoo.com minus distro> on Monday October 08, 2001 @09:54PM (#2404702) Homepage
    Kinda reminds me of those Family Circus comics in the paper on sundays.

    Kind of interesting to see where people have been...would be fun to wake up and start the GPS and then at the end of the night see where you have been all day by graphing it onto a local map. Do this for weeks. At the end of all the time, use the (x,y) cords and divide the city into 4 quadants and start to make equations of where you have been....try and see where you are most likely to be..... see what times you are most likely to be where, etc...Could be some good math to do..useless? sure, but fun if yer a geek like me:)

    • At the end of all the time, use the (x,y) cords and divide the city into 4 quadants and start to make equations of where you have been....try and see where you are most likely to be..... see what times you are most likely to be where, etc...

      Let me get this straight... you want to hand your girl-friend 3D graphical evidence that you weren't working late, that you've actually been drinking with your buddies at the bar again?

      All I can say is: Bad, bad plan.

    • Do this with a large number of people and develop 'probability clouds' for their whereabouts. Then use multivariate exploratory data analysis techniques on critical dimensions of the probability clouds to characterize types of people according to their ranging zones. Could be interesting!

  • How long before somebody realises that their route to work is some fantastic work of art? And how long before they try and copyright the route?

  • Gimme cell phone cells or something COOLER. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by standards ( 461431 ) on Monday October 08, 2001 @09:59PM (#2404715)
    I'd find it more interesting just to see where I have driven over the past twelve months.

    Alternatively, I'd like to see what cell phone cells I drive through. That'd be neat, and perhaps more nerdly than the purpose-built paths of the site.

    Anyone do that yet? I'm sure we'd all like to see that versus a distorted elephant picture made by some guy driving his car around a city.
    • I'm sure we'd all like to see that versus a distorted elephant picture made by some guy driving his car around a city.

      I've been told before that I'm egocentric, and make things All About Me. From now on, I'll just show people your post, and they'll never be able to complain again.

      A squiggly line showing us where you've been for the last twelve months, versus a cute little elephant in Brighton. What do you think is more interesting (to people other than you)?
    • Cellnet phones already do this. You can set them to show you the "local" STD code for the area you're driving through.

      I don't know if any mobile phone networks in the US do this yet, it probably need to use digital mobile phones to work. As far as I know the old ETACS phones didn't do it but GSM ones do.
    • 88I'd find it more interesting just to see where I have driven over the past twelve months.

      Just get a GPS with a 12VDC adapter and leave it running in your car. Periodically download your track log to your PC -- voila!

      Your GPS manufacturer probably has software to do this. I have a Garmin; there are shareware utilities for managing the tracklog and waypoint database. Alternatively, there are open perl modules [cpan.org] that talk the Garmin protocol -- very nice for owners of the cheap etrex.

      (Personally, I think the etrex antenna sucks but it is otherwise a sweet little box that works fine in the car where you don't have to worry much about tree cover.)

      Alternatively, I'd like to see what cell phone cells I drive through. That'd be neat, and perhaps more nerdly than the purpose-built paths of the site.

      The really alpha-geek thing to do would be to hack your cell phone to tell you. Otherwise, you could approximate this by plotting the centroids of the cell as waypoints and downloading them to your GPS.

      An even nicer thing would be to do a PDA application that talks to your GPS so you could have a more sophisticated database. I've toyed with several for the palm: the Magellan [magellangps.com] unit for Vx form factor and the Rand-Macnally unit for the III form factor (These are somewhat obsoleted by the new form factors). Both of these work by sending standard NMEA strings with position, heading and speed information over RS232, so acquirign fix information and parsing it is a snap. The Magellan unit is excellent; it locks on fast and comes with first class software that turns your palm pilot into a handly little GPS with a full GUI.

      The Rand Macnally unit is pretty much junk: the mapping software that comes with it is very crashy on the palm. However the desktop software is fine and very useful for street mapping and the hardware unit is acceptable: it takes a long time to lock on, but it performs acceptably thereafter if you have good coverage. The big advantage is that if you look in the store specials bin it can be got really, really cheap: the III form factor is gone and because of the crappy software the Streetfinder/GPS for palm package has a very high return rate. This makes it good for experimenting if you have a III* palm, or can get your hands on one. The most important strings for position, heading, signal quality etc. are standard across all manufacturers.

