Tuesday round up

• External GPS camera mount - it looks kind of tricky, but cool nonetheless.
• A Meditation On the Speed Limit - large scale annoyances by UGA students are probably a sign of increasing value to the UGA degree.
• The uses of anti-semitism
• Cool noir photography from Mr Riddles on Flickr
• A blogging conference I might actually attend. Why are none of these in Atlanta?
• C# bar code generator
• An interesting article on archetypes
• The decline of Western civilization, part 938.
  

The Stone Mountain Punisher

My second attempt at GeoTracking turned out much better. I mapped my usual bike route, with a bit more attention to detail. The addition of waypoints helps a lot.

It's called the Punisher due to the extreme hills on the route.

Check it out

My first try at trackpoints

I'm having problems putting it directly in the blog, but here is the map on a stand alone page. Pretty cool. The missing parts are where I had turned off the gps unit momentarily or put it in a pocket and it lost signal.

The GPS

The Garmin Geko 201 is way, way cool.

Friday rapid fire

• NutritionData.com - very good site
• Lebanon Metaphor One
• Web Photo School
• Lighting 101
• More on Kyoto
• Building the $14 steadycam, you can buy it here
• GPS Article One, Article Two, Windows Media Info
  
• Alt Energy Blog One
• WindHunter - a good idea, but like most energy ideas, doesn't exist
• Supacam
• An angry analysis of the current Business Week cover story (about Digg) over at 37 Signals.
  

Grinding

The combination of spring break and tax time has made the past few days excruciatingly dull. Most of the people I work with are out out of town, the rest are doing taxes (like me) and that's thrown all organization out of whack, which is bad. I'm in the odd position of not having anything pressing going on, and no work related stuff to talk about, which happens very rarely. The combination has made me moody the past three days.

In other news, I did get the Garmin Street Pilot in today, I'm about to take it on it's first test ride. We'll see how it goes.

GPS acquired

I got the Garmin StreetPilot I3 for a good deal on E-bay. A detailed product review will be here shortly after I get it.

The techno lust is strong for this one

Specifically, the Garmin Street Pilot I3. I think I'll have use for it on a project later this year. Amazon has it for $299 as well.

Wednesday Rapid Fire

• Yahoo News with Yahoo Maps - I'll give Google 5 days to do this too. HT: Make
• Google Maps with Transparencies - HT: Make


• A glut of flat screen technology - which would be cool.


• Google Maps Walking Distance


• New MS Money


• Mencken
  

  "All the extravagance and incompetence of our present Government is due, in the main, to lawyers, and, in part at least, to good ones. They are responsible for nine-tenths of the useless and vicious laws that now clutter the statute-books, and for all the evils that go with the vain attempt to enforce them. Every Federal judge is a lawyer. So are most Congressmen. Every invasion of the plain rights of the citizens has a lawyer behind it. If all lawyers were hanged tomorrow, and their bones sold to a mah jong factory, we'd be freer and safer, and our taxes would be reduced by almost a half."



• Tom G Palmer has some nice words about Admiral Stockdale, clearly the classiest guy to run for national office in quite some time.


• Yet another review of Freakonomics, this time by James Q Wilson, the authors are on the Charlie Rose program tonight. Money quote
  

  "...quoting someone whose name I have forgotten: social scientists should never try to predict the future; they have trouble enough predicting the past."

Flagrant gadgetry

• Navicore Personal GPS - it wirelessly turns your bluetooth phone in to a GPS device. Very cool, but it seems to only be available in Europe, though I imagine that will change soon. HT: Gizmodo.


• 10 Million Candlepower flashlight - with built in recharging! And only $49 bucks too. There's a 15 million candlepower for sale too.


• The Pain Ray - Not really a gadget, but cool in a creepy way. It uses microwaves to heat nerve endings. Supposedly for security and crowd control.
  

GMaps at last

As promised yesterday, here is my first experiment with GMaps.

On the whole, I like the technology. It does a lot of the work for you in terms of plotting and it works off on an external xml file. The only real downside is that it does not use actual address information, only latitude and longitude coordinates. There are a number of free lookup services online, I used GeoCoder.us which worked very well, still it's an extra, probably unnecessary step.

I'll look around and see if there is some automated process out there which does automatic conversions and reports back.

On the whole though, a very good and easy proof of concept.

With no further ado, here My Week So Far

Google Earth is staggering

Google Earth was released today and I'm blown away. Basically it's a free version of their KeyHole software, but with incredible capabilities. Skylines, tilting and foreign cities, it's all just staggering.

To justify getting a laptop

OK, I'm trying to justify the expense of getting a laptop and I'm trying to list out all of the ways I would use it.

1. With GPS unit, as a navigation tool on long trips (I have plans to mount it to the car to some degree.
2. To play music while in the car, sort of a massive I-Pod
3. With some sort of internet service, as a way to avoid traffic problems using Traffic.com, Georgia Navigator and such (I'm sure a Google Maps port is on the way soon.)
   
4. Recording the various bluegrass jams I go to, I would have to get an outside device to do it properly.
   
5. For use on trips

Can anyone think of any other uses?