GPS

Perfectly named as a weight-loss device,

not-so-perfectly named for what it is — a portable, inexpensive LoJack-style tracker which a

Sunnyvale-based GPS company, Trimble will release this month. Users place the

TrimTrac in the glovebox, or even in your check-in luggage,

and using a combination of cellphone and motion detector, the device tracks the item’s locale every 15 minutes and

sends the info by cellphone to a network. The TrimTrac costs $160 plus the cost of the internet site fee of

$6 to $8 per month. Best application we can think of: finding your car in those massive parking complexes.

We’d be way more stoked if they’d just roll back that recent fare increase, but New York City’s Taxi and Limousine

Commission is thinking about requiring all cabs to be outfitted with electronic maps and GPS navigation so that riders

can see exactly where they are and where they’re going.

[Via Textually.org]

We gave up stealing cars a long time ago (that inner city midnight blogging program really turned us around), but

even though we’ve lost our touch we still know better than to carjack a BMW, enter your dad’s address into the GPS

navigation system, and then ditch the car later without having deleted that information or wiped the car for prints.

Unfortunately Australian wannabe carjacker George Sam Youssef didn’t manage to think that far ahead and just got

himself sentenced to six years in prison for leaving a few too many clues on his crime spree.

We’d forgotten all about it, but remember that contest where Coca-Cola is putting special GPS-enabled Coke

can-shaped phones? It’s going on right now, and if you find one of them you press a button which instantly connects you

to an operator who’ll tell you that you’ve just won a Chevy SUV, and then instructs you to press another button that

activates a GPS homing beacon on the can so that Coke can immediately deliver the prize to your location.

Anyway, an Air Force base in Ohio and an Army base in Kentucky have decided that they’re too much of a security risk,

and is requiring all cans of Coke to be inspected before being brought into secure areas, just in case one of them

happens to have a GPS chip in it. There’s only a hundred of those cans out there total, meaning there’s only a one in

2.5 million chance that any given can of Coke brought onto the base is a winner, not to mention the fact that the cans

don’t transmit the location of the winner unless a big red button is pressed on it, but with the War on Terror and

everything you really can’t let these things slide.

[Via TechDirt]

As the summer approaches, we crawl out of our protective wired covered lairs to sometimes partake in outdoor

activity. Last weekend, we went kayaking around Lake Union in Seattle, WA and of course, we couldn’t help but bring

along a lot of equipment and decided we’d hunt for open wireless spots, this friends- was “War Kayaking” we found a

ton, charted it with GPS, Wifi finders and we’ll show you how we did it for this week’s HOW-TO Tuesday.

Here’s a video of what we did and all the details are below. Click

here to view (Windows Media).

Getting started (Hardware)

For our War Kayaking adventure we packed our bag with the following:

• Pocket PC 2215 Symbol Wireless card
• Sony Ericsson p900 phone
• Garmin Forerunner GPS watch
• Sony t1 5 Megapixel camera
• Motorola i730 phone
• One energy bar
• One bottle of water (16 ounces)
• All the gear was placed in plastic bags and sealed

One more thing…before we left we installed “WifiFoFum” a wireless tool for

the Pocket PC which gives a pretty good radar-like display of Wifi spots and also saves the log. It’s small, fast,

free and works great. It also reminds us of those “Fish Finders” which was somewhat fitting.

We then headed off to the Kayak rental place in Seattle, WA. For about $12 per hour you can kayak around one of

the most amazing places in the world with views of the city of Seattle, the Space Needle, Mt. Rainer as well as tons

of sail boats, yachts, sea planes and more. All that and there are like a million Wifi spots since all the folks who

own house boats and all the businesses around the area use wireless.

And we’re off

Here we are pushing back from the kayak place. We paddled out past where all the onlookers are at and then began to

fire out all the gear.

Getting location

Using the Garmin Forerunner GPS watch, we starting logging out position. While this device is meant for land, it

works perfectly on water as well. In one of our past “HOW-TOs”

we showed you how to take the data from this GPS watch

and make a satellite photo map, we’ll be doing that again as well.

Looking for Wireless

Next up, we cranked up our HP Pocket PC 2215 with Symbol wireless card. Using the

application WifiFoFum we immediately starting seeing which open spots were in the area, we set the Pocket PC to

dim its screen and not turn off, we figured we’d get a couple hours of battery and we’d be able to hear the sounds

from the Pocket PC as we paddle around and it finds new spots. We put the Pocket PC back in its plastic baggie and

started to paddle around.

