Can a Smartphone Replace a Dedicated GPS?
How accurate can a smartphone GPS be? Is a smartphone now good enough to replace a dedicated GPS receiver in the field? These two questions have come up numerous times this past semester. Saratoga Springs is in the process of working on a tree survey and the GIS Center has been doing some minor supporting...
Spring 2012 has Sprung!
Hello, and welcome to Spring 2012. Things are starting to ramp up in the GIS Center for the semester. We plan on making some improvements to several of our past projects. These are mostly server-based, so hopefully you won’t notice, but they will provide a more solid infrastructure for Layar, Ushahidi, and GeoServer. The other...
Mystery Map X
The new Mystery Map is here! When you've got a guess put it in the comments. We'll announce the winner next week.
Mystery Map IX
We’re thrilled to bring you this week’s map in a new format. Over the past several weeks, we’ve worked to bring you dynamic maps, so that you may move around and further explore the mapped data. Today, we bring you the result: If you have any issues viewing or interacting with the map please post...
Installing GRASS and QGIS on a Mac
GRASS and QGIS are two open source and free pieces of GIS software. After examining them, you may want to install them and try them out. I recently walked through the process of installing these applications and their required frameworks on a Mac. Although it was straightforward enough for me, I figured that it could be beneficial...
A New Semester
Hello, and welcome to Fall 2011! We here in the GIS Center are looking forward to bringing you some quality content this upcoming semester. We’ll be posting a series of mystery maps, the conclusion to our WiFi mapping experiment, and any reports of seismic events from Skidmore’s seismograph. (At the least.) We’re sure to stumble...
Indoor WiFi Mapping
With the advent of the iPhoneTracker, mobile device location has been brought back to the forefront of our minds. A Skidmore Faculty member compiled several versions of iPhoneTracker from GitHub, and one of these pulled the locations determined from WiFi positioning from the consolidated.db database. This meant that locations determined from WiFi proximity/triangulation were displayed...
![iPhoneTracker Shows Your iPhone Knows Where You've Been [UPDATED]](https://academics.skidmore.edu/blogs/onlocation/files/2011/04/iPhoneTrackerCambridge-290x290.png "iPhoneTracker Shows Your iPhone Knows Where You've Been [UPDATED]"){kind=tracking}
iPhoneTracker Shows Your iPhone Knows Where You’ve Been [UPDATED]
Today, an open source application called iPhoneTracker was released, which demonstrates that the Apple iPhone records its location to a file, preserving a record of everywhere you’ve been. This file is backed up by iTunes, and lives locally on your computer. iPhoneTracker is a free application that pulls the data from this file and displays...
Mystery Map VII Revealed
We’re back, and after unleashing the mystery map and scattering a few hints we have a winner. Nick L-S correctly guessed that Mystery Map VII was of canine feces in the North Woods. Dog poop may seem like a strange thing to map, but it is tied up in all sorts of things from public...
Valentine’s Day Projection
We thought we’d share one of the more interesting map projections with you today. A cordiform projection presents the world, fittingly, as a heart (cordiform means “heart shaped”). This is an equal area projection designed in the 1500s, and is not widely used currently. Happy Valentine’s Day! Image Source: Cartogrammar Information Sources: Danstopicals, Progonos
