Bought me a GPS receiver for my laptop. Really cool. The main reason is for mapping - you know, I am here, I want to be there, tell me where to drive and when to turn. Works like a charm.
Then my brother introduced me to wardriving. Driving the neighbourhood with NetStumbler detecting wireless access points, GPS recording where we were, porting the info to Google Earth. Oh what fun!
I brought these two uses up at work. A cow-orker says, “GPS, yeah, great for golf” BING! I’d never thought of that. How far did I drive? How far to the pin. Cool, gotta try that.
Then we let our imagination run a bit. Imagine a radio-controlled helicopter equiped with GPS and auto-pilot, used to deliver small items from my place to my buddy’s 14th floor apartment balcony.
So what else can can we use GPS for? Fanciful or pragmatic…
Running and cycling. More accurate than a pedometer or cyclocomputer. You don’t have to have it with you all the time - you can use it once to measure your regular training or commute routes.
Use it to check the speedometer accuracy on various vehicles.
I suspect it can be used for finding your car in a huge outdoor parking lot.
It can be a lot of fun to get lost and explore (on foot or in any vehicle), knowing you can easily find your way home by GPS.
My dad uses the little hand-held GPS I got him to find his way back to the truck when he goes hunting. He also uses it to mark good spots he finds up in the hills, so that he can relocate them later.
I used to use mine to mark my car when hiking. I’ve used them as the only decision-making device when driving. (get to an intersection and go whichever way is closest to the as the crow flies direction you need to go.) In combination with my mapping software, I use them to mark locations and landings along river and lake trails. You could mark a spot and revisit it every so often and take a picture of the same place through the year. YOu can go around verifying the accuracy of those little plates the put places that have the lat long alt of that place.
I had problems finding a grass strip airport (grass next to grass) so I created an artificial waypoint and used it to line up with the runway. Also downloaded a terraserver satellite image of the area as a visual que.
I’m also a big fan of the laptop moving map displays for travel. I use it to map out where I’ve been if I’m out looking at historical landmarks.
Wow! Thank you for this! My whole family is now hooked. We found three this weekend and placed our first. Bit awkward with the laptop, though, so I’m trying to get a cheap handheld on eBay.
Other games can be found here. Minute War sounds fun.
I map out historical areas in parks and the like. I have Fugawi Global Navigator software that lets you scan or download maps, aerial photos from Terraserver, whatever, and make them the map on which my GPS tracks are visible. Moreover, I can write a track with the mouse and load it into my GPS so it appears like a map feature. Nowadays I go out with 2 or 3 handheld GPS units and let them waypoint average on a ruin while I measure it, so I can later insert a drawing correctly into my map.