I see the occasional odd posting on boards asking about free GPS fleet tracking software; stumbled across this, and thought it worth posting about. OpenGTS, which stands for “Open GPS Tracking System”, allows web tracking on Google Maps for a fleet of vehicles. It’s written in Java, and uses MySQL, so it should run on any platform that supports those. Current version is available at the SourgeForce page for the project. The software is labeled “alpha”, and I have no way of trying it out, so you’re on your own on this one. If you do use it, please post your experiences in the comments section.
Archive for April, 2007 Page 2 of 7
As you might guess from the name, MicroDEM is a program that works with digital elevation models (DEMs), plots of elevation as a function of position, the same kind of data used by 3DEM. But MicroDEM contains far more features and capabilities than 3DEM, and includes other non-DEM related features as well. I like to think of MicroDEM as a “Swiss army knife”, since it contains so many interesting and useful tools. Even if you’re not into GIS, MicroDEM is worth looking at for its terrain visualization and analysis capabilities. I could post for month or two on just MicroDEM alone, and by the time I’m done, the posts will likely add up to at least a month’s worth. But to start, I will do a number of posts over the next week or so on just a little of what MicroDEM can do. Bear with me on the first few – I have to get through some of the basics of program installation and operation before I can get to the really cool stuff.
Continue reading ‘MicroDEM: A Swiss Army Knife Of Terrain And GIS Tools’
There’s a new service from the USGS that lets you download 1:24K, 1:100K and 1:250K topo maps for anywhere in the US in GeoPDF format. It has an easy-to-use interface based on Google Maps that makes finding your location, and downloading the desired maps in compressed zip format, straightforward.
Continue reading ‘Downloading USGS Topo Maps In GeoPDF Format, And The GeoPDF Plug-In’
Honest-to-God (almost) real-time satellite data from the EarthNow! viewer. The catches are that it’s low-resolution (250-meter) Landsat data streamed from the satellite to your computer screen, so you only see the area the satellite was above recently. And since the image data is constantly scrolling across the screen, the only way to save an image is to do a screen capture. Still, fun to watch (click on the image below for a larger view, showing part of Michigan):
Via AllPointsBlog.
Edited 4/25 to change the resolution from 30 meters (which is what processed Landsat band data is) to the correct number of 250 meters. Also, it’s not really “real-time”, but almost.
Modeling and calculating earth’s climate, with the many parameters involved (sun, atmosphere, land, water, snow/ice, etc.), used to be the exclusive domain of supercomputers, and still is for the most complicated models. But there’s a simplified computer climate model available for free for both Windows and Macintosh that lets you run climate models on a desktop PC, and allows you to investigate both past and future climatic scenarios.
Continue reading ‘Calculating And Mapping Climatic Change With EdGCM’
A nice tool that lets you create an embedded Google “My Maps” map, along with a KML file, on any web page.
Via Mapperz (which has an example) via Education/Technology (with another example).
I’ve been meaning to post about this site for a while, and it’s natural to do so after posting about GE-Path. The Geo Utilities website offers online tools that let you simplify KML files by reducing the number of points, create buffers (areas around a point, line or area of a specific size), calculate polygon areas, and determine the intersection location of two different layers.
Continue reading ‘Online Google Earth Utilities For Buffering And Area Calculations’
Frank over at Google Earth Blog was nice enough to link to my post last week about GE-Graph. In his post, he describes another great Google Earth utility from the same author that I was also planning to post on, and here it finally is.
Continue reading ‘Drawing Grids, Paths And Polygons In Google Earth Using GE-Path’
