I posted a while back about Johnny Lee’s plans and software for converting a Wii Remote into a hand/motion tracker for various uses; seemed like a good match for some mapping applications. Touchless is another motion tracking system, this one using a webcam to track user-specified objects in the webcam view to modify objects on-screen.
Played with the software demo shown in the video above a bit (which includes manipulating a map image on-screen), and while it’s not perfect, it is kind of fun. It’s open source, and there’s an SDK available if you want to experiment with adding it to your own applications.
Don’t have access to Access (ha ha), but stumbled across this and thought some might find it useful: a VBA macro for Microsoft Access that exports a table/query with latitude and longitude to Google Earth’s KML format. The original code is here, and a page that offers explanations and augmentations to the original code can be found here.
Also tucked away in my bookmarks was this link to a Google Earth community post offering an XSL-based tool for exporting from Access to KML. The link to the downloadable file seems to be missing, but I snagged it at the time, and you can download it from this link.
As I said, haven’t tried any of these - use at your own risk/discretion.
Thanks to those who contributed last week to my fundraising drive to replace my dying laptop (and chief on-the-road blogging tool). The total is currently about 1/4 the cost of a cheap but reliable laptop. If you find this blog useful but haven’t donated yet, I’d really appreciate anything you could offer. Even a donation as small as the cost of a fast food meal would be helpful (and would put an end to this series of posts :-). Just click on the button below to give via PayPal. Thanks for your support!
Know where a building is, but don’t know the street address? This Digital Inspiration page lets you click on a location in Google Maps, and brings up the nearest street address (“reverse geocoding”):
This is one of the neater online mapping applications I’ve seen in a while. Create a list of addresses and related information in a Google Docs spreadsheet, and map a list will geocode the addresses (convert the address to latitude/longitude), and plot the location and data in a Google Maps interface:
You can also export the data as a KML file for use in Google Earth.
User-selectable icons
Also plots latitude/longitude locations
Includes data in other spreadsheet columns in the data bubble
Lets you embed images and hyperlinks as well
Data can be public or private
As you update the spreadsheet, the map data is updated as well (daily, or on demand)
Not a lot of documentation, but it’s fairly easy to use, and a healthy number of example spreadsheets will show you how it’s done (scroll through the list at the bottom, and click on the link to see the sample spreadsheet for each list item)
Completely free (though they’ll take donations, and offer premium consulting services for a fee)
Well, Pokey, my 4-year-old Dell Inspiron 600m laptop and principal on-the-road blogging tool, is starting to act up, and two Windows XP re-installs haven’t solved the problems; looks like I need a new laptop to keep things running. I’m asking for your help with this; if you find this blog useful, and would like to see it continue, a contribution towards replacing Pokey of any amount via the PayPal llink below would be very much appreciated. Even a few dollars helps; I don’t need the latest and greatest, just something reliable. Thanks for your support!
ogr2ogr is a simple command line utility that converts between supported vector file formats. For those who don’t like dealing with command line programs, and need only limited conversion capability, Inventis has written a simple Windows front-end for ogr2ogr called ogr2gui:
Documentation is limited, so it’s not clear which input formats are fully supported. For example, input shapefiles work, but I had problems getting E00 files to convert (see this post for an E00 to shapefile conversion process that does work). Hopefully documentation will improve with time along with functionality (this is already the fourth release).
Output formats are limited to:
Shapefile
MapInfo
KML
GML
CSV
Converting shapefiles to Google Earth’s KML format works as long as the shapefile is in latitude/longitude format, WGS84; attribute table data added to the placemark pop-up for point shapefiles, but not lines or areas. There are better converters for shapefiles to KML conversion like shp2kml, but this is a good choice for converting other less-well-supported vector formats into the supported output formats..
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