Fun with GPS!
Today was SO FREAKING FUN!
We bought a GPS Unit today and we went Geocaching and then tonight I did some Geotagging.
Geocaching is where you take your gps, go to Geocaching.com, search for caches in your area, and then go hunt for them using the gps. A cache is a sealed box (like tupperware or metal) that has goodies inside. You write down the gps coordinates from the website, and use the gps device to help you find the cache. When you find the cache, you sign the log, take a goodie and leave a goodie. Goodies can’t be food, but are usually silly little toys, souveniers, tools, flashlights, etc. Goodies can really be anything except food I think.
We went looking for our first cache ever today and we found it and it was SO FUN!
Go here…
Click Here…
…and then click “Prev Page” to see a couple other pictures from our first GeoCache hunt.
Then later on when I got home, I decided to do some GeoTagging. Geotagging is where you associate gps coordinates with photos you’ve taken. On some photo storage/sharing sites like Flickr.com and Fotki.com, you can associate “tags” with photos (like keywords).
In the case of geotagging, you add tags to your photos online that reflect the gps coords of where you took the photo. You can do that several ways; you can write down the coords when you take the pic, you can take a pic of the coords after you take your scenery pic, you can store store a “waypoint” in your gps to remind you of the coords of where you took the pic, you can look up the place on an online map like maps.google.com which will show you the gps coordinates of the spot, or you can use 3rd-party scripts to associate coords with the images using the browser Firefox (which is what I do).
To learn about geotagging images in flickr, go here:
http://www.flickr.com/groups/geotagging/
The above link is in association with the site GeoBloggers.com.
(Geobloggers.com is not affiliated with Google NOR Flickr. It’s a site created by enthusiastic users which uses scripts to assiciate geotagged Flickr images with Google Maps.)
Here are my geotags so far:
Click Here…
I learned about it in a day, so you can too, just take the time to check out those sites and do some reading if you are interesting in learning about it. if you ever get the chance to do this, I highly recommend it. It’s so fun!