Air Jelly

Festo’s “Air Jelly”.  Imagine this and many other creatures casually and quietly gliding through the air although while communicating with each other like cellular automata, while providing us with services ranging from the banal to the absurd.  The creatures should have a way also to sense their environment — perhaps through GPS or other locative technologies such as sonar…etc.

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(via collective creature.)

Via Tommi

Tracking a BitTorrent Swarm in Google Earth | TorrentFreak

With the swarm plugin for Google Earth you can lookup the BitTorrent client that is used by each peer, what percentage of the file they downloaded so far, and their exact location. Currently it only shows seed and peers for torrents that contain the word “Borat”.

I can’t really tell how accurate the stats for the swarm are. It looks like Poland, the country where p2pmonitor.com originates, is overrepresented. Apart from this, it is fun to see where all the bits and pieces come from, and it makes you realize how global a BitTorrent swarm actually is.

It would even be better if you were able to hook it up to your own BitTorrent client, so you can pay leechers a visit if their share ratio is not what it’s supposed to be. Perhaps an idea for a future release of this tool?

Geo: All geo coordinates from Wikipedia

Stefan Kühn, a cartographer at the University Trier, Germany, has extracted all the geo coordinates embedded in articles on [Wikipedia->http://www.wikipedia.com/]. The [WikiProject Geographical coordinates->http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Geographical_coordinates] is a Wikipedia project for ensuring standardized geocoding of locations in its articles.

Google Earth fans bent on instant gratification can simply download a KMZ file and start surfing. But more importantly, coders and infoviz geeks can get a comma-separated text file (CSV) with coordinates, titles and Wikipedia categories for all points.

Link: [Geocoordinates from Wikipedia for Google Earth->http://www.webkuehn.de/hobbys/wikipedia/geokoordinaten/index_en.htm]

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(via Code & form.)

[tags]data, database, geo, coordinates, geolocation, knowledge, mapping, map, gps, wikipedia[/tags]

Build your own Google Photo Map with a GPS-equipped camera

(GPS Camera)+
= Easy Photo MappingTim Vidas has a great description of how he was able to equip his Ricoh D200 with a GPS unit to easily Google Map pictures he takes with it. He explains that “The tagging of GPS data into the Exif of each picture is a really nice novelty for me”. More from his How-To:

The Sales folks as Red Hen informated me that the adapter would come with some sort of mapping software, and when it didn’t I called them up and was informed that it’s ‘not quite ready’ and they’d email be about beta testing (evidently the sales teams information didn’t quite jive with the software team). So I set out to create my own, and as it turns out, with only a Image::ExifTool, the Google Maps API and a little over a hundred lines of PERL, I have a script that given a directory of images, will create the GMaps htm, the associated XML for the GPS points and extract thumbnails from the pictures themselves. All that’s left is to upload everything to a web directory!
[Read More..]

On his page he has posted the source code for you to be able to do this yourself, and even makes his custom map pins available to anyone that wants to use them!

A possible way to take this a step further would be to somehow tie this into a PocketPC with a mobile data plan on it that would allow you to wirelessly transfer these photos the second they are taken to a server that automatically Google-maps them with this app running. This way you could snap photos and have them instantly viewable for people looking at your real-time Google Photo-Map. It will only be a matter of time before this is possible. Camera companies like Ricoh or Canon could do this in partnership with mobile carriers, or perhaps mobile phone handset manufacturers could just add the GPS feature to picture phones and mobile carriers could just build a service offering around it? Fun stuff. I can’t wait for this all to be a little easier to do.

[Via Digg]

(Via Google Maps Mania.)

[tags]maps, google, mapping, exif, gps, geolocation[/tags]

La Suisse, Portrait urbain

(Via variable_environment.)

[tags]mapping,maps,information,geolocation,graphic design, books[/tags]

ecal – media & interaction design unit – Track Stick

A utiliser d’urgence pour les cours de Fabric ;)

Cette clef USB enregistre sa localisation, l’heure, la date, sa vitesse, son altitude, etc à des intervalles prédéfinis. On peut ensuite exploiter les données sur google earth ou sur d’autres softs de géolocalisation.

(Via ecal – media & interaction design unit.)

[tags]geo,geolocation,locative,device,mobile,usb,electronic,google earth,gadget,gps,tracking,space[/tags]

DShield – The Movie

DShield.org
Distributed Intrusion Detection System

[tags]evolution, animation, network, software, activity, electronic presence, geolocation[/tags]

False color image based on patterns of jungle growth and plant coloration from a commercial satellite shows the locations of lost Mayan pyramids, paths and smaller structures.

New Secrets Revealed in Maya’s Ancient Landscape : Other

Mayan ruins, hidden beneath soil and dense forest, have been located in Guatemala using satellite technology. IPS | Img. | Related

(Via Archinect.com News.)