Paddle paddle

For the next hour we paddled a little over 3 miles in a variety of different areas- every few seconds or so we picked

up a new Wifi spot, our Pocket PC was set to automatically use open Wifi spots so we were able to check email,

instant message, log on to IRC (#joiito on freenode) and do everything you’d expect, but all from a kayak. As we

instant messaged our friends “hey, i’m in a kayak” we’re quite sure they didn’t really think we were, well- now

they’re going to read this and see we suppose.

Here are a few pictures of our War Kayaking trip

If you want to see more, click here and then click the “next”

button. As we took photos, we uploaded them to our “moblog” a photo journal you can send photos to.

The spots

We found a lot of spot to connect up to, some were really strong, some weak, all the ones we were really interested

in needed to be strong enough to be available at least 150 feet away or more. We noted which ones popped up on the

Wifi radar, and later compared them with our GPS data. The best open spots we found are as follows (SSID):

Evado, temptress, NETGEAR, NETGEAR, bbx, blackberry, bbx, KIP, Evado, Armegedon, cortwe, dexter202, linksys,

bbx, lind3, gil1, SWN, MultiLocal, WPSI, defaulttlam, wireless, MoinMoin, Dulcinea, WLAN, weises,AP_Router.

Although we didn’t list all of them here, it’s worth noting that about 30% were “linksys” and another 30% were

“NETGEAR”.

Mapping the War

After a great run, we decided it was time to head back. We managed not to

destroy a couple thousand dollars worth of gear with water damage and we also didn’t get mashed by a landing sea

plane, one close call- but it was all good.

We did a data dump from the GPS watch, parsed the XML and then mapped it to our notes and Wifi logs. This is still

a somewhat manual process, but it only took about 20 minutes. Here is our

XML file.

From there we placed the approximate wifi spots over the Satellite map with route we created. We did this by noting

the time stamp on the XML lat and long entry along with the Pocket PC time stamp on the wifi log.

Click here to see a large version of the Satellite

map with Wifi spots.

And, if you want to check out our speed, click here

to see a SVG map with speed and location (no Wifi, just speed).

And that’s it

So, with a few plastic baggies, a wifi card, Pocket PC and a free application you too can make kayaking a little more

interesting. If we start getting in to kayaking more, we’re likely to make a stand alone mount for a kayak that has

the Pocket PC mounted and will give a visual and audible indication where the strongest wifi signals are as we paddle

around. And if you’ve been keeping up with our latest HOW-TOs we’re mostly likely going to attempt the first ever

kayak based pirate radio station soon, downloading music on the kayak via Wifi, and then broadcasting as we paddle,

should be cool. Questions? Comments? Email: torrone@gmail.com

The crazy thing about kids and privacy is that since they sorta have no rights (when you think about it), we can

force all sorts of crazy invasive surveillance systems on them. We’d all freak out if George Bush announced that anyone

who wanted to fly on a plane had to get chipped, but we don’t think twice about parents who want to implant a GPS

tracking chip in their child (to prevent kidnappings, naturally). Anyway the latest Sign-of-the-Beast-for-kids is

National Scientific’s new WiFi version of their IBUS tracking system, which puts a GPS module with an ID card reader

into school buses. The GPS school officials can keep track of the location of each bus in real-time, and the addition

of WiFi relays this info back to them so they can know exactly when and where students (who have to swipe their ID

cards) board and get off of the bus.

[Via Daily Wireless]

A quick note to anyone thinking about stealing a car: you may think you’re being very clever, but merely tearing off

the automobile’s XM satellite radio antenna does nothing to disable its OnStar tracking system:

Police caught the two people who stole a car from Broome Oldsmobile in Independence Saturday because they failed

to disable the OnStar tracking system in the vehicle. David Clutts, the executive manager of the dealership, said the

two stole the 2004 Cadillac Saturday morning, but police found them later in the afternoon. The suspects had ripped

out the XM antenna thinking that would deactivate the system, but they failed. Police tracked the car and thieves,

later identified as Scott Hazel, 40, Kansas City, and Catherin M. Curns, 38, Kansas City, to Merriam, Kan.

Another hardcore Bluetooth GPS module, this one the Blue Logger from Earthmate, which with the right setup, can be

accurate to within one meter. And why do these pro Bluetooth receivers always come in yellow?