nearby.org.uk blog

A while ago released a Compass Overlay, which (hopefully) makes reading directions of the navigation control easier. Well this new version does the same, but its (mostly) correct for the Magnetic Direction!

Magnetic Compass ^beta!

Note: its positioned to fit the navigation control of Google Earth 4.3, not the separate compass, which has only recently begun working for me… Updates a few seconds after stopping moving.

Now have a way to determine the magnetic variation at a location have some other ideas for using this in Google Earth, eg magnetic bearing along a line, but this is a starting point. For example in the uk the variation is often too small to be really seen on the tiny control.

Thanks to heywhatsthat.com for the pointer to a webservice that gives the variation.

Behold a new network link from nearby.org.uk:

Google Earth GPS

Once you have chosen a destination point, a small arrow will be shown in the bottom right of your Google Earth window, which points towards your destination! Ideal for use in the flight simulator, where you can play follow the arrow.

Note it only updates every 5 seconds, and comes with all sorts of disclaimers such as don’t use in life or death situations.

Sorry that nearby.org.uk and related services have been offline for most of the past week. I am currently away for a trip in (not so) sunny Ireland, and the first halve was camping so was away from Internet connectivity.

Anyway minutes before I went away I got a deluge of emails saying the site if offline? what?? It turns out my generic credit card had expired, and without warning (feck) the machine was switched off. But this was 12am so their phone lines where closed (billing at least) - so a hasty phone call on the move in the morning and with the new card details they said be back within a few hours - not ideal but the best could do. I carried on my merry way and didn’t think any more of it (my mistake!), but the real feck up was that yes they had re-enabled the machine, they just forgot to re enable it at the switch…

It appears to be back now after much international phone calls….

btw - feck isn’t considered a swear word in Éire, and when in Ireland, do as the Irish do. (which is use it a lot!)

Update: as an amendum to the above, it turns out that on wednesday (3 days after it was switched off) a letter did arrive at home stating that they intended to turn off the server unless payment was received - and that it would take three days to reactivate the server. Which is at least factual.

I think I have mentioned this before, but have a page that helps share your KML file via various Google services.

Following a post on the Maps help group, realised could update it with some other ways to use the KML (even non Google!)

So view the latest page at

Publishing your KML for Google Earth, Google Maps and Beyond

suggestions for other links welcome in the comments!

Just spotted a proposal for a standard icon to represent geotagged content, the homepage is at geotagicons.com, can’t say a big fan of the icon itself, but the idea is great.

<OT>Was sort of involved in trying to find a standard icon for GeoRSS (in fact they use my icon as the favicon ), but not sure (in hindsight!) if that a good idea, really it just saying this is a geotagged feed, which really shouldn’t mean much different to the end user than the standard feed icon. If their feed reader is geoenabled - great, if not tough, although it can help people specifically looking for geo-content.</OT>

Anyway to try the waters, have enabled it for geotagged content on this blog, see the PhotoSpot category for example

(via)

Following part 1 yesterday, have now plotted some maps per individual service.

Flash Earth Layer

Conclusions

1. Google Earth does request a link for the initial view on startup - that point in the Atlantic.
2. I guess North American installs have two slightly different default placemarks; has it changed, or maybe Canada gets a different one?
3. But that doesnt explain the lines from there - people must have their links set to periodically refresh?
4. Germany likes FlashEarth (or rather people like looking at Germany with FlashEarth link enabled)
5. Many people leave the links open even when not in use - e.g. the British Isles links show worldwide usage, notably over Russia.
6. MGRS notably has high usage in two areas.
7. The Far east likes to know what direction they facing.

Update: In a total forehead slapping momont realised these unprojected whole world images, are exactly what is used in GroundOverlays, so the the pages now include links to view the higher resolution images directly in Google Earth, duh!

Example: View In Google Earth (don’t forget to try adjusting the tranparency slider!) [Update, to fix broken link, sorry!]

As some may know this site serves a number of Network Links for Google Earth, for a long time I have thought it would be fun to map the data from that, but finally got round to trying it. This is still work in progress, so the current images are very much easly tests, but shows promise, hopefully can make some better visualizations - maybe even as KMZ

‘Lookat’ point v1: (click for 145k version)

View In Google Earth (don’t forget to try adjusting the tranparency slider!)

Shows some interesting patterns, there are a number of lines on the map, and definitily appears to be flight lines, I suspect this is from people leaving tours on loop, and a fudging a networklink to refresh periodically. Not sure how else to explain such repeatable loops - can a large number of visitors really be all following the same route? I’ll investigate this more in follow up map(s).

But WHAT is that point in the middle of the Atlantic?

Update: this is from about 900k hits from aug-nov ‘07 - still processing the rest of the data!

Update 2: More maps here, all maps seem to to show the same overall pattern which is slightly puzzling, eg the IPs graph suggests that many users are following these flight lines.

This is probably a purely a rhetorical question, and a means to vent. As background, I have just noticed a single user use a very disportionate number of requests against one of the Google Earth Grid Layers (MGRS), it look’s like they set it to refresh every 10 seconds, and for a while did browse around the globe, after that it stuck on one view and just happily refreshed away for 20 hours.

So what is the response to this type of thing (and I have no idea of the identity of users)?

1. Blacklist at firewall level - effectively cutting them off from using nearby ever again.
2. Blacklist them from that feature permanently
3. Impose a temporally ban
4. Add a throttling to the service for everyone, such as a quota or rate limiting - difficult to get the sweat spot
5. Google Earth offers <maxSessionLength> which could be used to curtail the long term effect, but this would have a minor effect on legitimate users
6. similar to last but only start adding it once they trigger some limit

So far (and only in a handful of cases) have done either 1 or 2. In the example that has triggered this post have done 1. but might change it to 3.

(the api and coordinate converter have their own dynamic limit, essentially 4. )

Recently geohash.org was released; the premise: short easy links that encode a location. The website offers instant conversion, but as the algorithm is Public Domain, Lordelph was quick to implement a php class, and I could quickly add the conversion to my existing conversion API. Convert a postcode to geohash anyone?

Updating the documentation noticed the API was last updated in 2005 - gulp, how time flies! Anyway as a celebration have upped the throttling on the API, now three times the previous limit. Running on much improved hardware than when it was launched so maybe the limit can be tweaked even more, will run some analysis of its impact - it already seems the API is a minor part of the overall load on the server - particularly against the Google Earth layers.

Love keep adding destinations to your route, or even dragging the route to refine perfectly to your needs in the directions feature on Google Maps? But frustrated that this feature isn’t available in Google Earth?

… No, not implemented this feature for Earth (wouldn’t that be something!), but as a stop gap its a way to export your newly created directions on Maps, and open them in Google Earth! You get a freshly created folder containing each section as a separate route, ready for use as ‘one.

Multi Destination routing in KML for Google Earth