This may be one of those situations where my love of a good story gets me in trouble with the more hard-minded scientific types among you, so please understand first that this is all intended in fun. Nonetheless, there are some intriguing facts here.

During the summer of 1997, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) repeatedly detected an extremely powerful underwater sound on an array of Cold War era hydrophones originally installed to listen for soviet submarines. "While it bears the varying frequency hallmark of marine animals, it is far more powerful than the calls made by any creature known on Earth." Phil Lobel, a marine biologist at Boston University, purportedly "agrees that the sound is most likely to be biological in origin," although his opinion appears to be in the minority. (Both quotes from this article at CNN.com.) The approximate origin of the sound has been identified as 50 S x 100 W, which is almost exactly the same latitude as Lovecraft's fictitious sunken city of R'lyeh, at 48 S x 123 W, although it is 1000 miles distant in terms of longitude. [Thanks, Maredith!]

You can listen to a sped-up version of "The Bloop" on the NOAA website here.

Want to fly your plane or drive your car using GPS signals, but finding that your receiver just isn't accurate enough to make things work? Well, MAKE subscriber Bruce Mueller writes in to point us at an impressive solution: an open-source real time kinematic GPS receiver. Researchers Tomoji Takasu and Akio Yasuda of Tokyo University developed the RTKLIB library to perform the RTK-GPS calculations, and then ported the whole thing to run on a low-cost beagle board and commodity GPS receiver. Want to try it out? Full source code, circuit layouts and instructions are provided on their site.

So, how does it work? A GPS receiver normally works by measuring the delay between an internally generated signal and one received by a satellite. This specially crafted signal makes it possible for the GPS receiver to find and latch onto the satellites signal, however it's wavelength limits the accuracy of the receiver. The real time kinematic system gets around this limitation by measuring the phase delay in the carrier signal. Because this signal has a much sorter wavelength, it is possible to make a system that is accurate to the centimeter.

If you own an older Android phone and were curious about Google Maps Navigation, but were afraid to ask, here's instructions to get it running. [via AndroidCentral]

Interesting article in the Telegraph about "Argleton," a town that appears in Google maps but does not, apparently, exist in the real world. The best theory I've heard is that the town is a "trap" intended to catch those who steal map data. [Thanks, Glen!]

The first presenter at last Thursday's Dorkbot Austin was a gentleman named Mikal Hart, who described his "Reverse Geocaching Puzzle." Designed and built as a wedding gift for an old friend moving to France, the box incorporates an Arduino with a custom shield. A prominent button on the lid, when pressed, returns a distance, in kilometers, on the LCD display (if a GPS signal can be acquired), and counts button-presses up to 50 attempts. No directional information is provided, so the box must be moved about in order to triangulate the location it wants. Mikal also included a cunningly-disguised back door to allow it to be opened in the event of battery failures or bugs.

Cool post over on Hack-A-Day about corn maze entrepreneur Scott Skelly, shown above with his trusty GPS-enabled riding lawn mower. Scott explains his maize-maze-making process thusly:

A maze starts as nothing more than a large field of corn. The design is created using a computer, then translated into GPS coordinates by fitting it into a field whose outline coordinates were previously captured on foot. Once the field coordinates are reconciled with the map design the data is used in one of two ways; the routes can be made by tilling under a path when the corn is very young, or more commonly it is cut lawn-mower-style when the corn is anywhere from knee-high to full grown. This corn-meets-satellite hack makes for a whole lot of fun!

As part of a course at the United States Military Academy at West Point, maker Roy D. Ragsdale developed a prototype Street View-like camera using a laptop, $300 in off-the-shelf components, and open source software. A Python script captures eight 1280x1024px JPEG files that are then stitched together and uploaded to Google Earth.

Construction was straightforward. On a flat octagonal heavy-cardboard base, I glued small posts for the cameras' clips to latch onto. I aligned each unit and then placed the USB hubs and the GPS receiver in the middle. I secured the cables with Velcro and sandwiched everything with another piece of cardboard. The whole thing's the size of a small pizza box, weighing less than 1 kilogram. Excluding the notebook (a 2-gigahertz machine with 512 megabytes of RAM running Ubuntu Linux), the hardware cost about $300.

