Free Geography Tools

I posted a while back about a small utility I wrote called KML Time Embedder, which lets you embed TimeSpan or TimeStamp data into a KML file for use in Google Earth time animations. That version only allowed year-month-day times, but I said that if enough people asked, I’d add the ability to stamp with hour-minute-second in addition to year-month-day. Thanks to popular demand (two people), I’ve modified the program to include that capability.

If you haven’t already read posts one and two on this utility, the following won’t make much sense.

In the upper-right, above the checkbox to enable timezones, is a new one to enable setting the time of day for each date:

Check that box, and setting the timezone is automatically enabled (and can’t be turned off). Set your local time zone relative to UTC (Greenwich Mean Time) using the dropdown at right.

With that box checked, timeset boxes will appear to the right of the date set inputs:

These will only become enabled for input after you’ve selected a day, and are set for 24-hour time (e.g. 2:17 PM is 14:17:00). As before, if you’re in TimeSpan mode and want it to run from the beginning time to the present, just leave the end of the timespan section blank. Click on Verify Dates to make sure they’re what you want. The program does check to see if the dates and times are valid, but I’m not 100% sure I’ve made that foolproof, so you should check them manually:

If they’re what you want, click on the “Embed Time Information” button, and the output file will be written with both date and hour of day information.

If you’ve already downloaded and installed the KML Time Embedder, you can just download this small executable file (about 20 KB) and unzip it into the program directory. For that matter, the executable by itself should work fine for most people. If it doesn’t, you can download the full install program (2 MB) which now contains the updated executable.

Other free utilities can be found on the Utilities page. If you find this or any of my other utilities particularly useful and would like to show your appreciation, donations of any amount are gratefully accepted via PayPal.