Category Archives: Uncategorized

APRS is go!

Automatic Packet Reporting System — APRS — is rather clever. It’s a way of reporting position, status or messages via the amateur radio 2m band. Data is relayed via digipeaters, and routed to/from the internet APRS-IS system to any user … Continue reading

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#mapfail

… or “トロント動物園“, as we locals purportedly call it. The This place has unverified edits legend is a bit of a giveaway. Looks like there’s been some messing about with Google Map Maker, which isn’t always the best tool for the … Continue reading

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Mac OS X killed my Garmin!

My GPSMAP 60CSx had started to become unreliable: crashing after startup, randomly locking up in mid route, and just generally being an aggravating piece of kit. I was really close to replacing it. The problem seemed to appear after I’d … Continue reading

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probably wouldn’t recommend the Blackberry Tour as a GPS logger

I walked a local footpath carrying my (mostly) trusty Garmin GPSMap 60Csx, and a Blackberry Tour running bbTracker. Both had had a good satellite fix for about 10 minutes beforehand, and both were logging trackpoints every second. The smooth turquoise … Continue reading

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fallout from last night’s OSM 6th birthday Mappy Hour in Toronto

It was fun – there were geo-aware cupcakes! It is very easy to lose days in the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection. Richard’s OpenStreetMap for the Beginner tutorials are actually really really good. In a moment of geek worlds colliding, … Continue reading

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My Neighbourhood, Canada Day 2010

I went for a bike ride on Canada Day. Click on a bicycle icon to see what I saw. I went for a bike ride on Canada Day. Click on a bicycle icon to see what I saw. [osm_map lat="43.729" … Continue reading

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Taking geotagged pictures with your Blackberry

Note: I’ve had reports that some carriers seem to disable GPS service within their service area. I’ve certainly seen slight differences as to how this works on different carriers. Most recent camera-equipped Blackberrys have a GPS built in. One of … Continue reading

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current tools of my trade

Mark asked: What kind of GIS software are you using? Well, since you asked:- SpatiaLite: spatial awesome built on SQLite. I love it because I don’t need to play DBA. QGIS: for maps ogr: for file format futzing proj: for … Continue reading

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Japanese Map Symbol for a windmill

I’m rather taken with the symbol that Japanese maps use for wind mills and wind turbines. I’ll try to modify it for use in QGis. Update: so how does this look? I cleaned up the blade angles, added line end-caps, … Continue reading

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