Seagate’s new 4TB internal hard drive is now available from NewEgg for $205.
To put this in perspective, the first 4GB hard drives started appearing in August 1997. That’s a 1000-fold increase in storage space in under 16 years. At this rate, if they’re still making magnetic platter-style hard drives, we’ll be up 40TB by 2018 and 400TB by 2023.
The 32GB HP Touchpad I purchased during last year’s fire sale for $150 is running QGIS for Android. This is full-featured open source desktop GIS software I’m talking about. It works well and is surprisingly fast.
First you’ll want to set up your HP Touchpad to dual-boot into WebOS or Android 4.0.3 (Ice Cream Sandwich) using the instructions here: http://liliputing.com/2012/01/how-to-install-android-4-0-on-the-hp-touchpad-cyanogenmod-9-alpha.html CyanogenMod is undoubtedly the best aftermarket firmware you can get for your HP Touchpad, and now’s the time to take the plunge if you haven’t already done so. I’m running CyanogenMod 9 Alpha 2 and only the microphone and camera aren’t working yet. Also, the article mentions a lot of users having issues with wireless connectivity. I have yet to experience any problems (using WPA2-PSK on a TP-Link Wireless N router).
Boot into Android (it’s the default now), set up your wireless connection and then download the latest nightly build of QGIS for Android directly onto your Touchpad: http://hub.qgis.org/wiki/android-qgis/Download You’ll also need access to the Android Marketplace, or Google Play or whatever they’re calling it now-a-days.
Load up the Touchpad with your favorite QGIS project and data layers. QGIS for Android will open a .qgs project file created from your Windows or Linux version of QGIS. All your symbology, labels and project settings transfer over. S-l-i-c-k-! Just tell QGIS the new location of your data layers when you open the project from your tablet, then save.
Pinch to zoom and swipe to pan the view. You can play with the font size and icon size inside Quantum GIS (settings, options, general tab) to suit you preferences.
As you may expect from an alpha version app running atop an alpha version tablet operating system, not everything is going to work perfectly. The attribute table is unusable unless you put it in docked mode (also under QGIS settings). Not a lot of plug-ins are supported yet, but you know it’s just going to get better. IMHO, this is a good entry point to start playing around with Desktop GIS on a tablet device.
Actually, Ovi Maps 3D is about as real as you can get. The animation/rendering speed is the best I’ve seen so far.
Updated April 4, 2012 to include new 3d cities: Currently the 3D cities include Barcelona, Berlin, Boston, Cape Town, Chicago, Copenhagen, Florence, Helsinki, Las Vegas, London, Los Angeles, Madrid, Melbourne, Miami, Milan, New York, Oslo, Prague, Rome, San Francisco, Stockholm, Sydney, Toronto, Venice and Vienna.
Google Earth has elevation profiles! Slicker than slick! Draw a line or path using the ‘Add Path’ tool then right-click it and select ‘Show Elevation Profile’. Move the mouse along the profile to see the corresponding location on the globe. Click and drag along the profile to see just that segment.
It works with directions too. Enter your starting & ending address and voila:
Great planning tool for hiking or biking.
Interesting article. http://bit.ly/lEWxlD
Spring has sprung and what better way to enjoy it than to get out there and explore. But before you do, fire up Google Earth, turn on the Flickr Photos layer, then zoom around and look for high concentrations of photos. You’re bound to find something interesting nearby that you never knew about.