[thanks, Erico]

Layar, the augmented reality app for the Android platform will be incorporating 3D capabilities into the application in November. They've released a tech preview this week for PICNIC '09 in Amsterdam. The preview, which is available from the Android Market (and only works with-in and around the PICNIC festival) is a significant improvement over flat pins on a map and hopefully encourages people to further investigate the use of augmented reality.

[via androidworld.nl]

Face Removal Services brings us the GPS Beatmap -

Looping musical phrases are represented on a map as overlapping circular territories. As the vehicle approaches the center of a circle, the volume increases. In areas of the map where territories overlap the vehicle generates dynamic mixes of the overlapping musical phrases. By exploring a very large map of many overlapping territories the Beatmap creates complex, dynamic mash-ups.

The map can be explored on foot, by plane, boat, train, or automobile. In this footage the map is explored by car on the Bonneville Salt Flats, allowing the user to freely accelerate, swerve, and slam to a stop for optimum musical control of the instrument.

Some N97 owners find the integrated GPS doesn't perform as well as they'd like, so they've taken it upon themselves to render a proper fix. Using a copper wire attached to the existing antenna, Symbian Freak contributors Bruno and Teo have greatly improved their signal strength and can go about geocaching with fewer dropped signals.

[via Symbian Freak]

"During the summertime, I'll disappear for hours on long rides to nowhere and back. But I have to admit on some rides I've gotten so lost I have trouble finding my way home. Happily I was able to build a solar-powered GPS mapping machine, mostly from old computer parts and software I had sitting around my office." Author Brian Nadel's words in the introduction to his DIY Outdoors piece, "Solar-Powered Bike GPS," from the pages of MAKE Volume 10, are further testament to the fact that necessity is the mother of invention. Brian's homespun bike GPS cost him next to nothing to make because he had most of the parts on hand already (ah, the endless parts bin for that maybe-someday project do come in handy). He estimates the project would run about $150 total by combing through eBay and closeout retailers. Naturally, with the abundant varieties of bike, PDA, GPS receiver, and solar panel, you likely have to improvise for your personal combo but seeing how Brian set his up is the insight you need.

Here is the full article in our Digital Edition. No better time than a sunny summer day to get crackin on this project.

You can still pick up a back issue of MAKE Volume 10 in the Maker Shed.

The Scarlet Knight, named for sponsoring Rutgers University's mascot, is a cruise-missile-shaped autonomous ROV that was launched off the New Jersey coastline on April 27. If all goes according to plan, the Rutgers team will recover it off the westernmost coast of Spain right around Christmas day. That happy event would mark the first successful underwater crossing of the Atlantic by an unmanned vehicle. At the mission website, you can track the robot's position using Google Earth, monitor her battery status, and follow the team's navigation blog.

Using a GPS reference board and an Atmel ATMEGA324 microcontroller, engineer Bengamin Kokes has created a prototype GPS peripheral for his iPod nano. To display coordinates, the device uses Advanced iPod Remote commands to send a 4-color image to the iPod screen, a technique Kokes picked up after seeing it implemented in an Alpine car stereo.

iPod GPS [via Hack a Day]

Four-wheeled rovers (typically built on RC car platforms) dominated the entries, but there were three flying UAVs, and one spheroid (Nathan, with "labrat", pictured at right). One team had been designed a tethered model rocket to fly the course, but, unfortunately, didn't compete.

The race was structured as 3 heats. Each vehicle got 5 minutes to attempt a run; best time overall won the competition.

The first heat got off to a rough start. Only about half of the robots made it to the first corner of the building, and only the Mookie Mobile Death Pod 3000 made it around the whole course.

A slight wind from the West seemed to be affecting the DIY Drones's ability to precisely line up with the course route. It completed many test runs very well, but its first two official runs were disqualified for slightly cutting the corner of the course. The plane also found itself in multiple trees. The Boulder Fire Department was kind enough to help out with one, and other was low enough to get by hand.

