B. Mann Consulting

Remember the DG-100-GPS? That cheap data logger that I've been really bad at finding the time to use consistently? Jaako left a comment letting me know that he got the DG-100 working on the Mac:

Hey Boris! Wanted to drop you a line and let you know that I managed to get a pretty decent solution to the DG-100 / Mac issue. The key lies in Mirko Parthey's dg100.c script he wrote as a basis for implementation into GPSBabel. I made some tweaks to his original code and added a GPX output mode and have a pretty reliable command line interface for the DG-100. Check it out ( + the relaunch of my blog ) at Blog-Shmog.com and let me know if you have any luck!

Good news! I've been in touch with Corey Leach of Expansys / Mobile Planet, and he's agreed to help out with both a bulk buy and with getting a loaner unit out to the Chief Babelhead for the open source GPS Babel project (thanks to Richard Akerman for making the post that prompted that connection). I've also had an update from the folks at LoadMyTracks, who have been contacted by the Globalsat manufacturer directly.

So, it's time to pony up some money and start geo-enabling yourself. The Globalsat DG100-GPS is the unit that I wrote about previously and it is currently listed at $100.95CDN.

If we get 5 - 9 buyers, the price will be discounted $5 USD per unit.

If we get 10+ buyers, the price will be discounted $10 USD per unit.

Corey Leach has suggested that the easiest way to make sure we get the discount applied is for everyone who is interested in purchasing to email him directly. We'll wait a couple of days to see if you get above 10 buyers, and then apply the discount and it will get shipped to everyone directly.

Note: this is open to *anyone* that wants to buy this unit -- the more the merrier. Just include a link to this blog post in your email and/or cc me on the email. What are you waiting for? email Corey to book your order.

Update: we are now at 7 people and only need 3 more to get the magical 10 person discount. We'll wait another couple of days, and then everyone can place their order, Corey will ask for your REF number, and the price will be reduced. Travis also pointed out to me a good thread on Vandigicam talking about geo logging.

Update 2: we are now at 10 people! Please go ahead and purchase the unit normally and email Corey your confirmation / ref number to receive the discount.

So, I went on my first GPS adventure after work tonight. I was talking to Roland about doing something for BarCamp Vancouver 2007, and he reminded me that Cyprien had a Bluetooth receiver to borrow. So, we swung by Cyprien's place and I was off to see if I could find the pieces to make this work. Thanks, Cyprien!

I specifically posted earlier about a simple GPS logging device instead of a Bluetooth receiver. Bluetooth receivers allow you to hook up a PDA or your laptop and do various "on the go" GPS activities, usually involving directions and maps. But, I'm looking for something dead simple that a) just works and b) doesn't mean fiddling with / charging / carrying a bunch of other devices.

Continuing with the geo theme, I've got a post brewing on what Google is doing and what this means for the growth of geo in general. I tried to get momentum for geo-related stuff for this past February's Northern Voice...but I think I was off by at least a year. Herewith some interesting links and examples of what you can now do with Google and maps.

For example, you can add your own business listing to local (and others can even review it, here's the entry for Bryght in Vancouver), and the Google My Maps now makes it really easy to create your own custom maps (e.g. here is my start of Drupal events around the world). My Maps even lets you add "mapplets" -- different layers that folks create -- here's the directory, I'm a fan of the Flickr Mapplet.

I've been looking for a central place that I can trust to "store" my geo-related information. While I still like 43 Places, it's certainly not going to be the only place I put geo-related data. Can I use Google to just act as a giant store for all my geo-related data, and pull it out, remix it, display it elsewhere as needed?

I've continued to think about GPS and geolocation, and thinking about how to, well, be more geo.

Update 2: you can now participate in a bulk buy of a Globalsat DG100-GPS from Expansys.

Some of this in context of Placeblogger, of course, more of it in imagining a future where even MORE photos and media are easily discoverable as being "local". In fact, Jeffrey Veen's Fixing the Web has a modest proposal to geo-enable *everything*:

I wish every device that was capable of talking to the network could send its geolocation. I'd like this to be fundamental—let's send longitude and latitude in the HTTP header of every request. Let's make it as ubiquitous and accessible as the time stamp, user agent, and referring URL.

So, it has to be easy, it has to be (almost) always on, and I need to be able to easily combine geo information with other media -- blog posts, photos, videos, etc. -- that get created along the way.

Enter GPS logging devices. "What is a GPS logger?", you ask. Well, it's a simple GPS receiver that does nothing more than log your location to local memory with a timestamp, which you can later pull off onto your computer as a GPS "track". It's small, it's battery powered, and you can keep it with you all the time. OK, OK, still too complicated.

1. Buy GPS logger
2. Turn on and clip to belt
3. Walk around taking pictures, video, blogging, etc.
4. Get back to your computer, download the GPS track and the media you've just taken
5. Run some software to merge your GPS location information with your pictures (e.g. GPS Photo Linker)
6. Voila! Thousands of your pictures on a map

Of course, this works for keeping track of hiking, biking, running, boating or anything else where you might want to see a map of a route you've taken after the fact.

After a little research on where to buy (I like Expansys and NCIX) and what to buy (this review of the Globalsat DG100-GPS and the Sony GPS-CS1 was immensely helpful -- some photos by the reviewer rakerman on Flickr are good to get a sense of size), I'm pretty sure that the Globalsat DG100-GPS is the unit for me. It charges over USB, has a longer battery life, and a bunch of different logging modes. It can even do "GPS mouse mode", where it can act as a GPS receiver for a laptop (e.g. various mapping software packages on your laptop showing real time location info for when you do have your laptop with you).

