I, like many others, have wanted the ubiquitousness of digital books in the same way that the iPod ‘revolutionized’ the music industry and made it easy and common to carry your entire audio collection in your pocket. Digital books aren’t new, I’ve read entire series of books on my old iPaq using Microsoft’s Digital Library and really enjoyed the experience.

It seems rather humorous that Amazon named a “book replacement” after something you burn. Are they implying a Fahrenheit 451 future? To its credit, Amazon used Neal Stephenson’s “Diamond Age” in the initial screenshots of Kindle – implying a utopic vision of digital literature access.

Another funny comment was the beginning of Amazon press release:

“Why are books the last bastion of analog?” Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos asked an audience at New York’s W Hotel in Union Square as he unveiled Amazon Kindle, the online-retail giant’s new electronic book reader.

Probably because so far, book publishers have felt justified charging full, hardback pricing for what is an entirely ephemeral medium. Why should anyone want to pay $20 for a digital book? Apple was one of the first to identify, and more importantly strong-arm the labels, into the pricing sweet-point of $0.99 for a song. Cheap enough for consumers to find it a better value than scouring music sharing applications and services.

Books are priced at $9.99, still more expensive than a mass-market book, but perhaps an expected pricing, commensurate with the price of an audio Album. Newspapers are about $9.99 / month, and magazines a reasonable $1.99 / month. However the licensing isn’t clear (can I resell my digital books when I’ve finished them?) iTunes tracks aren’t, so I would assume books aren’t either.

The demo video says Kindle has access to “hundreds of blogs”. Aren’t there actually millions of blogs? Assumedly they are only providing access to a select number of blogs with quality content. Also surprising is that you have to pay a monthly fee of approximately $1.99 each (some more, some less) to access these blogs. Are they sharing that revenue back to the blog owners?

It does have built-in access to Wikipedia. But will I be able to add access to my own portals, perhaps via an API? You can send PRC, Mobi, Word or Text documents, but what about PDF’s? Also, there is a small fee, 10¢, for “converting” these documents.

A couple of really additional good looking things about the Kindle. The screen refresh looks quicker than the first generation Sony eReader. The wireless EV-DO access if free, assumedly covered as a percentage of your purchases, but you don’t have to directly pay for it.

Overall, Amazon’s Kindle does look rather compelling. Wireless access is especially powerful for accessing online information and easily downloading information from wherever you are. Perhaps a death-toll to Airport book stores? The price of books is probably reasonable and cheaper than the physical version.

Surprisingly, Amazon didn’t play up the environmental benefits of buying digital books instead of large amounts of paper and glossy magazines or newspapers. This could have a huge impact on consumer paper usage and waste and should probably get some more attention. Of course, it does mean “yet another device” to add to your bag.

This is nice in a couple of ways. First, MaemoMapper, and the underlying Maemo, are open-source applications. So it’s nice to use open geodata. Second, using and caching Googlemap/Yahoo/et al. tiles is probably a violation of their Terms of Service, especially when you use them for realtime navigation. By using OpenStreetMap as the default mapping tile provider, MaemoMapper now provides a base functionality that is free for stringy ToS that could get it into trouble and question its existence.

Tags: nokia, n800, maemomapper, openstreetmap, osm, henribergius, geo, mapping, maps, opensource

What this means is that hardware devices will be able to use a single solution to get both GPS Satellite positioning as well as WiFi positioning, essentially providing both a clear sky and urban-canyon/indoor positioning solution.

Therefore, these devices will be able to rely on positioning regardless of the visibility of the user to the sky – and provide LBS with a higher reliability.

There’s no word on when the first devices (looks like an iRiver media player) will roll out – or what their interface to applications will look like (single “what is my location?” queries?), but whatever it is, it will no doubt be very exciting.

Tags: sirf, gps, wifi, loki, skyhook, iriver, geo, positioning, geolocation

What is most interesting (to me) is the built-in support for GPS and location devices in the N800 OS, Maemo. Maemo is based on Debian Linux, and the GPS support is done by building in gpsd, the location-daemon. gpsd provides a common interface for location-based applications to access to the GPS information via the low-level service. Therefore, when you connect your Bluetooth GPS device to the N800, gpsd provides the location to any and all apps that may request it, like MaemoMapper or MaemoBlog to publish to geographic blogs via GeoRSS XML-RPC.

