more thoughts re: secondlife, maps and blogHUD

July 22, 2006 at 10:26 pm | In gis | Leave a Comment

Chanced upon Koz Farina, maker of blogHUD (a Heads-Up-Display thingy that allows you to post to the blogHUD website), as I was wandering around the RSS/Podcast area. We talked about blogHUD, how it works, how it can be updated automatically, and the future, for example, posting to any blogging system. I can simply post to the blog by typing /9 and the text i want to write about. The posts come tagged with the location of where you blogged about. You can see my feed to the right here –>. The feed has the location embedded in as a SLurl, which could be scraped out, and mapped, but he may include a global geo coords in the feed, which could be good.
One option would be, who else has blogged about this area, within the last week?

Anyhow, my thoughts were that the Search button on the Second Life client suffered from spam. Personally, I cant stand land sales, slingo or casinos – how can I find what I like? Whats needed is some kind of rating, moderation, handpicks if you will. Perhaps a way to say, “this is a great place for exploring at night”, bookmarking in a way. Comments on my selection by other users, an aggregated, top picks from all the users. Perhaps using digg style voting, or a “who else likes the kind of things I like”, using tags to explore…

What I’m increasingly being made aware is a) The power of the Second Life scripting language, and b) the under-use of it and c) Theres now another thing that I will have to spend some time with

Mobile Phone, J2me, Bluetooth GPS & Openstreetmap #1

July 15, 2006 at 6:11 pm | In Mapping, gps, j2me, openstreetmap | 17 Comments

Openstreetmap (OSM) is a great project – real “grassroots remapping” of the world, created mainly in response to the restrictive pricing and licencing of mapping companies, such as the Ordnance Survey. People go around with GPS units and basically walk, cycle and drive around, recording where they go, they then upload these tracks to the OSM website and edit them into the map. Here’s a great step by step guide to the whole process.

There are a number of options for capturing GPS tracks. I’m using a GlobalSat BT-308 which is a blue-tooth receiver – it doesn’t store anything on it. Using VisualGPS running on my windows laptop, I can store and record tracks, but lugging that heavy laptop around turns a nice stroll into an arduous hike! So i needed to use my phone.

I’m using a Nokia 6230i, and have looked at two programs so far… (watch this space for more info, as I find more, or get exasperated and do the coding myself!)

1. Spot: from Skylab Mobile Systems.
I tried the demo version of this j2me product – the demo version only runs for 5 mins.
It connected successfully with the GPS unit, displayed nice satellite positions, and location information. However it crashed, and made the whole phone crash and reboot when I tried to save the waypoints (.gpx) to the phones memory card. Sent them an email, will see whats going wrong.

2. GETrack:This looked more like it. The demo version recorded 50 waypoints. Every 5 seconds it tried to record a waypoint from the gps unit, the full version is 2000 units. I went for a walk to the shops and back, and saved a couple of runs. However, there’s no way to save the file to the phones memory, just the option to send via Bluetooth. Sending via bluetooth to the laptop wouldn’t work. nothing happened. An email will be sent (after ive read the manual again!)

EDITS:16 july: got it working, read the manual! Had to set up bluetooth on laptop and mobile to get it to work. Heres a sample, in kml format taken walking around in Headingley, Leeds, UK, and below is image of combined tracks
3+ I’m going to try GPSWatch, and read OSM Mobile

getracks.jpg

anxiety maps

July 13, 2006 at 11:26 pm | In Mapping, gis, psychogeography | 4 Comments

So in #geo, the talk went nicely off topic and discussing about favourite films, and then onto favourite apocalyptic films, and what with the increasing tensions and conflict between Israel and Lebanon, Korea etc, there seems to be an increasing fear of nuclear end of the world. I grew up in the 80s with many others with acute nuclear-war anxiety, Threads , the Day After, When the Wind Blows, etc all led to us feeling very anxious. Since anxiety is not good for the health, and it is used as propaganda to influence peoples behaviour (i.e. you may die, buy this assurance) how can we fight back, restore the balance using maps and geographical information?

anxiety culture is a favourite site for a quick anti-anxiety fix.

How about simply showing how peoples fear, get it out in the open, or how different places, peoples, ages, cultures have different responses? <roger> chippy: can you index your anxiety map by specific anxiety and date? – great idea.

Ive done some work capturing these fuzzy kinds of data with tagger and I know there’s the British Crime Survey results around that can show which areas have more “fear” of crime. More research would be needed to find some more data.

Another idea would be to compare time series with scraped “events” from BBC/google news to see if there’s some correlation. Edits: or maybe by scraping through some sections of the blogosphere, and seeing how they react from day to day, and place to place.

Obligatory First Post

July 13, 2006 at 12:01 pm | In gis | 4 Comments

As an first post, I thought I would leave the Real World, and delve into Second Life. Second Life is interesting as that the content, objects and things that happen are made by the players, or to be more exact, its “residents”. Its not really a game, although there is a lot of play that goes on. One of the things that interests me, as a total beginner, is that its quite hard to find things to do in it. Or rather, select the good things from the crud. What is also interesting is how we can interact between First Life (this one) and the Second Life. For example, theres a way to blog quick messages from SL that gets posted, currently to one site, http://www.bloghud.com/. This uses something that i’m interested in – its mapping API http://secondlife.com/developers/mapapi/ which i will be exploring soon, possibly using the ning platform. There are other websites, such as snapzilla which allows you to post your screenshot directly from Second Life to the website.

Other news: I will shortly be leaving my current position for local government to a) spend more time on various projects / hacking and b) travelling and if this blog kicks off c) blogging. My first travels take me to the FOSS4G2006 conference in Lausanne. Should be interesting.

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