Slashdot Mirror
GPS Drawings
With all the less then happy things happening, I thought I'd share a link sent in by
mustafap. The site is
GPS Drawing, and the idea is to record your path driving around with a GPS signal, and then graph the results to draw pictures. It's fun seeing the routes superimposed on maps. Simple and fun. I hope you enjoy it too.
Can we use this against taxi drivers, the next morning when we sober up and realize that fastest route from the bar to our house was not the 45 mile route the driver took...???
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
I'll probably get modded off-topic for this comment, but...
that Shockwave game sucked. Really.
So how long until one of the slashdot trolls starts posting a GPS drawing of that goatse guy?
This really has to be one of the most completely pointless things I have ever seen in my entire life.
I'm sure someone will use this to figure out weird coincidences and conspiracies. Messages written out in paths taken and such.
The Stone Age did not end for lack of stones, and when the oil age ends it will not be for lack of oil. --Bjorn Lomberg
Hey, this is obviously stolen from my senior project back in 92'-93. I'll have to file for a patent violation!!
I'm rich! I'm rich!!!!
- Necron69
this is absolutely fascinating...
Kinda reminds me of those Family Circus comics in the paper on sundays.
Kind of interesting to see where people have been...would be fun to wake up and start the GPS and then at the end of the night see where you have been all day by graphing it onto a local map. Do this for weeks. At the end of all the time, use the (x,y) cords and divide the city into 4 quadants and start to make equations of where you have been....try and see where you are most likely to be..... see what times you are most likely to be where, etc...Could be some good math to do..useless? sure, but fun if yer a geek like me:)
"Allez Cusine!"
How long before somebody realises that their route to work is some fantastic work of art? And how long before they try and copyright the route?
No, I don't want a free iPod
I'd find it more interesting just to see where I have driven over the past twelve months.
Alternatively, I'd like to see what cell phone cells I drive through. That'd be neat, and perhaps more nerdly than the purpose-built paths of the site.
Anyone do that yet? I'm sure we'd all like to see that versus a distorted elephant picture made by some guy driving his car around a city.
Drive or walk your message, while transmitting your location. Glyphs could stand for entire blocks of meaning. Encrypt the message into glyphs, then walk them while transmitting encrypted GPS data. The data would then be smoothed (in space and time domains? What about traffic jams?) in order to recover the glyphs. Encrypted sign language in the large.
But most of all, it reminds me of the alphabet-walking man in Paul Auster's City of Glass.
-dwd-
kidda reminds me of road rallying, basically you meet with bunch of people driving in the middle of nowhere with no real purposes AND wasting gas at the same time. talk about productivity
kawai
I've always wondered where I am when flying over the US... never really thought about taking a laptop and GPS aboard to chart progress.
... you could even plug the data into Flight Gear in real time so you could look at your computer screen instead of looking out the window (of couse using the cool A href="satellite photo textures:)
Attention, mysterious crop-circle makers: next time you liquor up and head out to Billy Bob's farm for a fun night of, uh, cornstalking, don't forget your GPS! Would be interesting to see the GPS track left behind from a crop-circle creation.
One thing that kind of irked me about the site, "data alteration" is used in part to make most of the images. I think I'd rather see the raw unaltered images. What's the point of doing the whole GPS position tracking thing if you're just going to alter the data to make it look "right?" Seems equivalent to sketching a landscape, only to take a photo afterwards and toss the sketch into the trash.
Shaun
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
I think it would be really cool to do this with the GPD-guided missiles that we're using against the Taliban (note I said Taliban and *not* Muslims). I would love to see their path from whatever launched them, avoiding enemy SAMs, hills/mountians, until the reached their target. That would be pretty neat I think.
mod this guy OUTTA here.. Slashdot is not the spot for spam, go post on some newsgroup for lunatics.
Jesse Wolfe Sr. Manager Systems Integration
No doubt.
Shouldn't it be rm -rf /bin/ladden? This way you wuold erase his subordinates also. :-)
[]'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins
^[:wq
Dude, what's wrong with free speech? The particular tract bewing linked to isn't that extreme or lunatic. It merely makes the point that Islam grew out of Arabic tribal religions.
Let me get this straight... you want to hand your girl-friend 3D graphical evidence that you weren't working late, that you've actually been drinking with your buddies at the bar again?
All I can say is: Bad, bad plan.
"They do not preach that their god will rouse them, a little before the Nuts work loose." Kipling, 'The Sons of Martha'
I s'pose it would be impolite to point out that this is nothing particularly new. Matter of fact, we hams have had something like this for years, but a little more fun: APRS, or Automatic Packet Reporting System. Basically, the GPS receiver is connected to a TNC (packet radio modem), and broadcasts its position at a time interval specified by the user. Now I can see where you are going. Couple the reception of the GPS data with mapping software, and you get this. Very entertaining to see where your buddy is going ("No, no, I said turn left on Brooks!"), and very useful at times--throw the rig in your trunk before you give the keys to your kid. QST did an article about this a few years ago; if I weren't so lazy, I might go look it up. Feel free to post it, anybody, if you find it.