There is detailed information available from Maemo.org, HowTo use GPS framework in OS2007.

I would argue that it would have been better to just include a GPS chip in the device itself. Currently an external device is required to be purchased and connected to use the location information – not something a typical user would do whenever they are traveler or quickly use the device out and about.

A better possibility would be to incorporate WiFi geolocation, such as Skyhook’s Loki, to provide location information over gpsd by the visibility of WiFi access-points. This would work much better in urban areas anyways where WiFi could be more visible than GPS signals.

I’m looking forward to hopefully getting my hands on one and see about geolocating the N800 camera images and WiFi/GPS/Cell tracking.

Tags: nokia770, nokia800, maemo, maemomapper, geo, gps, gpsd

Maemo Mapper is a Maemo-specific mapping program that replaced GPSDrive after it kind of sputtered out on being ported to the Nokia 770 platform.

Installing & Setting up

Obviously, you’ll first need a Nokia 770 to start. I would also recommend getting a larger MMC card (1GB or 2GB) to store the cached maps and GPX files. A GPS unit is optional.

It is possible to grab map tiles as you move. This is a good option if you will have a broadband connection, either before hand to “pre-walk” your trip and download tiles, or a mobile data connection. More than likely though, you won’t have a data connection everywhere, and it would really be unfortunate to be missing maps just as you get to an area without data – I would assume that will be just when you need the map.

There is a very nice program called WinMapper that you can use to download specified areas and store the tiles in proper cache directory that Maemo Mapper can use. One thing to be aware of, for zoom levels of 0,2,4 (street-level) there will be thousands of files for relatively small areas, which will take quite a long time to transfer to the memory card. It’s probably useful to grab levels 10,8,6 of most of the area you’ll be traveling, and then 2,4 for very specific small regions.

Alternatively, Maemo Mapper now has the ability itself to download large regions of tiles. In “Manage Maps…” you can grab all the tiles for various zoom levels on the currently viewed region. This way you can download the tiles directly to your memory card cache.

Maemo Mapper is available via a repository, so open the “Tools” -> “Application Manager”, and add the following repository to your list:

Web location: http://repository.maemo.org/contrib/
Distribution: 2.0
Components: free

update your list, and then install Maemo Mapper.

After you open the app for the first time, bring up the menu, and choose “Maps” -> “Manage Repositories”. I created a “New” profile for GoogleMaps, and used the following URI:


http://mt.google.com/mt?n=404&v=w2.29&x=%d&y=%d&zoom=%d


You can also put the same URL in WinMapper. Select the extents that you want (use GoogleEarth, or Mapufacture), and the zoom levels (0 is zoomed in, 16 is world view) – 6, 8, 10 is probably a good start. Select “Region” and “Street” and press “Download”. It will take awhile, depending on the area you are downloading, so let it go on its way.

If you want satellite imagery, the URL string is:

http://kh.google.com/kh?n=404&v=10&t=%s


It’s useful to make at least 2 caches, one for street and one for satellite imagery. You can then navigate and zoom on the street view – then switch to the satellite imagery at the same location.

Also, Niko Kotilainen has instructions and a python server for making a Hybrid Map service. It would also be great to cache OpenStreetMap tiles for that extra-special open-goodness taste.

My POI

Maemo Mapper stores all of it’s data in GPX format, so you can save tracks for easy output and storage. Also, you can load sets of waypoints on your own for various POI.

Alas fair Pacific

Maemo Mapper doesn’t want to cross the International Dateline. This makes it annoying for getting down to New Zealand since you have to push up against the side of the Dateline, zoom, pan back over, zoom, and keep doing this. A small usability shortcoming that isn’t apparent until you’re in NZ, or trying to cross the Bering Straight.

Resources

For more information on Maemo Mapper add-ons and utilities check out the
Maemo-mapper related stuff on Internet Tablet Talk

Tags: nokia770, maemo, maemomapper, winmapper, geo, mapping, gps, maps

It has includes examples and links to using Ruby with:

• NabazTag
• Symbian Mobile Phones
• Nokia 770
• Roomba vacuum cleaners
• Apple Remotes (the kind you get with your MacBook/MacMini)
• SlimDevices SqueezeBox and SlimServer
• Lego Mindstorms NXT

There are definitely more devices out there that can or should work with Ruby. Given ruby-serialport it’s possible to control just about anything.

