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Comment by zikduruqe | Hacker News Reader

Even neater, I use CoMaps on my linux laptop, with a USB GPS receiver.

It beats using IP based Geocoding.

Another alternative to geoIP could be WiFi-based location detection (comparing which WiFis are near you to a database). https://beacondb.net aims to replace Mozilla's shut-down location services, with public data releases once a proper anonymisation scheme has been figured out to avoid another Mozilla event. Google and Apple apparently also have usable back-ends: afaik it's not documented or meant for public use so ymmv, but the reverse engineered API is apparently super stable and not requiring any auth.

In case you have a second device where you'd like location, or ever don't have the USB GNSS receiver on you or something :)

Yep. When I was screwing around getting geoclue to play around with NMEA sentences, I ran across beacondb. I might replace geoclue's back end with it next time I feel like messing around.

I'm a little confused. You mean for getting your own location, I guess?

Yes. Default location on your linux computer will use geoclue2, which will give you a location based on your IP address. My location is about 30 miles away since my IP is associated with Google Fiber.

https://github.com/deepin-community/geoclue-2.0/blob/master/...

Using a cheap USB GPS receiver you can get to meters level resolution, could use it mobile as a navigation device, and NTP timing too if you want.

Thanks, I get it now. I was thinking you used it for geolocating webvisitors or something, already wondered how you'd do that with your own GPS receiver.

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