Mapping Hacks

We wrote about Garnix in _Mapping Hacks_. It is a command line tool written by Anton Helm to communicate with Garmin GPS units. It will run under DOS 5.0, various Windows versions, Macintosh, and Linux.
It was the first tool I used to communicate with a GPS.
The new version is here.
OEM Store

Go to phorum board goosh.org is cool! It gives your browser a command line complete with command history, and you get a scrollback.
K-Traxx K.C. Milian K.D. Lang
It supports searching wikipedia and google, including images, video, blogs, etc.
It also has a command line map mode. You can type ‘map ‘ and get a bit […]

“Open Aerial Map is an open collection of aerial photographs, collected into a single coherent view of the world.”
It is run by our good friend Chris Schmidt, and it rocks.
Chris has posted imagery of Where Camp 2008 taken by Pict Earth. Pict Earth is what happens when RC hobbyists become geowankers, or vice […]

Going through old notes I stumbled on this link to a flash animation of the Middle East, showing the growth and decay of empires over time (link).
“Imperial History of the Middle East: Who has conquered the Middle East over the course of World events. See 5000 years of history in 90 seconds.”
I used to […]

I just got an email from someone wanting to know how to convert from degrees-minutes-seconds to decimal degrees.  There are calculators online to do that, and we wrote about how to do it in Mapping Hacks, but you can also use Google Maps:
Example, enter this as your location:
38 54′ 4.35″ N, 76 42′ 45.22″ W
The […]

WhereCamp2008 rocked my world. Here is a gigapan from the event, and links to more. (this is implemented in an iframe, because I don’t know how to get wordpress to allow an embedded object in a post - email me if you have advice)</p>

I’ve been taking lots of Gigapan images. One of the neat things about Gigapans is that they are using image tiling to let you pan and zoom around in image-space. They are using a modified version of the Flash Earth browser which Paul Neave wrote to access Google Maps tiles.
I wrote up a […]

Schuyler wrote a python module to support the Geohash latitude/longitude encoding system created by Gustavo Niemeyer. (wikipedia link).
Schuyler’s python implementation of geohashing code is here.
Geohashing is not to be confused with the more amusing but arguably less useful xkcd geohashing, an implementation of that code lives here .
There is of course also an […]

A member of the Geowanking list asked for advice on pulling 700×700 element chunks out of a 50,000×50,000 element raster file.
And doing it in under 10 seconds, please.  That brings up the magical GDAL tools.  The Geodata Abstraction Library.  This is a set of libraries and command line tools which let you do just about […]

Bill Woodcock forwarded me this blog post with an awesome map of the United States as seen from Japan.  The Thing That Is Scary is how the fanciful map does reflect certain aspects of reality.
Certain aspects