Tags: ruby, programming, roomba, nabaztag, symbian, nokia770, apple, squeezebox, slimserver, slimdevices, brigade, rubymi, rubybrigade

There are all kinds of really neat things you can do with such a simple tracking device for pedometry (relative distance when GPS/cell geolocation falls out), location (you are at any number of places a sensor station is setup), tracking devices in races (they use expensive/proprietary tracking devices now), and so on.

But leave it to the media to do a hype piece and scare tactic on the cool technology. Here is a CNN video on the “bad things” you can do with it.

While the information and knowledge is good, they could have done better in talking about how useful it is, the potentially good and interesting things you can do with it, but also be aware of…

Tags: geo, neogeography, mapping, geolocation, gps, nike, ipod, sportkit, apple, cnn,

The research is sponsored by Microsoft and the Ordinance Survey, obviously both very large organizations that want to find commercial uses for their data/services.

Like the Come Out & Play festival, geolocation games can become much more common as devices come with Geolocation technology built-in, whether it be by GPS, WiFi, Cell, or whatever.

Are geolocated games the cure for the modern sloth of gaming? The Nintendo Wii already has gamers bowling in their living rooms.

Now if you can create great platforms for people to easily develop their own games, say by making waypoint, boundaries, rules, targets, objectives. And possibly use Splines/Blogjects to leave as markers, treasure, icons, etc. that users would carry around, pass off, leave, find, etc. Just wrap a nice story around it: buried treasure, Trouble with Tribbles, Pac-Man, Hunt the Wumpus etc. Really, you could probably take any old-skool game and make it into a really great geolocation game.

Here is a full rundown of the features and there is a good good review at pycage.

I think it looks really interesting, especially the idea of not having to carry “yet another gadget”. It supports downloading traffic and weather info over a GPRS connection. But as Pycage mentions, the prices is a little high – 200 Euro for just the Nav upgrade. And it’s also Europe only at the moment, not so useful in the US or when traveling to New Zealand.

Maemo Mapper by comparison is free, and hackable. It just doesn’t come preloaded with maps or quite as many features.

Tags: nokia770, nokia, navicore, gps, geo, navigation, mobile, gadgets, gadget

However, there is another drool-worthy phone coming out in January. On the same vein as the Nokia N770 tablet, which is very hackable, the OpenMoko phone is a fully hackable mobile phone. GPS, quad-band GSM/GPRS, SyncML, microSD cards, apt-get install, Linux, GTK goodness. Future versions are expected with WiFi and Bluetooth. via Koen’s Blog

Also check out the LinuxDevices article which sports images including mapping applications.

Tags: mobile, openmoko, linux, phone,

However, I don’t think it will take off in the general public. For one, when you flip a page the wait is “long”, 2-3 seconds, which is long for the average person when compared to flipping the page of a book, and more importantly the screen flashes black/white 2 or 3 times each page flip. I think early adopters like us may overlook that, most users will not.

Not to mention the price gouging on accessories. The Device itself is $350, then you have to pay $50 for the dock and $30 for a case – bringing it up to a possible $430 off the bat for the reader and cover.

The screen isn’t touch sensitive, which is a little annoying, but not a deal breaker. I’d really like to be able to highlight and mark actual text. I used to do this on an iPaq with the Microsoft reader, which was also very crisp, and legible for reading books. Afterwards I could export a text file of all the passages I had highlighted. But size, cost, usability perhaps wasn’t there for this first version of the eBook reader to have touch screen. You can mark a page, which makes a little ‘dog ear’ icon in the top-right corner of the page and then go back to view your marked pages from the book’s table of contents.

The buttons are a little weird, there are 2 sets of “page” buttons. And the menu button is odd, diagonal push below a directional joystick. The joystick doesn’t seem to serve that much purpose as most navigation is just up/down. There is also a row of number buttons below the screen, from 1 to 0 (yeah it’s “computery” as they did 1-9, then 0. Why not just make it 10?).

