This may be one of those situations where my love of a good story gets me in trouble with the more hard-minded scientific types among you, so please understand first that this is intended mostly in fun. Nonetheless, there are some intriguing facts here.
If you own an older Android phone and were curious about Google Maps Navigation, but were afraid to ask, here’s instructions to get it running.
Want to fly your plane or drive your car using GPS signals, but finding that your receiver just isn’t accurate enough to make things work? Well, MAKE subscriber Bruce Mueller writes in to point us at an impressive solution: an open-source real time kinematic GPS receiver.
Interesting article in the Telegraph about “Argleton,” a town that appears in Google maps but does not, apparently, exist in the real world. The best theory I’ve heard is that the town is a “trap” intended to catch those who steal map data. [Thanks, Glen!]
The first presenter at last Thursday’s Dorkbot Austin was a gentleman named Mikal Hart, who described his “Reverse Geocaching Puzzle.” Designed and built as a wedding gift for an old friend moving to France, the box incorporates an Arduino with a custom shield. A prominent button on the lid, when pressed, returns a distance, in kilometers, on the LCD display (if a GPS signal can be acquired), and counts button-presses up to 50 atttempts. No directional information is provided, so the box must be moved about in order to triangulate the location it wants. Mikal also included a cunningly-disguised back door to allow it to be opened in the event of battery failures or bugs.
Cool post over on Hack-A-Day about corn maze entrepreneur Scott Skelly, shown above with his trusty GPS-enabled riding lawn mower. Scott explains his maize-maze-making process thusly:
A maze starts as nothing more than a large field of corn. The design is created using a computer, then translated into GPS coordinates by fitting it into a field whose outline coordinates were previously captured on foot. Once the field coordinates are reconciled with the map design the data is used in one of two ways; the routes can be made by tilling under a path when the corn is very young, or more commonly it is cut lawn-mower-style when the corn is anywhere from knee-high to full grown. This corn-meets-satellite hack makes for a whole lot of fun!
As part of a course at the United States Military Academy at West Point, maker Roy D. Ragsdale developed a prototype Street View-like camera array using a laptop, $300 in off-the-shelf components, and open source software.