      There are some clip on units for WinCE too; I expect the also work by sending serial signals. In any case, your other choice is to make a null-modemish cable for your GPS to connect it to your PDA or laptop. The connectors on GPS's are non-standard (they have to be water proof) and very expensive: a cable with the GPS connector on one end and bare wires on the other cost about $40. There was a guy who had molded some connectors for a couple of Garmin units and was selling them for a reasonable price over the internet -- try a google search.

      There used to be a Rand-Macnally package with the streetfinder package and a small, puck like GPS unit with a DB9 DCE wired connector that plugged straight into your laptop to transfer data and to get power. This cost me under $100, for which I got the GPS (sans any hardware user interface which was fine for my purposes) and street maps of the entire US (albeit windows only). This might make a good experimenter's unit if it's still available. If you want to use it with a PDA, simply make a little straight through dongle that separates power leads and runs them to a small battery pack.

      By the way, interfacing with GPSs and other NMEA capable equipment is one fault I found with the Linux PDA discussed a few days ago. Sure, USB is better for desktop integration, but you have to get a CF format serial card (such as the Socket corp I/O card) to interface with this kind of equipment. Hopefully, there are drivers for serial cards, otherwise they're useless for many kinds of apps you'd particularly want an open software based platform for.

  • You know... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by dwdyer ( 5238 ) on Monday October 08, 2001 @10:00PM (#2404717) Journal
    Maybe I've read too many marginal novels, but I imagine using this as a way to communicate covertly. Granted, it'd be a royal pain in the ass.

    Drive or walk your message, while transmitting your location. Glyphs could stand for entire blocks of meaning. Encrypt the message into glyphs, then walk them while transmitting encrypted GPS data. The data would then be smoothed (in space and time domains? What about traffic jams?) in order to recover the glyphs. Encrypted sign language in the large.

    But most of all, it reminds me of the alphabet-walking man in Paul Auster's City of Glass.

    • If you're gonna transmit GPS coords, you might as well just trace your pattern on a computer instead of a city.

      What you'd want to send is intersections or simple directions, use GPS to decrypt the message. Ideally, break the trip into many smaller trips and give end-to-end directions, out of order.
    • Just like a bumble bee.

    • ... The Taliban could use cartoons from "The Family Circus" to plan strikes?

      "Who's responsible for this terroristic attack?"
      "Not Me." "Ida Know."
  • kidda reminds me of road rallying, basically you meet with bunch of people driving in the middle of nowhere with no real purposes AND wasting gas at the same time. talk about productivity

  • how cool (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mojo-raisin ( 223411 ) on Monday October 08, 2001 @10:08PM (#2404737)
    I've always wondered where I am when flying over the US... never really thought about taking a laptop and GPS aboard to chart progress.

    ... you could even plug the data into Flight Gear [flightgear.org] in real time so you could look at your computer screen instead of looking out the window (of couse using the cool A href="satellite photo textures:)

    • Re:how cool (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      ExpertGPS will show your GPS track superimposed on aerial photos anywhere in the USA. http://www.expertgps.com [expertgps.com] [expertgps.com]
    • I used to take my GPS on planes but

      (1)had to put it right next to the window to be able to get a signal and

      (2) a misinformed air steward told me that "transmitters" are not allowed on planes and to switch it off. It wasn't worth arguing or trying to explain how GPS works, so I turned it off. I don't bother taking it anymore.

      Simon
    • No need for a laptop, as many modern and inexpensive consumer GPS units have bulit in maps. For example my Garmin Etrex Legend has rough built in maps and can be upgraded with higher resolution maps by uploading MapSource compatible maps of many parts of the world. You can follow your path on the map page in real time. Of course the map page is no where as big as the laptop display, but it does do the job. This unit is priced just above $200USD.
  • I think it would be really cool to do this with the GPD-guided missiles that we're using against the Taliban (note I said Taliban and *not* Muslims). I would love to see their path from whatever launched them, avoiding enemy SAMs, hills/mountians, until the reached their target. That would be pretty neat I think.
    • Fascinating. I'm sure military intelligence agencies the world over would love this kind of data . . . .

