As the next twelve to twenty four months goes on there will come more and they will be even more commonplace in portable computing devices than they are now.  Windows 8 supports more types of sensor than ever before too with technologies such as Kinect, NFC and more being integrated directly into the platform.  But what is this going to do for the prices of the computers that we buy and is it even affordable to do so?

The latest rumour is that ASUS is testing Kinect sensors built into the bezel of laptops.  This type of integration won’t come as a surprise to many people and it’s only to be expected.  This type of technology isn’t cheap however and integrating it into a laptop will come at a cost penalty.  This is also at a time when PC makers are telling us that the profit margins on PCs and laptops are now so tight that they’re beginning to focus on the high-end computing devices such as ultrabooks in order to get us to part with more cash.

My own laptop contains a four-point capacitive touch screen, 3G SIM card slot, drop-sensing accelerometer, fingerprint reader, TPM chip and GPS.  It’s a high-end model yes, but when you think about where consumers are now with technology it’s likely that people will want to get these types of devices, along with Kinect, already integrated with their new computers, monitors and laptops, and that PC makers will capitalise on this fact to hike prices and push people towards buying even more expensive computers that improve their profit margins and balance sheets.

To be honest I firmly believe that some of these sensors are pretty much essential for work in the modern age.  3G/4G is one such example with mobile broadband now so ubiquitous.  GPS is also something that’s extremely useful in a mobile device and security systems such as biometric fingerprint readers and Trusted Platform Module chips are now essential for any business laptop.

Then we have to face the fact that by the time Windows 8 launches or at least early in 2013, over 80% of new laptops will ship with a multi-touch screen.  Next year’s consumer electronics show will be full of such devices and laptops packed with sensors and NFC readers of all description.  Each will have a use, every last one will be justifiable, and all will be more expensive than they are today.

So what is your attitude to sensors and extra tech on PCs?  Do you already have a laptop that includes some of these devices and do you use them?  I might not use my laptop’s GPS a lot but the 3G module is used several times a week.  Are you happy that the prices of laptops seems to be steadily rising, at the same time as many are predicting the death of the traditional desktop PC with a tower that’s easy to upgrade and cheap to build.  Why not let us know in the comments below.

Currently, the most important implementation of the GPS is finding out locations in places that you are visiting for the first time and wish to explore on your own. Many people would prefer to use the old tried-and-tested system of just asking people about routes to the places they want to visit, but for the shy traveler, as well as for those who are in the adventurous mood, tracking places using GPS can be a better choice because of both convenience and the fun experience.

Most major GPS device providers update their databases on a daily basis, and the latest places come up on the GPS as soon as they are opened. As a matter of fact, just buy a new GPS device and fix it in your car, and check it out. You will be surprised to see how many new places have come up in your own city and how many shorter and convenient routes exist to commute to the places that you frequent.

GPS Technology

The GPS technology has become so advanced and reliable that most travelers around the globe have started using it. It is not just limited to those who travel. Recent studies indicate that the use of GPS technology is on an equal-level rise even in towns and cities with more and more people using it for tasks as simple as locating the nearest pizza outlet or the fastest, convenient route to it. Uses also include things like finding out which areas have currently got traffic jams, and re-routing , a facility that most GPS devices are capable of. By tracking out your current position, authorities will be in a better position to communicate with you, in the event of emergencies, or when roadside assistance is needed.

The current breed of GPS-enabled devices is largely automated, with the device connecting to the software database of the device provider. After that they can receive up-to-date and late breaking information. The GPS usually receives information that enables them to provide turn-by-turn directions. It couldn’t get easier than this. Also, most feature a choice of male or female voice accompanying the directions. The GPS technology comes in handy especially when planning long trips that include new places . This cuts down on the time spent in figuring out the best routes and according to either time or distance, either will be greatly reduced by this. Also, few providers even give an image of the directions being pointed out, thus reducing the possibility of taking the wrong route.

Another interesting and useful feature of most GPS-enabled devices is that they have a HUGE number of built-in points-of-interest, which can vary from being as regional as the local neighborhood church to important national attractions like the Lincoln Memorial or Mount Rushmore. Whatever they may be, they allow for easy searching for just about any place that you need! Not only with searching, either you will practically be guided right to the exact location! In this way the GPS technology is very useful, and helps millions of souls find their way about unfamiliar territory! This comes in handy in cases of emergencies when the rescue teams can locate the stranded or injured easily. There are a million choices to choose from, and one can easily get misguided and confused, looking at the huge variety.

