Geotagging It Up

For Christmas my father received a global positioning system unit, the Magellan eXplorist 600. We are still trying to figure the thing out. For some strange reason Magellan decided not to include a comprehensive paper manual, leaving most of that duty up to a pdf file on the Internet. Even basic things like how to hook up the unit to the computer is left ambiguous. In the paper manual it says that to hook up to the computer or to charge the battery, you must hook up the data/power cable to the unit. The catch is that the connector on the back of the GPS unit is symmetrical in two axes (there are six conductor plates arranged in an almost-hexagon, with a nut in the center, while the cable has six pins with a bolt in the center), which means there are two ways to connect the cable, and the paper instruction manual does not have any description or graphics on how to hook it up. For about the first ten hours I was trying to charge the battery and get the data transfer working all while the unit was hooked up backwards. Quite a silly connector design, and quite a silly choice in not including a proper manual with the unit.

The included software (MapSend Lite) is, in my opinion, useless. Sure I've only been using it for a couple minutes, but it already looks featureless and boring. It only has an outline for major bodies of water (I'm talking about oceans and The Great Lakes. The software can't even import the overlay maps that come on the same CD (these overlay maps are intended to be loaded onto the GPS unit so that you get extra map information about your local area). I also tried getting Google Earth to work with the GPS, but that requires a $20 annual subscription to get Google Earth Plus. Right now I'm working on getting WorldWind running, and hope that will be able to import POI, waypoint, track, and other information. One nice thing about this unit is that all POI/waypoint/etc information is stored in ASCII, and realtime information is transferred over USB in NMEA format, which appears to be industry standard. Hopefully this means the unit will at least be marginally compatible with Linux.

My last topic in this post has to do with Geotagging. Geotagging Flickr photos seems to be easy, and there are many guides to doing it, but geotagging blog posts doesn't seem to be as popular. I tried looking around for guides on how to geotag posts in Blogger (blogger.com/blogspot/google), but to no avail. Ultimately, it would be nice to have tags in the proper place in the html posts that you read in a webbrowser, and also the proper tags in the proper place in the RSS/XML feed. This would require Blogger to have a special field where you can type or copy-paste your lat/long and then it will put that info into the headers properly. Even better would be a "Geotag" button that gets the NMEA info from the USB device, and does it all magically (having a webpage read data from USB is something you probably can't/shouldn't do, but it would be fun). As it is, I seem to be forced to just put the tags into the post itself, and hope that RSS programs can interpret the information correctly. Geotag follows in meta tags, so should not be visible.



If you're in Firefox, just right click the page, go to "View Page Info", and the geotag should be visible in the Meta info textbox. To generate these tags, I cheated and used http://www.addressfix.com/ to generate the tag. Geotagging usually uses deg.deg format, whereas the GPS unit is currently set to use deg.min.min format, and if I want to do real geotagging, I would have to change the settings for the gps unit.