NerdBeach

Google GeoEye in the sky takes first pics

It looks like Google's new eye in the sky satellite is alive and doing well.  Well, technically the satellite is owned by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and Google is only the second largest fund source, but you know who gets the most publicity in the matter. 

The GeoEye-1, which took its first picture last week (above, the Kutztown University campus in Pennsylvania), has the capability to snap pictures down to 41cm.  This is about the equivalent of zooming in on the home plate of a baseball diamond.  Due to governmental restrictions, Google will get their pictures only down to 50cm resolution, and the NGA will get the highest detailed photos. 

The images, even at 50 cm, marks a greatly improved terrestrial image source for Google Earth, and it paves the way for new services that could redefine the way we look at online mapping.  At the moment GeoEye-1 is officially undergoing some fine tuning to assure maximum resolution, which is probably code for "High priority targets first".  

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Suunto X10 GPS Watch is perfect for outdoor adventures

The Suunto X10 GPS watch is an improvement over the company's previous X9i with improved GPS technology. Not only that, the watch features:

  • altimeter
  • barometer
  • digital compass
  • thermometer
  • stopwatch

Suunto also includes the Track Exporter, which allows tracking information to be used with other software packages.  Accordingly,

After converting your Suunto X10 logs with Suunto Track Exporter, you can share your adventures with anyone who uses Google Earth,” explains Suunto Outdoor Product Manager Petteri Hernelahti. “You can save your tracks in Google Earth, and then email them to friends or family, or post them on a website or blog for downloading.

 

No final word on price yet, but the Suunto X10 watch should be available sometimes in September.

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Go Earth Surfing With the Wii Balance Board

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We have seen other cool mechanical gadgets that manage to interface to Google Earth before, but this is a more off the shelf solution.

By using a Wii Balance Board's Bluetooth connection and some interface software, you can use the Balance Board to act as a mouse.

Of course, you could use it to move the cursor around, but where is the fun in that? (Besides, you have no handy buttons to click, and re-mapping one of the four weight sensing domains to a mouse button would take away some of the functionality of the board.)

A better use of a Balance Board Mouse would be to go virtual surfing across the world, and with the mouse board and Google Earth you can do exactly that. Check out the video for the fun.

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UFOs Captured on Google Earth

Google Earth is a snapshot, or rather of series of snapshots, that covers the globe. So, if there were anything suspicious in the line of UFO activity, it should have been captured by the process (assuming, of course,that anything found wasn't scrubbed by the military long before the images were released). 

Going with the theory that something could have been picked up, we have a video showing what appears to be UFOs present in the sky shots from Google Earth.