GPS Buying Tips

The following things should be kept in mind before buying a GPS device for travel. However, as travel needs of various people differ to some extent, specific needs can be met by personally examining the features of a GPS device. These guidelines are general but should serve the majority of travelers seeking a GPS.

First, the screen size should be considered. A larger screen enables better visibility from a distance, and that is a very important thing for most users. The display should be well lit, with simple menus, to facilitate use by elderly people. The second thing to be considered is the built in memory, as many people prefer to pre-set their preferred routes and the internal memory helps in storing that information. It also stores the points-of-interest data. The third thing to be considered is the battery life. This is perhaps the most important consideration, as you wouldn’t want the GPS device to die out just as you entered an unknown place where there is no one to ask help for nearby! That could present major difficulties, especially in a foreign country. Thus a good battery life is a must and optional battery backups should be looked into to cover any kind of lengthy trip. The fourth thing which would come handy for city users, is to check whether the device can receive live updates about traffic jams and other issues, so that alternate routes can be worked out. Whether or not the device can receive information on re-routing should also be considered. These are the basic features to look for, while choosing a GPS device for travel.

Moving on, here are some of the detailed features that buyers should look for in a GPS device. In addition to the four elements outlined above, you should also look into the following. First, you must make sure that the latest technology is being used in your GPS device. Many manufacturers lure people by using fancy terms that can be confusing to people so as to trick them into buying their products. Make sure that the latest, high sensitivity GPS receiver is installed in your GPS device. Second, the maps must be completely up to date. Many companies do not update their maps regularly. This can be troublesome in the long run. One must look into how frequently the updating takes place, the level of detail that are included in the maps, and the accuracy of any charts included. Third,look into is the mounting hardware used for the unit you are considering. As the GPS device is a long-term installation, making sure that it is fixed sturdily is a must. This particular aspect must be looked into carefully, as there is no point in having your GPS device fall off with every bump that you encounter. These things will help narrow down the choice for a new GPS device for travel.

By considering all the points outlined in this article, you should be on the way to getting your new GPS and having many wonderful travels in the future.

That, of course, is the condition of people who work really hard and don’t find much time. There also exists a solid group of old-schoolers for whom the “organized tour” thing is a complete no-no. This is the breed that likes to rough it out, packing all the bags and throwing them in the back of the SUV, turn on the GPS, and hit the road. There, I just used the word GPS. It wasn’t’ intentional, it just came out. Just shows how much dependent we are on technology. You’ve got to admit, most of us are dependent on a lot on technology. One rarely sees a person who is out on travel without these things: a cell phone with GPS, internet, and for the younger travelers, an iPod, a laptop, and mobile internet for sure. Seems like they just can’t live without it. What happens when you take a teen apart from his iPod and laptop and then take him on a trip, trying to teach him to value family more than his gadgets? Incidents have occurred where teens, unable to bear separation from their music players and iPods for even a week, either sought refuge at internet cafes at their destinations, or in case of that not being an option, became moody and unpleasant to be around. All of this, of course, is just a background that tells you that technology in travel is a must, or rather, has become a must. You cannot ignore it. It has become a part of everyone’s life.

The frequent applications of technology in travel used by most of the travelers today are: the mobile phone, the laptop, and the iPod. The cell phone is now equipped with the latest digital cameras, thus eliminating the need to carry a separate camera. The cell phone can also provides you with a medium to connect with the outside world, because mobile internet is becoming so widely affordable and reasonable in pricing. The iPod, of course, has got all your favorite songs, from Elvis Presley to John Mayer to Michael Jackson to Eminem. They are all in one place, and offer a lot of choice too. And the laptop, though not carried by all, is a favorite with students and business people who can’t even enjoy a holiday without attending to business at least once or twice a day. Add one more gadget to this list: the tablet. A term that’s becoming a household word already, a tablet is referred to as a computer that is portable and is equipped with a touch screen as the primary input device. Tablets are designed to be operated and owned by an individual on the go. The most popular tablet is the Apple iPad, which was launched amidst a lot of fanfare very recently. With the iPad, technology has reached new levels, and portability is awesome. Tablets are smaller in size and lighter than laptops, and thus make for an excellent choice during travel.

