can we get excited yet? · 2004-10-04 21:51
my movements over the last few days – click for annotations
Readers visiting the website may have noticed a new addition in my sidebar – location. Over the weekend, I managed to take a few commercially available components (Bluetooth GPS, mobile phone and application), combine them with a bit of Perl glue, and create a system that automatically sends my location to the website. I can be located all the time. This is fantastic! I’ve been trying to get this for years.
The setup is this – Pretec BluetoothGPS (that also has a nifty data logger, which isn’t used here), GSM Tracker, a Nokia 6600, and a custom written server program on my webserver. There was a slightly cheaper alternative to GSM Tracker, CellGPS, but when I tried it, it just kept on crashing. GSM Tracker takes GPS info, and sends it as UDP over GPRS to my server. It triggers on distance, time, or mobile cell change (I haven’t got the Cell ID extraction working properly yet, but it seems simple enough). It isn’t cheap – certainly not cheap enough for any of the collaborative cartography ideas we have had over the years, and doesn’t quite do all I want, but it’s a start. Anyone writing a free program that does similar will get a lot of repect, anyone writing an open source version will get my undying love and a small brass plaque installed in the city of my choosing.
The server is a quick hack – I’m still considering whether to release the code, or run it as a web service for others. If you’re interested in either, please contact me.
So what does this mean? Well, for a start, I now have a direct personal link for mapping sites (press a button, get a map… anywhere in the world! w00t!). I’m also publishing my data as one-shot RDF, complete RDF tracks, and even RSS2.0, which gets fed into Worldkit to produce the picture above. If anyone has suggestions for improvement, new feeds, or useful apps that consume such data, please holler. It’s early days, and I haven’t even got proper mapping and track maps sorted out yet, but now I have the raw data, anything is possible.
A bigger question is why publish this information in public. I must admit I’m not overly happy with giving everyone access to this data, but then again, this kind of service is the near-future that designers like myself have been preaching for years. It will cause privacy problems, it will cause social embarassment, it may change the way I live. Unless I try it myself, I will never know what unexpected consequences publishing this information will have. Self-ethnography is not scientifically valid, but I think it’s one of the best ways of empathising with the problems new technology creates. If I won’t use it, I shouldn’t expect you to either.
Anyway, I’m still playing – lots of niggles with the hows, whys and wherefores, but this is just the start.
Doesn’t it feel like we’re starting to live in the future?