The world might feel like a mess right now, depending on your technological, financial, or political interests, but there's one thing I think we can all get universally excited about. Google Maps has finally come to CarPlay.
Tagged With mapping
We all love the convenience of mapping apps, but many of us would prefer that the app stick with a route we know is golden, rather than rerouting us all over the place to save a few minutes in traffic.
If you want to know the postcode for a given location, you can find it out with Australia Post's search site or some quick Googling. But if you want to see how postcodes are constructed, the Australian Postcode Decoder offers a neat graphical representation.
Google Maps is already an essential traveller's tool, but two of the features in its new Labs experimental sectionare extremely handy for frequent road warriors and help reduce longstanding Google annoyances. Here's why Drag 'n' Zoom and What's Around Here belong in your arsenal.
In the GPS world, nothing much comes for free, but Navigon's new iPhone direction-finding app comes close: you can install it for nothing and check out a pretty comprehensive set of Australian maps.
Cyclists and geography geeks will want their very own Frida V - the Free Ride Data Acquisition Vehicle. This project's website describes the project like so:
"Frida V. is a rugged and comfortable bicycle equipped for efficient exploration and mapping of public urban spaces. It carries a small computer, GPS positioning device, 802.11 wireless network transciever and a basic audiovisual recording unit. The consolidated software and hardware assembly enables automated mapping of stumbled wireless networks, easy creation of location-tagged media and opportunistic synchronization with a server resource on the internet. In other words, let the warriding and rideblogging begin!"
As the Make blog notes, all of the open source software and hardware design for the bike can be downloaded from the Frida V. Wiki. Nice.
