Which Way to the Castle?

Is Leeds Castle in Yorkshire? Just how old is Stonehenge? For those in the United Kingdom, answers come via a new GPS tour guide that alerts motorists to Britain’s treasures as they drive near them, according to BBC News.

Invented by history enthusiast Daniel Taylor, the RoadTour software works with GPS to trigger audio commentary and pictures of 600 heritage attractions, such as castles, stately homes, and battlefields. Each has an average 90 seconds of commentary, researched and written by a team of 12 amateur historians. There’s at least one picture of each place, plus opening times and prices where relevant. And for after sightseeing, 900 pubs are also located.

The software responds to satellite prompts as cars approach places of historical interest throughout the UK, delivering commentary.

According to Taylor, even native Brits don’t know about all the history surrounding them. For instance, research commissioned by RoadTour shows that a quarter of people think Leeds Castle is in Yorkshire, rather than Kent.

Oh, Deer, They’re Tracking Me!

A white-tailed deer going about his business in suburban Pennsylvania is blogging regularly, sharing his location through GPS every five minutes, reports the Wired Blog Network. A poster named Siberian at the Google Earth Community collared a deer he nicknamed Thor with a GPS and cell phone with text-messaging capability. Siberian thought of the idea while tracking deer for the Bryn Athyn College Deer Research Project.

“The GPS coordinates were sent by the collared deer as an SMS/text message via GSM/cell-phone networks to a server in Sweden, and then relayed to my e-mail account,” Siberian explains in his post. He then found a way to plot the coordinates sent via e-mail to create a spreadsheet, which is then converted into a file used to track the deer in Google Earth. The system is fully automated using free services.

Thor’s wanderings, captured through GPS and text messaging.

Plotting New Uses

Using GPS to Measure Acreage

Bill Marchel, outdoor reporter for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, made readers aware of a simple way to plot acreage using a handheld GPS in a March 15 feature.

“Acreage calculation via GPS might not be news to modern farmers, but most recreational landowners I have spoken with are not aware that GPS units feature this time-and-money-saving option,” he writes.

To find the exact acreage of a wildlife opening on his property, Marchel picked a starting location on the perimeter then walked the outskirts of the opening. “As I walked along, I watched the screen on my GPS and, like magic, my track was plotted,” he writes. “When I completed the loop, I had the exact acreage of the interior of my route…no measuring, no pacing, no mathematics.” According to Marchel, most modern GPS units have the ability to gauge acreage. He uses a Garmin.