The tablets is a natural device for travel with its high entertainment focus on movies, songs, books, always on connectivity (no need to wait for the computer to boot), and light portable design. The tablet competition is already heating up, and new features like dual cameras and the ability to have video conferences on the go will ensure better response from the traveling public. Tablets provide seamless connectivity, and with large, touch-screen displays, they are a boon to use, even for the elderly. The main travel groups that use the tablet are: leisure travelers and business travelers. Though the business travel class always prefers laptops, which cater to their extensive needs, the tablet trend is catching up. The latest models are now integrating more and more features on to the tablets, to ensure they stand in the first place in providing the latest technology to the consumer. There are applications such as Flipboard, which aggregates Facebook, Twitter and other feeds into a very appealing magazine-like style, thus taking advantage of the tablet platform.

Most of the current tablets feature the Android operating system, something that was specially built for mobile use. The iPad, of course, uses the OS X , and now many are being developed on Linux as well. The advantage of an operating system based on Linux will be that users can modify the tablet according to their specific needs, and not stick to the brand configuration. Microsoft Windows 7 Mobile is another operating system that is gaining popularity. Most tablets come with a screen size of 12 inches, with a resolution of 1280×800 pixels. Apart from the iPad, let’s take a look at some of the up-and-coming competition on the market: the HP Slate, a prototype as of now, appears to be a very good tablet. Next, the Dell Streak uses the Android operating system and has got a whole load of interesting new features. Next is the Asus tablet, which features android as well. These three apart, there has been a long-running rumor that Google and HTC are going to release a tablet, and this looks more promising than most of the things that are available now. We will just have to wait and see. Whatever is the case. we now have to accept that tablets have become an indispensable part of ourtravel lives!

The attack was dreamt up by security expert Sam Kamkar who demonstrated at the Black Hat hackers conference a website exploiting common shortcomings in a router to reveal it’s real-world location.

He tricked the router into believing the request for it’s ID information was coming from the connected PC, not from the Internet.  He then used the revealed MAC address with a geo-location feature in Firefox to interrogate the database Google gathered when it made its Street View photographs.

The data, which was controversially gathered, linked the MAC addresses of routers to GPS co-ordinates.  “This is geo-location gone terrible,” said Mr Kamkar during his presentation. “Privacy is dead people. I’m sorry.”

Mikko Hyponnen, senior researcher at F Secure called the demonstration “very interesting” adding that such a technique could be used for “stalking or targeted attacks against an individual”.

“The fact that databases like Google Streetview’s Mac-to-Location database or the Skyhook database can be used in these attacks just underlines how much responsibility companies that collect such data have to safeguard it correctly.” said Mr Hypponen

In 2005, Mr Kamkar created a work that helped him gain more than 1 million MySpace friends in a single day.

In this article I will show you how to install and use the handy pyTrainer sports logging tool.

Features

pyTrainer has a number of helpful features:

• Graphing.
• GPX imports.
• Supports Garmin GPX files.
• Supports Google Earth kml *.files.
• Supports dumps directly from Garmin GPS device.
• Add/remove sports.
• Export as common separated lists.
• Publish results to WordPress.

Installation

The installation of this tool is quite simple. All you need to do is open up your Add/Remove Software tool and do the following:

1. Search for the term “pytrainer”  (no quotes).
2. Mark pyTrainer for installation
3. Click Apply to install.

That’s it. You can also install from source. To do this follow these steps:

1. Download the latest source package from the download page.
2. Open up a terminal window and change to the directory containing the downloaded file.
3. Issue the command tar xvfz pytrainer-XXX.tar.gz (Where XXX is the release number).
4. Change into the newly created directory with the command cd pytrainer-XXX (Where XXX is the release number).
5. Issue the command sudo python setup.py install (If you are using a distribution that doesn’t use sudo then change to the root users and issue the same command minus sudo).
6. Issue the command pytrainer -i.

Once installed you will find pyTrainer in the Start > Office menu. Click on that to start up the application.

Usage

Figure 1

When you start up pyTrainer you will be welcomed by a very user-friendly and clean interface (see Figure 1). This main window offers you a quick calendar with which to jump to each day’s exercise. If you didn’t exercise on the day you are looking at your calendar, nothing will show in the bottom left window.

One of the first things you will want to do is to open up the preferences window and then select whether you use Metric or US customary units. Open preferences by clicking Edit > Preferences. Once open select the measurement system you use, click OK, and then close pyTrainer. I have discovered that the change in units of measurement will not take place until you close and re-open the tool.

With your measurements correct, now you want to go back to the Preferences window and add/remove to the Sports list and enter your details in the Athlete tab. Once you have done that you can fill in a few other bits of information such as Maximum heart rate (220 minus your age) . Fill out all of that information and you are ready to begin adding exercise information.

To add a workout just click File > New and then fill in all of the required information. Over time you will start to see your graphs start to fill out and become much more useful.