      Seriously, sure it'd be really cool to look at (particularly if they combined it with some cool 3D imaging so we could have a "virtual missile cam"), but the chances of this kind of data being released before 2030 or so are somewhere are pretty minimal.

    • This guy I knew told me a story that a few years ago they declassified the videos from the bombs that fell in '91. He said that all you saw was desert, then a small building, then 2 guys standing outside smoking... and blank. Wonder what they were talking about.
    • Pretty neat. War is fascinating, isn't it. Why not take the illustrations and print them on tshirts and wallpapers and so on. Make art out of them, sell the stuff and use the money to fight terrorists.

      Hopefully you were already ironic - anyway, your comment is *tasteless*.

  • Nothing to see here, folks...move along (Score:5, Interesting)

    by BarefootClown ( 267581 ) on Monday October 08, 2001 @10:41PM (#2404784) Homepage
    I s'pose it would be impolite to point out that this is nothing particularly new. Matter of fact, we hams have had something like this for years, but a little more fun: APRS, or Automatic Packet Reporting System. Basically, the GPS receiver is connected to a TNC (packet radio modem), and broadcasts its position at a time interval specified by the user. Now I can see where you are going. Couple the reception of the GPS data with mapping software, and you get this. Very entertaining to see where your buddy is going ("No, no, I said turn left on Brooks!"), and very useful at times--throw the rig in your trunk before you give the keys to your kid. QST did an article about this a few years ago; if I weren't so lazy, I might go look it up. Feel free to post it, anybody, if you find it.
    • Wasn't the original goal of APRS to see who was around to talk to?

      If so, it shows another reason to do things just because they're interesting: they often take on a life of their own. Like some finnish CS student writing his own OS kernel.

      APRS was almost cool enough to get me back into ham radio.

    • And, of course, that GPS/APRS information is gated to the Internet at the site FindU.com [findu.com]. For example, I'm right here [findu.com]. (Actually, I was there a while ago.)

      Position information can be updated as often (every ten seconds) or as rarely as you want (when active, I send a packet every two minutes when moving; 30 minutes when stopped). You can also stations near me [findu.com].

      I never found ham radio very interesting until the advent of APRS. I can talk with someone across the world using email or a telephone. APRS brings something to ham radio I really enjoy.

      When I'm touring on my bicycle, I generally have the GPS and ham radio with me. Folks all over the work can track me on the internet. One of these days, I'm going to tap into my heart rate monitor so that data can also be uploaded to the internet using ham radio.

      Ham radio is a great way to your geekness to the next level.

      InitZero

  • Woud this let me track my cat's daily wanderings? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 08, 2001 @10:41PM (#2404785)
    Are GPS receivers small enough to fit on a cat's collar?

    I'd pay $ for a collar that would keep track of where my cat goes during the day when I let him out. Every day, or week, or whenever, I could download info from the collar and graph his wanderings against a map of my neighborhood.

    Come on, engineers, whaddya say?

  • New contest! (Score:4, Funny)

    by phraktyl ( 92649 ) <wyatt@dPLANCKraggoo.com minus physicist> on Monday October 08, 2001 @10:45PM (#2404792) Homepage Journal
    Kudos to the first person to drive around their country to spell First Post with their GPS system.

    Other allowed GPS path contest entries would include: Beowulf, Natelie Portman and JohnKatz Sucks.
  • Writing out some decryption algorithms?

    Let's see if the DMCA will ban GPS

    mick
    • Or get together a group of people and spell out the DeCSS source across an uninhabited part of the desert so it can be read from space.

  • i just happened to have some anaglyph viewers sittin on top of my monitor.some of those drawings had adjustable red/blue stereonoise.
    SERENDIPITY!

  • Etch-a-sketch (Score:2, Interesting)

    by toral ( 267417 )
    It like an extremely large scale etch-a-sketch, although some of the drawings are not continuous.

    Nevertheless, this is certainly nifty. I especially like the airborn ones. Someone could really exploit the 3d nature of this in the sky.

    I can see this becoming another type of performance art: watch the gps path on a screen as this guy doodles something in the lake with his boat. A few people working together could come up with some especially spectacular results...

    -toral

  • Animals? (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Has anyone ever tried this on a cat or something?

    I always wondered just what they are up to when I see a cat, whos owner lives a block or two from my house, walk by my front door....