Also, the view should be rotatable, but again, not a huge deal.

You can upload images, which are viewable in a grayscale, kind of pixelated/newspapery look. None of the demo books of text had embedded images, so I wonder how that works out. I’ve seen demo videos that show reading a page of text and having an embedded video (hrm, YouTube on your portable ebook reader)

What I’d *really* like to see, from a geek perspective, is an SDK for developing my own text/software so I can, say, make a dynamic map

I like it, I may consider getting one, but will probably wait for v2.

Tags: sony, ebook, eink, gadgets,

Maemo Mapper is a free and open-source mapping application, designed from the ground-up for the Nokia 770. However, a large caveat is that it uses GoogleMaps in what is probably a violation of the terms of service (realtime navigation and downloading), not to mention annoying in that you have to “pre-drive” your route to cache the appropriate GoogleMap tiles.

GPSDrive now supports OpenStreetMap for downloading free maps.

I’ve gotten slightly involved in the new GeoClue project – an effort to provide an easy “location service” backend for devices. The location on the device may be served up by GPS, WiFi, GeoIP, Mobile Cell/GSM, or even just the user clicking on a map or entering an address. Then, an application can subscribe to the location service and get updated with the current location of the user/device and use it as appropriate.

At FOSS4G I attended a BOF (Birds of a Feather – people interested in the same stuff) on Mobile GIS. The software and technology all exist, it just needs some coordinated efforts to define the use cases, interfaces, and approaches. However, one solution won’t fit everyone. There are users who want to do “real GIS” in the field and there are users who want to do “neogeography” to say, find the nearest coffee shop on their mobile.

Tags: neogeography, mobile, gis, mobilegis, nokia770, geoclue, maemomapper, gpsdrive, openstreetmap, navicore, maps, geo

It is a full-featured GPRS/GSM phone:

• dual-core 312MHz XScale processor
• 64MB Ram, and a mini-SD flash slot
• 1.3 megapixel camera
• Bluetooth
• WiFi networking

Looking at the success Nokia has had with exposing various developer interfaces to their mobile phones and N770 tablet (Maemo), I think there is a huge market for an “openphone”. When I first heard of the O’Reilly Telephony Conference, I pictured people sitting around with their antiquated telephones, talking about switchboards and the like. I guess it’s a lot cooler scene than that.

Additionally, hopefully Open-hardware like mobile phones and tablets will kick the closed-minded carriers into realizing they’re slowly strangling themselves by keeping everything closed and begin to work with the huge, untapped, hobbyist and developer community.

Tags: mobile, phone, gsm, gprs, trolltech, qtopia, nokia, n770, maemo, pys60,

Technorati Tags: nokia770, gps, gpsd, maemo

Unfortunately, it’s not available until Fall 2006.

While traveling, I can imagine an incredibly useful technology, where you could rent small handheld GPS receivers & maps that were pre-loaded with sites & tours of a city. As you wonder the city, interesting historical facts pop-up, and routes to sites, hotels, restaurants, etc. show up as well. The device would be small and inexpensive. Perhaps rentable from a central location and as you traveled to different cities, you jacked it into a booth and it uploaded new information. Then when you return the unit, your actual travel logs are downloaded and emailed to you or burned on a CD. Then you would have a time history track of your travels and sites. You could even make your own bookmarks & notes of locations.

I think this is what Schmap (Dynamic travel guides) is, though I haven’t gotten to try out my demo cd that recently came in the mail. However, this still requires a full computer to use.

Off to see a bone church & then to Budapest.

Mesh networks are simple: everything is a sensor and can connect to other sensors. She referred to it as “Ad Hoc Wireless networking”, but I think that confuses the issue, because then people start thinking it just means WiFi everywhere.

What it really means is that all of these sensors and network devices can talk to one another, gather, share, and use information. For example, if every car was a member of the mesh network, they would all share traffic information, road conditions, and driver destination, perhaps. Then your in-dash display would update real-time traffic ahead of you as each of these cars shared their data. Also, you may be able to get internet down the line as you all shared a common network system.

Other examples that have popped up in the past include finding potential mates/friends around you by a profile you broadcast, or tracking birds with RFID.