Final thoughts

We only really touched the surface of this outstanding training application. In upcoming articles I will show you how to further extend the usage of this tool by including Google earth file imports as well as adding waypoints and more. If you are a serious athlete you know how important it is to track your training. Give this tool a try and you might find you become reliant on it’s information as well as it’s ease of use.

So, a very interesting question is how does such technology work?

They consult a service called Skyhook Wireless. They drive around settlements in several countries and record the GPS co-ordinates of where they pick up certain wireless access points, so when users send the access point’s MAC to them, it can return the co-ordinates. Many areas aren’t covered but if you would still like to use it, and let others use it, one can manually add details to the system. The same system is used to correct erroneous listings.

Many services already make use of WiFi-based location services.

For example, GPS units may struggle to provide an accurate location indoors or in an urban environment, but Skyhook Wireless doesn’t have this problem. Software like Google Maps on the iPhone use WiFi-based location in such scenarios.

Several online websites also use WiFi-based location services to return information based on the locality. Some are social networking, like brightkite and Fire Eagle to local search, although these services tend to be American. MyLoki is another service which relies on geolocation, and this allows location data to be exported to RSS feeds, Facebook or even Twitter. It can also grab data from ‘channels’ and plot things nearby on a map. These ‘channels’ include everything from Starbucks coffee shops to geotagged photos, Yelp reviews and cinemas.

Google Gears uses its own geolocation service, which websites like ITN use, but this is much worse than Geode/Skyhook, being accurate for me to about 150 miles instead of 15 meters!

Skyhook-based locations are built into the iPhone, the Opera web-browser and Mozilla Geode.

Privacy concerns are put to ease as data is only sent if you confirm the website can have access to it, and the software lets you specify how accurate a location you’re willing to send.

The idea of geolocation and WiFi positioning is fantastic. Eventually, it will allow you to open your laptop and then share your location with others, should you choose, or find the nearest restaurant in a distant city!

OpenStreetMap is a project to provide maps, like Google Maps does. Unlike sites like Google, though, OpenStreetMap provides its data freely under a Creative Commons licence.

The site relies on its users to utilise their GPS devices to record roads, something that can be done through several pieces of software available for platforms ranging from Linux to PocketPC to iPhones. These pieces of software produce journeys which can be traced around, labelled using software and then uploaded to OSM. As roads change, other users can then edit these pieces of information.

Many websites and appplication, especially those involved in the free software movement, utilise OpenStreetMap’s data.

To contribute to this project, you need a GPS receiver. Then, you need software to log it in the ‘GPX’ format; the project’s wiki lists a number of pieces of software for several platforms which do that. TopoGrafix Personally, I use Track n Trail for iPhone. OSM seem to like GPSBabel for non-mobile operating systems. Maps are then uploaded to OpenStreetMap, where using a Java editor they are edited and published. If this sounds complicated, a clearer how-to guide is available.

To summarise, OpenStreetMap is a wonderful idea. Coverage is patchy outside major cities, although most major roads in most Western countries are marked. There is no harm in contributing, naturally! It gives but more access to free information.

GPX on the other hand is the GPS exchange format, a light-weight XML data format which is more or less the standard gps transfer format on the Internet. While most web applications and software programs support those formats most gps devices have their own proprietary format that cannot read gpx or kml data.

That is where Route Converter comes into play. The multi-platform tool can convert gps data between various formats and provides a few extra options to adopt the data to the needs of the user.

Router Converter is a Java application which means it requires Java to be run. On the positive side the software does not require any installation.

The easiest way to use the application is to load a source gps file, select a destination file format and save it. About 30 gps formats are supported by Route Converter, the best way to find out if the gps format of your gps device is supported is to check out the features page of Route Converter that lists all the supported formats.

If several tracks are stored in the gps file one can be selected. The positions can be moved around or reversed as well.

The GPS tracking device was put into a briefcase and sent away with the DHL transportation company which flew it around the world using travel instructions given to them by the artist. It took them 55 days to finish the route and deliver the tracking device to the artist who downloaded the date to his computer to create the drawing from it.

The drawing was created in one stroke that passed six continents and 62 countries and a total length of 110664 kilometers.

The artist created several Youtube videos and published proof of what he did accomplish by posting pictures of the GPS device and the delivery notes as well as two Youtube videos detailing several aspects of the project. What can I say, it’s interesting if you like it or not. Maybe a new art form, GPS art was created. What do you think ?

Update: The web page is not longer available.