"Make it ten--I am only a poor corrupt official."
--Captain Louis Renault (Claude Rains), Casablanca
Are GPS receivers small enough to fit on a cat's collar?
I'd pay $ for a collar that would keep track of where my cat goes during the day when I let him out. Every day, or week, or whenever, I could download info from the collar and graph his wanderings against a map of my neighborhood.
Come on, engineers, whaddya say?
Kudos to the first person to drive around their country to spell First Post with their GPS system.
Other allowed GPS path contest entries would include: Beowulf, Natelie Portman and JohnKatz Sucks.
Karma: Marginal (mostly due to the border around the website)
Writing out some decryption algorithms?
Let's see if the DMCA will ban GPS
mick
i just happened to have some anaglyph viewers sittin on top of my monitor.some of those drawings had adjustable red/blue stereonoise.
SERENDIPITY!
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
It like an extremely large scale etch-a-sketch, although some of the drawings are not continuous.
Nevertheless, this is certainly nifty. I especially like the airborn ones. Someone could really exploit the 3d nature of this in the sky.
I can see this becoming another type of performance art: watch the gps path on a screen as this guy doodles something in the lake with his boat. A few people working together could come up with some especially spectacular results...
-toral
Has anyone ever tried this on a cat or something?
I always wondered just what they are up to when I see a cat, whos owner lives a block or two from my house, walk by my front door....
-Justin
Not offtopic but it is redundant.
If your cat wanders into my yard, its dead. It wouldn't be the first, either.
how about a gps device that records your best time from point to point? Work to home, school etc. maybe send that info to the guy in the next car and see if he can beat your best time :)
"You people disgust me!"
Good - then I've been productive today as well.
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
I thought my girlfriend said she was going to the movies. There's no cinema there.
:wq
"Slashdot is not the spot for spam"
ROFLMAO! Someone mod this post up as funny!
I had an IBM thinkpad laptop (dual-boot Windows 95/Mandrake 6.1, although once I had linux installed I never booted up that 'other' OS :-) ), connected to my GPS (Garmin II+). I ran a VERY simple bash script that just pinged the GPS every minute and grabbed the latitude/longitude/altitude. I stored these points in a data-file, and then rendered some pretty cool maps (Mercator and Perspective Satellite Projections) when I got back from the trip. I rendered the projections on IDL, with some superimposed (and conformally mapped) satellite pictures of Earth for the terrain.
Trip started and ended in NJ, but went through about 40 states in-between, coast-to-coast. Even drove through parts of Mexico and Canada. Put about 15,000 miles on my car in 8 weeks. It was pretty cool, I was totally connected, with laptop and GPS and CB, driving from point to point. Got kind of annoying to keep doing it all the time, though (especially for parts of the trip that friends went with me), but it was definitely worth it!
The online journal isn't caught up, and is kind of wordy at times, but let me know what y'alls think. When I get some free time (yeah right) I'll add some more pictures, shorten all the blah-blah text, and maybe also add a pictures-only tour. Let me know how you guys like the maps, though. I wanted to eventually render them in Python to only use open-source software, but never got around to fully learning Python. Had to settle on IDL instead.
make world, not war
I wrote a program that can do this kind of things. It's actually for glider's pilot. You can record your fly and do a post analysis. You can also bring a (very small) laptop with you and use it as a moving map. Sorry, it's only Windows but if someone is interested, I can provide the sources. http://gschneid.free.fr (In French and English)
This is somehow related to one of my ermmm.. buffer overflows ;) so there.
This would have been ideal when I was wandering about the bridges of Koenigsberg.
do it riding a bike, and zoom in further...
(it seems like an aweful waste of gas for marginally better resolution)
OGG NOT LIKE. Ogg hit you over head with Open Source CD.
Draw with your wardriving GPS logs!
Hmmm - that last wardriving trip spelled out "look at all these AP's"
Many websites (restaurant guides, etc.) that use some kind of Geographical Info System display the Latitude and Longitude in the URL query string. Hacking that is fun, but I still have to come up with a clever use for it. Check out mapquest too, e.g.: http://www.mapquest.com/cgi-bin/ia_free?lat=501000 &lng=30000&level=6
Idempotent operation: Like MS software, wether you run it once or often, that doesn't make it any better.
Calculate:
(hrs wasted driving/year) * [(# of people who care) * (average value of hour per person)
+ (amount of wear and tear on road) + (amount of wear and tear on car) + (amount of wasted gas) + (cost of polution in air) + (money saved from less accidents)]
Using GPS systems when driving quickly add up some serious savings! Image if the Government paid 50% off all GPSes -- they'd quickly recoup their costs in terms of road/polution/life savings!
If that's not enough, would you sell your GPS coordinates and a detailed buying profile? Advertisers would be able to say -- "80% of people driving this road are interested in their MCSE certfification!", or "30% of people that go down this highway at 5 PM have children in the perfect X-Box purchasing range!", etc... Then, put some animated signs that change based on who's driving by.... we're talking serious advertising $$$!
