Free Geography Tools

A Review Of The Garmin Oregon 450t GPS For Field Work: Part II – The Touch Screen Interface

Leszek Pawlowicz — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 00:12:12 +0000

See this post for Part I of this review. Starting with their Colorado GPS unit, which had a click-wheel-like “Rock N Roller” controller, and moving on to their Oregon and Dakota units, which rely exclusively on a touch screen interface, Garmin has moved away from having multiple physical buttons on their units to access functions and [...] Related posts:

A Review Of The Garmin Oregon 450t GPS For Field Work: Part I

Leszek Pawlowicz — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 11:47:58 +0000

A few weeks ago, I did a post called “In Search Of The Perfect Fieldwork GPS”, a list of the features I’d like to see in a handheld GPS unit designed for serious fieldwork and mapping. The Magellan Triton 2000 GPS unit, which I reviewed last year, had some but not all of these features, [...] Related posts:

WMS Inspector Extension For Firefox

Leszek Pawlowicz — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 11:32:39 +0000

Adria Mercador writes to announce his WMS Inspector Extension (WMS = Web Map Service) for the Firefox browser: Load all WMS requests in the current page and their parameters Requests sorting by service or type Individual WMS requests (images or errors) visualization Copy services, requests or parameters to the clipboard Direct editing of requests parameter values Output GetCapabilities response as an [...] Related posts:

OA Digital Version Of gvSIG 1.9 Is Out

Leszek Pawlowicz — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 12:30:04 +0000

Back in November, I posted about the release of the gvSIG 1.9, a free multi-platform Java-based GIS program. Oxford Archaeology Digital, which created their own improved installer for the previous 1.1 version of gvSIG, has just released the second beta of a similar improved installer for version 1.9. Differences from the official baseline 1.9 installer [...] Related posts:

Slice And Dice Data With Microsoft Pivot

Leszek Pawlowicz — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 12:10:46 +0000

Microsoft Live Labs’ beta Pivot software lets you slice, dice, analyze and examine data, including geographic data, with a unique, animated visual interface. You can’t currently use your own data, but several sample datasets have geographic attributes, including: National Parks World Leaders Endangered Species Sports Figures Kiva Loans Here’s a screenshot of Kiva loans grouped by alphabetical country groups: Clicking on a [...] Related posts:

Overlay OpenStreetMap Data Transparently On Google/Yahoo Maps

Leszek Pawlowicz — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 12:24:23 +0000

The transparent com site lets you select a base map layer from Google or Yahoo, and then overlay an OpenStreetMap (OSM) data layer on top with user-definable transparency. Zoom in to your area of interest, pick the base and overlay layers by clicking on the “+” sign in the upper right: And see the base layer [...] Related posts:

For Those Who Miss The Commodore 64

Leszek Pawlowicz — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 12:55:21 +0000

A scrollable, zoomable, fully accurate map of New York City designed to look like an 1980s 8-bit videogame background: Built using Open Source Map data. Via CNet. No related posts. No related posts.

Two More DEM Format Converters

Leszek Pawlowicz — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 12:45:33 +0000

Hoisted from the comments from my post on creating ESRI ArcGrid DEM files for use with Terrain Bender, two more options for converting other DEM formats to ESRI ArcGrid, plus many other formats as well. LandSerf: A multi-platform (Windows, Mac and LInux) terrain visualization and analysis program, LandSerf can also import/export DEMs in a number of [...] Related posts:

Rescue Your Data From Platial Before It Shuts Down

Leszek Pawlowicz — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 01:42:47 +0000

Via the James Fee GIS Blog, the online mapping service Platial is shutting down. If you’ve been using it, you have a very limited amount of time to export it in KMZ format; access may shut down as early as March 2nd. Geocommons will be acquiring the data from the past five years, and making [...] Related posts:

Map Warper – Georeference And Export A Raster Image

Create A Horizonless Projection View With Terrain Bender

Leszek Pawlowicz — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 12:58:44 +0000

One more brief post on Terrain Bender, a program that lets you create varying-perspective terrain views, analogous to what you get looking from an airplane window: straight-down for nearby terrain, an oblique view for terrain further away: But you can flip that analogy around 180 degrees, and use Terrain Bender to generate a “horizonless projection” view. [...] Related posts: