I’ve just knocked up a little geouri helper for Safari that launches geouris in Google Earth. You can download it here. You may need to use the More Internet preference pane to associate the geo: URI scheme with the GeoHelper application.
It’s rough and ready and writing it reminded me just what a comprehensively awful language Applescript is. Let me know if you improve it.
If you get it working here’s where I live.
A couple of years ago I floated the idea of a geo: URI scheme. You give each physical location on the planet an address and then leave it up to individual users to define what happens when they click on a geo: URI. One person might have their browser configured to open Google Earth at the appropriate spot while someone else might prefer to use whatever mapping is available from Open Streetmap.
True to form I didn’t do much with the idea but Alex Mayrhofer and Christian Spanring (who I’m certain came up with the idea absolutely independently) have written a draft specification for a geo: URI scheme and implemented a FireFox extension to handle geouris.
My original proposal involved a packed representation of latitude and longitude. My thinking was that if you could encode, say, someone’s home address as a reasonably short string then people might have a reasonable chance of remembering it. On reflection though Alex and Christian’s daring use of conventional latitude and longitude makes much more sense…
Here’s the current situation - just in case it isn’t entirely clear from the item below. Windows Live Local currently has an issue for some people who are using Firefox on Linux. Steve Lombardi and Stephen Stchur of Microsoft confirm that this combination is absolutely supposed to work (it’s something they’ve put considerable effort into) and believe that there may be a problem with their browser sniffing code. They’re aiming to get a fix in the next release of Live Local - in around a week.
In the meantime you can work around the problem by
Thanks to Steve and Stephen for getting on the case so promptly and to everyone who reported results.
Where’s Windows Live Local gone? It used to be at local.live.com but now all I get is a search interface that seems to lead to maps but no aerial photos. Strangely I can still see the aerial photos (which for my area are much better than Google’s) via flashearth.com but all the links to Windows Live Local now redirect to intl.local.live.com - “Live Local Search”.
Update: It’s back. Maybe somebody pulled the wrong plug :)
Update 22/09/2006: It’s still not working on Linux (tested with Firefox 1.5.0.5). Working fine on Mac Firefox. Can we have a show of hands from people who’ve previously been able to get it working on Linux?
Update: This item (dated Sept 12) on http://virtualearth.spaces.live.com states that it does work on Firefox Linux (my emphasis):
You have control over line thickness, fill color, line color and line pattern. You can draw multi-segment lines or complex closed shapes. While its not exactly Adobe Illustrator, it is quite an impressive set of basic drawing and editing tools all implemented in Dynamic HTML; No plugins required, and it works very well in Firefox 1.5 (Windows, Mac, Linux), IE6, and IE7. Here’s a Collection I am working on of the major neighborhood boundaries in Manhattan.
Update 24/09/2006: Steve Lombardi from the Windows Live / Virtual Earth team (that’s his blog linked above) tells me that this is definitely not intended behaviour and is now investigating - thanks Steve.
I’ll post more information as soon as I have it.
Stephen Stchur writes (hoisted from the comments):
This is definitely a browser sniffing problem. VE is absolutely designed to work with Firefox (on all of Windows, Mac, and Linux).
Download the Firefox extension (User Agent Switcher). Then switch the User Agent to be IE 6 for Windows. Then try browing to local.live.com. It will work.
A crappy solution, but at least it’s something until this gets fixed.
I’ve just tried that and it seems to work fine.
Update 25/09/2006: Spoke too soon - faking IE 6 prevents the redirect - but the map doesn’t actually load. I was having connectivity problems when I tried it and assumed that’s why the map hadn’t loaded - but Stephen confirms the same problem.
What does seem to work is faking Firefox on XP. That’s not one of the default User Agent Switcher options - but if you download uas-ffxp.xml and import it to User Agent Switcher you should get a Firefox/Windows XP option that will work with local.live.com.
Steve and Stephen hope to have a proper fix in the next release and asked me to pass on thanks to everyone who submitted reports.
I’ve just learnt (thanks Klaus) that the industrious folks at Wintec have released another firmware upgrade for the WBT 100 and WBT 200. It seems that they’ve taken the opportunity to change the data format - so I’m going to have to update gpsbabel again. I’m guessing that eventually they’ll run out of things to add :)
As I write gpsbabel does not support the new format - so don’t upgrade your firmware just yet. I’m working on a fix and will post as soon as I have one.
Update: Or maybe not… The data format doesn’t seem to have changed - but gpsbabel does now sometimes timeout while the device is erasing its flash memory. I’ve changed the timeout and that change should make it into gpsbabel sometime soon.
If you’re using your GPS and one of the applications that geotags photos based on a GPS track log you’ll have realised that it’s crucial to have the camera’s clock set correctly - otherwise the image locations will be shifted. If you’re lucky the software you’re using will allow you to specify the time difference between the camera’s clock and real (GPS) time. Here’s a tip for working out exactly what the camera’s time error is.
Find an accurate clock - the one in your GPS is good - or use your computer clock if it’s set to internet time. Now set the clock to display hours, minutes and seconds and take a picture of it with the camera. You’ll end up with something like this:
So now you have the time the camera thinks it was (in the image metadata) and the time the rest of the world thinks it was (in the picture). Subtract camera time from real time and feed the result into your geotagging software. In this case the camera thought it was 22:19:46 and the real world thought it was 23:19:27 so the error is 1 hour minus 19 seconds - or 3581 seconds.
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.
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