You could use the same info for tracking speed limits & dangerous roads. I'm not talking tracking when people are speeding, but rather, track when people are speeding stupidly. Imagine if all speed limits in the world were variable, depending on the weather, the amount of accidents occuring in this area, the average age (or skill) of drivers on that road, etc. Wow. I currently live in Germany and drive 100MPH on average -- I hate going back to the states and driving 55. But, German drivers are much more skilled (5 months mandatory driver's training, no exceptions), and have on average much safer and more responsive cars...
Bottom line: Everyone should use GPS systems, and the government should be handing them out like candy. Get some intelligent privacy laws going, and It'd be an improvement for everyone!
-Hell hath no fury like that of a woman scorned for
Well, the Garmin eTrex are pretty small, and I recall a Seiko or something GPS watch...
We will, however, be giving away this unintrusive set of URLs, including a year's free hosting, to some unafraud netizen, whois willing to follow the simple directions.
We did acquire these (soon to be updated) face scans, of the REAL .commIEs, with our gnu devise.
fud IS dead. Viva La Revolucione
... The Taliban could use cartoons from "The Family Circus" to plan strikes?
"Who's responsible for this terroristic attack?"
"Not Me." "Ida Know."
Mod Karma -1: I sed bad wurds. If I cep my mouf shut, I wud be at riyses.
now i live in colorado -- if you did it here, you'd just come up with graph paper, as all the streets are laid out in grids.
perhaps you can see people and streets and houses as information, and urban plans as the cultural algorithms (different in each place) that organise them?
Your graph would consist of a single point which is where that cat sleeps all day every day!
Of course a business application of this sort of thing is like the project I used to work on for a major ag equipment company. GPS is put on a combine or tractor, along with other sensors, and then the location data is correlated with other data, like yield or moisture, which is collected every second. Nice maps can be drawn to give information about what's happening on a farmer's field. And it can help to make decisions about how or what to plant next year.
Does anyone else see this as a complete waste of fuel and clean air more than a waste of time? Go ahead and make a giant invisible Etch-A-Sketch drawing using gallons of gas and spewing noxious fumes into the atmoshpere, and then get all excited, like you just made some art. While some people ride a bike to work to save gas, these people are driving around just for the sake of driving around. Not to mention the safety concerns of running the equipment, and trying to follow a nonsensical route. Sheesh.
If you fall off a building, go real limp, because maybe you'll look like a dummy and people will be like hey, free dummy
Those 'car maps' you would make as a kid on long road trips. Get a peice of paper and put it up to the window, stick your pencil on it and just let all the bums and things move your hand around.
instant art in the car... maybe i'm the only one that did that...
GPS Drawing has to be the silliest thing going! Let's hope none of this stuff ends up in a gallery somewhere, it might actually become mainstream...
[looking for my GPS and interface cable. just in case.]
Fast machines, powerfull AI, impulsive invention,... All I lack is a good espresso machine!
I've been doing this sort of thing for a while now. I made a cable for my garmin etrex, and I use the gpstrans program to download the track data into into a file (in decimal degree format). After that, I use a simple perl script to convert the lines of data to just lattitude/longitude cooridinates, and then plot it using gnuplot. I then do the same thing with the waypoints. You can plot the track with dots and the waypoints with points, and get a nice map of where you've been, along with where your waypoints are located. I've kept a cumulative file of all my track data, and I've got a nice map of all my trips from the past year.
/\t/, $line;
/\t/, $line;
Here are the scripts:
Converting a track to x/y coordinates:
#!/usr/bin/perl
$filename = $ARGV[0];
open (F, $filename) or die "bad filename - ARGH!";
while ($line = ){
$line =~s/T.....................//g;
@coord = split
chomp $coord[1];
chomp $coord[0];
print "$coord[1] $coord[0]\n";
}
close(F);
Converting a waypoint file to x/y coordinates:
#!/usr/bin/perl
$filename = $ARGV[0];
open (F, $filename) or die "bad filename - ARGH!";
while ($line = ){
$line =~ s/.*00:00.//g;
@coord = split
chomp $coord[1];
chomp $coord[0];
print "$coord[1] $coord[0]\n";
}
close(F);
Possible...but moment-by-moment inaccuracy might make your cat seem far more active than he is. The distance from your front door to your back door might not seem like that much, but what if your cat were at the edge of the lawn and inaccuracies showed him darting all over the street? (More precisely, somewhere within a circle whose center darts all over the street, but which happens to contain that point on your lawn where he's napping or stalking a bird.) You couldn't be sure that was not what he was, in fact, doing...
Yes they are: you can buy a GPS receiver the size of a digital watch, and provided that you counterbalance it properly, so that it doesn't slip to the underside of his/her neck, then that is perfectly feasable. And if you do so, we would very much like the data. Please provide a photo of the cat and some information about him/her and the circumtances of his/her escapade. hugh@gpsdrawing.com