kottke.org posts about gps

Celebrity GPS voicesAug 28 2009

I had no idea you could get celebrity voices for your GPS navigation device. There's Mr. T ("what does he say if you need to go to the airport?"), Yoda, KITT from Knight Rider, Michael Caine, Kim Cattrall, the Star Trek computer voice, Homer Simpson, Gary Busey, and Dennis Hopper.

And then of course you've got the mashups like Mr. T navigates Mr. Bean, Mr. T navigates Frogger, and Mr. T navigating in Mario Kart Wii.

You may even be able to get a Bob Dylan voice soon.

iTrailOct 29 2008

When we were up in Vermont earlier this month, we rode the single chair to the top of the mountain at Mad River Glen and then hiked down. Before we left, we installed iTrail on Meg's phone. iTrail uses the iPhone's GPS capability to track your progress along a trail, jogging path, etc. The reviews at the iTunes Store aren't glowing but we found that it worked pretty well for us. Here are a couple of graphs generated by iTrail of our hike:

iTrail Graphs

iTrail also allows data export to a Google Docs speadsheet. From there, you can import that data into Google Maps, like so:

iTrail Google Maps

It's not perfect (we weren't doing 8.2 mph at the beginning of the hike) and GPS mapping apps are hardly new, but I've never done this before and it feels like living in the future.

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