Everywhere I've Been in the last 3 years - GPS points | Hacker News Reader

Everywhere I've Been in the last 3 years - GPS points

geoloqi.com

67 pointszeppelin_711 comments

@aaronpk we're currently looking at geoloqi but would you mind clarifying the benefits of using your service over iOS CLLocationManager calls? Specifically, have you analyzed the relative power consumption & accuracy of various CLLocationManager settings?

For example, we found the best power consumption when the desiredAccuracy value is set to kCLLocationAccuracyThreeKilometers, and we trigger the startMonitoringSignificantLocationChanges method before entering into the background. Surprisingly, the accuracy was much better than 3km but varied depending on device & OS. Similarly, the power consumption was affected by the background network access schemes & buffering we used, of course.

Anyway, we stopped our studies after sampling just a few devices (3GS, 4) and one or two OS releases (iOS 4.2 and 5.0). Don't mean to pry your secret sauce, but what type of calibration are you offering?

Thanks!

Sounds like you've been doing a good amount of experimenting as well! If you use the default startMonitoringSignificantLocationChanges method you'll get updates sporadically depending on things like what other apps are using location services, so it looks pretty crazy in the wild. It will also skip over many geofences if they are smaller than a kilometer or so. Our SDK manages this intelligently and can trigger the smaller geofences more reliably without the phone being in super-accurate mode the entire time. If you send your contact info through our site we'd be happy to talk about this further! https://developers.geoloqi.com/enterprise

If you're interested in this, check out my lightning talk I gave at SXSW: http://goo.gl/5wE3O

In the browser using WebGL, I animate through GPS trails of multiple cabs in the SF area, 1.1M points

I have always enjoyed tracking my movements when I travel and when I exercise. Here is the map I published a few years ago of my running habits: http://www.cederman.com/2009/03/i-love-data-part-3/

And when I drove through Belgium: http://farm1.staticflickr.com/37/86326741_a59159c807.jpg

This is fantastic! I've been ephemerally plotting my GPS tracks for a few years (though I'm only up to about 1.6M points), but the thought of publishing my tracks on the open internet has always seemed just a little too creepy, even by internet standards.

Beautiful maps, though.

I was really wondering what kept you motivated throughout the project before you demonstrated your early fascination with data.

Did you find yourself trying new paths simply to get a better picture or is this movement all natural?

Good question. The movement is all natural. I tried as much as possible to avoid changing my behavior because I was recording my location. I wanted to get an objective picture of where I had been.

One exception was at Stanford during WhereCamp, I walked around a park and spelled "Where"! http://www.flickr.com/photos/aaronpk/6983337983/in/pool-1772...

I did something like this with my Google Latitude history: http://imgur.com/a/gfzIH

but this visualization is far nicer!

Ooohhh - I wanna play:

http://minus.com/mbpulUhij3#1f

Now I'd like to see you join in data about the locations you spent time in to characterize your personal geography. Have you done this?

This app needs far greater publicity. I am gonna give it a good try. I would love to see more Android updates. Thanks.

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