Of course, now that you have all this data, how do you share it? Robin says she envisions all of this being built on open-source technologies, to allow for “innovation” (aka ‘good hacking’). Open standards like GeoRSS could also be used to begin disseminating all of this data as it streams in and share it between devices. See the notes on Mikel’s XTech talk for more inspiration along those lines.

If the devices are cheap (< $100), open-design, and run on open-software, this is a great future. If, however, it is run by proprietary, expensive technology, and closed standards, then you’ll have a future where you get fast connections in your Ford car from other Ford cars, but no connection to all those BMW’s or Toyotas on the road.

This article will give a short overview of how to use the BlueLogger for a variety of applications. I use it primarily for geolocating photographs, but it’s also nice for any location-based activity.

The Bluelogger comes with the following:

• Bluelogger device
• Carrying case (with belt loop)
• Car charger
• Wall charger
• Charging stand (can work with either car or wall charger)
• Bluelogger Windows software

Connecting to GPS

To connect to the Bluelogger, you will need a bluetooth adapter. Many computers now come with bluetooth built-in or as an add-on option. If this isn’t the case, I would recommend the D-Link DBT-120. It’s probably the only D-Link product I can recommend, but I’ve had great luck with them, and never run into any device that it hasn’t worked with (and I have had problems with other BT adapters, especially on my Mac).

Once you have a bluetooth adapter, you will need to setup a connection to the device by pairing them. See your devices’/operating systems’ manuals on how to do this.

A very slick option is to run gpsd, which is a service-daemon running in the background that allows multiple connections to the single GPS device. Normally, only 1 software instance can connect at a time. With GPSd, you can “serve” your location. What would be really cool is to have GPSd be able to connect in with Geolocation by IP or Wifi as well as an actual GPS device to seamlessly switch between location technique.

GPSUtility is a nice, compact, graphical GPS application for Mac OS X. It can connect either directly to the GPS bluetooth port, or via gpsd. You can view location, satellite strengths, verbose NMEA output, and speed.

KisMac, while not a GPS-specific applicaiton, has excellent GPS support. KisMac is actually a wireless stumbler, which can also mark the latitude, longitude, and strength of detected networks and plot these on a map.

Storing & Viewing tracks

The Bluelogger software (currently Windows only) can export the tracks as GPL files. GPSBabel can convert these to a more useful format, such as GPX, which an XML format for GPS data.

Since using the bluelogger usually entails turning it on and off often, the entire track log will contain many separate trips. GPSBabel supports splitting up tracks based on a time separation. Each segment will be a self-contained track.

The following example will convert a GPL file to a GPX file, and make a individual track for any separation of 4 hours between points.

$ gpsbabel
  -i gpl -f Track_2005_11_23.gpl
  -x track,pack,split=4h,title="LOG # %c"
  -o gpx -F Track_2005_11_23.gpx

Displaying tracks

There are several options for displaying your tracks:

GPX Tracks

GPXLoader

• GPX Tracks HTML file

GPS and Nokia 770

ThoughtFix has a fairly comprehensive tutorial on setting up GPSDrive with a Bluetooth GPS receiver. They went with the i-Blue High Sensitivity Bluetooth GPS, which looks like a nice unit, but lacks logging.

Resources

• NMEA Protocol fields
• GPS Running Log -> GoogleMap on website
• Geocode Photos
• RoboGeo Windows photo-geocoding
• OziPhotoTool

Of course, I haven’t quite figured out what to do with Ruby on the Nokia 770, but its just one of those “oh, cool” things that’s worth installing and marveling at how easy it is to get programming when you don’t have to worry about binaries, libraries, compiler options, et al.

Several months ago, iRobot, the manufacturers of Roomba, released OSMO Hacking Module for interfacing with the Roomba’s onboard serial port. Since then, there have been some very cool projects that have cropped up; everything from a long serial tether, a bluetooth interface, a programmable plugin module, or a full on-board computer with WiFi access.

I think I’ll go for that latter. AutomationWiki: Roomba Entry

Resources

• Roomba Hacking projects wiki
• Make: adding a serial interface
• Make: adding a bluetooth interface
• Adding a serial tether and control software
• Adding a GumStick computer with WiFi access
• Mind Control adapter – program at the computer and then plug into Roomba (sold out until April 17, 2006)