    -Justin
  • how about a gps device that records your best time from point to point? Work to home, school etc. maybe send that info to the guy in the next car and see if he can beat your best time :)

  • Wait a Minute (Score:3, Funny)

    by nihilogos ( 87025 ) on Monday October 08, 2001 @11:24PM (#2404878)
    I thought my girlfriend said she was going to the movies. There's no cinema there.

  • Road trip - Summer 2000 (Score:5, Interesting)

    by wass ( 72082 ) on Tuesday October 09, 2001 @12:16AM (#2404936)
    I did just this on my road trip last summer (Summer 2K, baby!). Here's my homepage for my online journal [jhu.edu].

    I had an IBM thinkpad laptop (dual-boot Windows 95/Mandrake 6.1, although once I had linux installed I never booted up that 'other' OS :-) ), connected to my GPS (Garmin II+). I ran a VERY simple bash script that just pinged the GPS every minute and grabbed the latitude/longitude/altitude. I stored these points in a data-file, and then rendered some pretty cool maps (Mercator [jhu.edu] and Perspective Satellite [jhu.edu] Projections) when I got back from the trip. I rendered the projections on IDL, with some superimposed (and conformally mapped) satellite pictures of Earth for the terrain.

    Trip started and ended in NJ, but went through about 40 states in-between, coast-to-coast. Even drove through parts of Mexico and Canada. Put about 15,000 miles on my car in 8 weeks. It was pretty cool, I was totally connected, with laptop and GPS and CB, driving from point to point. Got kind of annoying to keep doing it all the time, though (especially for parts of the trip that friends went with me), but it was definitely worth it!

    The online journal isn't caught up, and is kind of wordy at times, but let me know what y'alls think. When I get some free time (yeah right) I'll add some more pictures, shorten all the blah-blah text, and maybe also add a pictures-only tour. Let me know how you guys like the maps, though. I wanted to eventually render them in Python to only use open-source software, but never got around to fully learning Python. Had to settle on IDL instead.

    • The maps are great. Makes me wonder if I should start tracing myself.

      I wonder if street/road level is possible? Something to ponder.

      -ajb

      • Re:Road trip - Summer 2000 (Score:3, Interesting)

        by wass ( 72082 )
        Thanks. Walking around with the GPS, you can definitely see a difference of a few dozen feet, especially now since the US turned off the selective availability. However, errors can be reduced to cm's or less, through time averaging (My Garmin does it, but I don't know what the max time-average duration is). So, depending on your patience and accuracy, you can make road maps that can be quite accurate.

        The GPS came in real handy on my trip, though, for helping me find where I was when lost (happened all the time). The Garmin II+ has a small display that shows a trajectory like this as you go (it only keeps a finite number of points, obviously, maybe a few hours worth before it starts swapping them out). I could often match the path I was driving with the road on the map, and find out precisely where I was (of course, the latitude/longitude would tell me that too, but the maps usually have only a few lat/long bars, and interpolating between them is a pain).

    • Very cool maps, looks like fun.
  • I wrote a program that can do this kind of things. It's actually for glider's pilot. You can record your fly and do a post analysis. You can also bring a (very small) laptop with you and use it as a moving map. Sorry, it's only Windows but if someone is interested, I can provide the sources. http://gschneid.free.fr (In French and English)

    • Re:Other program (Score:4, Informative)

      by brucehoult ( 148138 ) on Tuesday October 09, 2001 @03:34AM (#2405155)
      In fact we glider pilots have been doing this for nearly a decade now. The world championships in New Zealand in 1995 were judged using GPS flight records (I was one of the scorers), as has every world champtionship since -- and most local and national contests too.

      Here are the results [harvard.edu] of that contest. In the daily score sheets each flight is linked to the GPS log of that flight, so anyone can analyse the flying style and tactics of world champion pilots. You need a free program [cambridge-aero.com] to view these files.

      Here are some examples of good glider flights [soar-high.com] made in the USA, such as a 500 km flight [soar-high.com] at an average speed of 247 km/h (153 mph). Without an engine!

  • This is somehow related to one of my ermmm.. buffer overflows ;) so there [cyberian.org].
  • Check out the Degree Confluence Project [confluence.org] for some mapping fun with GPS receivers. Or travel the world safely from your home.

