From the iTunes 6.0.5 release notes:

Note: After purchasing music from the iTunes Music Store with iTunes 6 or later, you also need to upgrade your other computers that purchase music from the iTunes Music Store to the latest version of iTunes.

Is it just me or does that imply that they’ve updated their DRM again? I can’t think of any other reason why newly purchased music would be incompatible with older versions of the software.

In any case it neatly highlights the extent to which music bought from the iTunes music store is locked to Apple’s proprietary software. You did realise if you want to keep playing the music you bought from them you can never buy an MP3 player other than an iPod, right? And if you decide to ditch Mac OS in favour of, say, Linux you’re shit out of luck too.

The Wintec WBT-200 is a cute GPS receiver in a tiny package that streams NMEA data over Bluetooth and USB. It can also log GPS data for subsequent download. I’ve been using it to capture tracklogs for upload to Open Streetmap and I’ve been hugely impressed by the fast startup time and accuracy of the logged data.

The supplied software is Windows only but with a little fiddling you can get it working with your Mac or Linux box. Here’s how.

2006/08/06 Update: There’s a new firmware version for the WBT-200 (R4) that changes the data format used by the device (thanks G. Francisco for the tip-off). I’ve just submitted a patch to support the new format to Robert Lipe (gpsbabel). It should make it into the gpsbabel CVS within the next few hours. If you need a binary built with this patch for Windows, Linux, FreeBSD or Mac OS let me know.

Flickr supports various useful feeds. Flickr supports geocoding (or geotagging in Flickr language). Flickr’s feeds do not however contain GeoRSS markup for geotagged photos.

It’d be sooooooo cool if someone at Flickr noticed and decided to implement GeoRSS. You can nearly work round it now - the feed contains all of an image’s tags as RSS categories. Unfortunately the geotagging tags have punctuation in them, most importantly the decimal point in the longitude and latitude, and Flickr strips punctuation out of the tags that appear in feeds.

I’ve got a load of geocoded images over at ShitShifter and I’ve been meaning to combine them with Google Earth for ages. Obviously it’s tempting to refer to it as a mashup but I’m not really sure it is.

Anyway you can see the results by downloading

http://hexten.net/maps/ss2.kmz

and double clicking on it (or adding it directly as a Network Link in Google Earth).

If you can’t see any images that may be because most of them are in the UK.