The only, only downside is that it really doesn't work all too well with the Mac. As in, it comes with a bunch of crazy Windows software and that's about it. Enter ClueTrust's LoadMyTracks, a Mac app for sending and receiving GPS data tracks to/from various devices. It doesn't *currently* support the Globalsat unit, but...

...here's where you come in: Want to pay around $100 CDN for a Globalsat DG100-GPS and start geologging your social media? Leave a comment below, and I'll continue talking to Expansys about getting a bulk order in (we'll need to buy 5 or more), including arranging to get a unit to the guys at ClueTrust. I've put emails in to both Expansys and ClueTrust, and the guys at ClueTrust have provisionally said that they should be able to make it work nicely on the Mac. And of course, if you're on Windows, feel free to just take advantage of a bulk order :P

Update: in the comments, Richard Akerman, the person whose review I enjoyed, did a round up of GPS logging and the Mac. Looks like we are on the right track to try and get more support in software...

Yes! We did it...or will do it. We're going to have another Northern Voice!

Update: did I mention it's going to be out at the UBC Forest Sciences Centre? Which is fantastic, according to these pictures from Cyprien.

Our "mandate" has always been to make a highly accessible event that would be of interest and educational for a wide range of people. For people who aren't necessarily techies and/or who haven't been exposed to some of the stuff we cover on personal blogging and other tech (who also tend to be local Vancouverites...can we get non-techies from other cities to come?), I like to think Northern Voice gives them a bit of a taste of what's new. Not necessarily new-bleeding-edge, but new-you-can-use-it-now.

Maybe techies are tired of Blogging 101, Wiki 101, and Photo Sharing 101. I know we can keep giving these sessions every single year. And you, the techie reading this post (hi, Mom!), should sit in and share your knowledge and perspective.

You know the phrase, "This isn't your mother's X?". Well, Northern Voice is your mother's conference. But the neat part, it's also for you techies. Cheap, fun, educational, mind-expanding.

Right now, the speaker submission page is open. One thing to note....write a good abstract, and take filling that speaker submission form out seriously. We got lots of entries from great folks who just didn't bother telling us what they would talk about, or make a case for why they should have a session (or un-session, as the case may be). Colin Brumelle (and yes, he works with me at Bryght), was the only abstract submission that was unanimously voted in on the first pass.

What kind of submissions do we want to see? Well, let me tell you what I would love to see... 

I sat down with Robert Scoble at Gnomedex, asking him what he would like to see at next year's Northern Voice (he mentioned it briefly talking about Kris' part in a MediaShift article). We talked about two things: Geolocation and virtual worlds.

Abstracting this a little, to me it means the intersection of the physical world with online. Blogging has always done this -- with people bring pieces of their offline lives online, or helping to make real life connections through communicating online.

I talked about our mandate -- appealing to a wide range of people. Geolocation and virtual worlds are still new. But, not too new that people can't start experimenting if someone gives them a few pointers. Flickr now has integrated geotagging, and Second Life continues to explode. Your barber is not unlikely to play World of Warcraft, and the Nokia N95 has GPS and photo sharing built in.

What are you waiting for? Go make a great speaker submission, and let everyone know to get their moose, like D'Arcy just did (first post -- nice work!).

P.S. What can we do as a fun live event? Scoble suggests a photowalk. I think we should do a photowalk plus geocaching plus geotagging plus constructing virtual worlds. Or something :P 

I have the great pleasure to announce Pretzel -- a Jabber server written in Python on the Twisted framework.

The two main authors are Ralph Meijer, well known as a long time member of the Jabber community, and Andy Smith, hacker extraordinaire.

For now, Andy checked in some experimental code hosted on Google's new code repository. Check it out at http://code.google.com/p/pretzel/. We're looking for other people to join in -- one of the reasons we started the project was because it seemed there were a lot of people looking for the same thing. It is available under the MIT license to make it potentially usable by the broadest number of people, as well as being under the same license as Twisted.

Please join us on the pretzel-dev list and we'll get the discussion going. 

What's on the roadmap? Well, this is a very early release -- more of a proof of concept. We hope to enable the quick and easy implementation of various JEPs, making it fun and simple to add all sorts of powerful features to the server and clients, truly showing how Jabber can go way beyond "just" instant messaging.

I'm in Stuttgart meeting with some clients. Lots of Drupal + Jabber integration talk, and luckily ralphm is here to bring along lots of Jabber expertise.

We've been talking a lot about geolocation notification over Jabber -- so users can indicate their location over Jabber. There are few (if any?) clients that support this today, so we'll probably support some short hand for testing purposes -- being able to type in geoloc:[lat],[lon].

So, I was looking at JEP-0080 (geoloc) and JEP-0112 (physloc). 112 is a plain text representation of physical location, and JEP 80 is the latitude / longitude. JEP 80 also has a plain text "description" field. So...why not collapse the two? physloc could replace the current JEP 80 "description" entry...every single entry is optional, so the text field in physloc can handle the current usage of the description field. It just seems wasteful to maintain two separate JEPs for what is essentially the same information.

As well, if a service already knows the physical location, it can send it along with the geoloc -- you can't derive the physical location from the geolocation, so in the current case, you would have to send two messages.