    Many websites (restaurant guides, etc.) that use some kind of Geographical Info System display the Latitude and Longitude in the URL query string. Hacking that is fun, but I still have to come up with a clever use for it. Check out mapquest too, e.g.: http://www.mapquest.com/cgi-bin/ia_free?lat=501000 &lng=30000&level=6

  • Advertiser's Dream (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Big Yak ( 441903 )
    How much time do you spend per year driving a less than optimal route (or just plain lost)? I figure I spend about 60 hours a year driving more than I need to (damn, I didn't know there was a detour there -- or, I shoulda took the bypass around that traffic jam).

    Calculate:
    (hrs wasted driving/year) * [(# of people who care) * (average value of hour per person)
    + (amount of wear and tear on road) + (amount of wear and tear on car) + (amount of wasted gas) + (cost of polution in air) + (money saved from less accidents)]

    Using GPS systems when driving quickly add up some serious savings! Image if the Government paid 50% off all GPSes -- they'd quickly recoup their costs in terms of road/polution/life savings!

    If that's not enough, would you sell your GPS coordinates and a detailed buying profile? Advertisers would be able to say -- "80% of people driving this road are interested in their MCSE certfification!", or "30% of people that go down this highway at 5 PM have children in the perfect X-Box purchasing range!", etc... Then, put some animated signs that change based on who's driving by.... we're talking serious advertising $$$!

    You could use the same info for tracking speed limits & dangerous roads. I'm not talking tracking when people are speeding, but rather, track when people are speeding stupidly. Imagine if all speed limits in the world were variable, depending on the weather, the amount of accidents occuring in this area, the average age (or skill) of drivers on that road, etc. Wow. I currently live in Germany and drive 100MPH on average -- I hate going back to the states and driving 55. But, German drivers are much more skilled (5 months mandatory driver's training, no exceptions), and have on average much safer and more responsive cars...

    Bottom line: Everyone should use GPS systems, and the government should be handing them out like candy. Get some intelligent privacy laws going, and It'd be an improvement for everyone!

  • Precision Farming (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ce25254 ( 25706 ) on Tuesday October 09, 2001 @11:38AM (#2406565)
    Of course a business application of this sort of thing is like the project I used to work on [johndeere.com] for a major ag equipment company. GPS is put on a combine or tractor, along with other sensors, and then the location data is correlated with other data, like yield or moisture, which is collected every second. Nice maps can be drawn to give information about what's happening on a farmer's field. And it can help to make decisions about how or what to plant next year.

  • Those 'car maps' you would make as a kid on long road trips. Get a peice of paper and put it up to the window, stick your pencil on it and just let all the bums and things move your hand around.

    instant art in the car... maybe i'm the only one that did that...
  • GPS Drawing has to be the silliest thing going! Let's hope none of this stuff ends up in a gallery somewhere, it might actually become mainstream...

    [looking for my GPS and interface cable. just in case.]
  • I've been doing this sort of thing for a while now. I made a cable for my garmin etrex, and I use the gpstrans [sourceforge.net] program to download the track data into into a file (in decimal degree format). After that, I use a simple perl script to convert the lines of data to just lattitude/longitude cooridinates, and then plot it using gnuplot [gnuplot.org]. I then do the same thing with the waypoints. You can plot the track with dots and the waypoints with points, and get a nice map of where you've been, along with where your waypoints are located. I've kept a cumulative file of all my track data, and I've got a nice map of all my trips from the past year.

    Here are the scripts:
    Converting a track to x/y coordinates:
    #!/usr/bin/perl

    $filename = $ARGV[0];

    open (F, $filename) or die "bad filename - ARGH!";

    while ($line = ){
    $line =~s/T.....................//g;
    @coord = split /\t/, $line;
    chomp $coord[1];
    chomp $coord[0];
    print "$coord[1] $coord[0]\n";

    }
    close(F);

    Converting a waypoint file to x/y coordinates:
    #!/usr/bin/perl

    $filename = $ARGV[0];

    open (F, $filename) or die "bad filename - ARGH!";

    while ($line = ){
    $line =~ s/.*00:00.//g;
    @coord = split /\t/, $line;
    chomp $coord[1];
    chomp $coord[0];
    print "$coord[1] $coord[0]\n";

    }
    close(F);

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