Best of the Blogs 14 April 2015

By on 14 April, 2015

Augmented reality

GeoAwesomness has posted about a really cool interactive project where you can shape the sand in a box, and have topo-lines and shading appear in near-real time, and then pour imaginary water over them for near-real time flood modelling. So. Freakin. Cool.

 

Maps Mania is celebrating its ten year anniversary. Ten whole years of amazing web maps across 8,559 articles and 17,780,391 page views. As they so regularly feature here in the Best of the Blogs, I thought it appropriate to point you their way.

Indeed, with that in mind, I thought I would also follow up with the obligatory annual Game of Thrones map post from Maps Mania! You can probably tell that I am quite excited by yesterday’s season 5 debut.

 

The ever-interesting O’Reilly Radar has a post entitled ‘Open source won, so what’s next?’ that chronicles the rise – and eventual dominance – of open source software in day-to-day programming. Will GIS see a similar shift?

 

Over on SIBA’s blog, Michael Haines, presents his latest thinking on questioning traditions and addressing the challenges around what it really means to be a surveyor in the 21st century.

 

The Guardian talks of the new possibilities of micro satellites being launched for under $40,000 a pop. They’re based on technology used in mobile phones and laptops, measure around 5cm3 in size, and could be used to track planes, follow tankers seized by pirates, and even spot people flouting planning laws.

 

ComputerWorld has a great little piece outlining a practical, consumer application for indoor location – finding a particular book in a book store – and discusses the marriage of different technologies that allows this. Unfortunately, you need a (free) account to read it, so I’ll chuck in an extra blog article this week to make it up to you. Because I care for you.

Speaking of indoor location, Facility Management has put together a roundup and overview of the many different indoor location technologies on the market today.

 

TreeHugger has posted an article on a UK-based company, BioCarbon Engineering, that is using UAVs to replant forests at around 15% less cost than traditional methods, and magnitudes faster (thousands of trees per day). Pretty neat example of how spatial will save the world.

 

The Google Geo Developers Blog has a post outlining an interesting piece of softare based around the Google Maps API that allows photographers to pick a spot, then find out the time and date when the sun and moon will appear in the best position for their desired framing. Very clever.

 

And, to round out this week’s edition of Best of the Blogs, here’s a first person video of a chimpanzee attacking a flying drone with a stick. It’s a mad house! A mad house!

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