The ground-based vehicles had other obstacles to deal with, including curbs, and people who foolishly think that curbs are a safe place to stand.

After nearly hitting its creator, Ohcraptheresalake! (who later went on to discover the creek) goes after innocent bystanders:
Entrants used the time between heats to tweak their robots according to the lessons learned from the previous run. Death Pod 3000, the only robot to complete the course in the first heat, solidified its lead in the second by lowering its time to 1:28.

In the end, though, the DIY Drones team scored a stunning success with their final try, with Chris Anderson's UAV completing the course in 36 seconds to win the tile!

The competition is over! Diy drones is 1st, with deathpod3000 taking the Engineers Choice award. Thanks for following!!! See you next year!

Jordi launches the DIY Drones UAV:
This robot used sparklers to avoid collisions with pedestrians:
All set on the starting line:

More:

• Sparkfun's coverage
• Sparkfun's twitter feed, with reports and pictures.
• Competition page
• Chris Anderson's DIY Drones Blog

This is a neat Touchable map via Wired Science. I wonder if Apple has a patent on the multitouch for non-portable applications.

He says it was designed for kids to learn geography, but it appears that the Department of Education was not paying the bill. It's kind of like the interactive LED table from EMS, but way more expensive and militaristic.

Artist and MAKE subscriber Michael Marcovici sent us the link to these amazing lamps he made out of mounted slides and reels of film. While you're at his site, check out his other amazing work.

Lights

There's an OpenStreetMaps group mapping going down in Manhattan next weekend, no prior GPS-ing required -

OpenStreetMap is only as good as the contributions of the people who edit it. To encourage and help people to edit, experienced mappers run Mapping Parties. The public is invited to them. Often the organiser has GPS receivers to loan out. The attendees receive instruction in the use of the GPS receiver. The simplest way to record information is to take waypoints, and write down notes about that waypoint number on paper. There are more efficient methods, but require more fussy fiddling and aren't appropriate for the beginner.

When they return to the venue with a list of waypoints, the experienced mapper(s) help them download them off the GPS receiver and load them into an OpenStreetMap editor such as JOSM. The points get converted into Map Features and the hand written information is entered. The data gets uploaded to the map and made available to the world.

The Mapping Party is a convivial, community event. After the mapping is finished, the participants share food and drinks, and enjoy themselves. It's a party, after all!

So how does Yahoo benefit from the project? Compared to traditional marketing it's a hell of a lot cheaper. It's also more novel-instead of talking about innovation it actually makes innovation, creating self-generating press along the way.

More about the ybike 1.0

Seth Just sent us a howto on getting GPSd working under OS X, along with a few useful applications.

Luckily, there's a wonderful open source project called gpsd which provides support for a wide raft of devices and protocols, and talks to an even wider assortment of software. Primarily, I wanted to be able to get my gps to talk to the network scanner Kismac, and Randall Munroe's cyborg.py script. Both of these were built to take information from gpsd, so I was in business. However, gpsd, which is designed to play nicely with Linux, takes some coaxing under OS X. This is meant to describe how I got it all running.

The documentation also walks you through getting GPSd working with the free gpsdrive navigation software. If you have a Mac laptop and a GPS, it's worth your half hour of time to get all of this running. You never know when you'll need to find a public access point or get last minute directions.

GPSd under OS X

While not the oddest fetish in Japan by a long way, there are some who travel the length of Japan enticed by the prospect of a compellingly designed manhole. But while even the most ardent manhole cover buffs come up against the problem of too many manholes, not enough time, they now have a powerful ally: a new community Web site called Ittemia Zensen, started in August this year and featuring pictures of manhole covers from various regions of Japan and details on their locations.

Contributors can add photos of manhole covers directly from their mobile phones, along with global positioning system (GPS) data to mark its location on the map. While the site features pictures primarily of manhole covers from the Kanto region, those from other regions are also available, and many manhole covers feature locals sights and scenes, such as lanterns from the Kanto Festival in Akita; "gassho-zukuri" (thatched gable roof) farmhouses of Shirakawa in Gifu Prefecture, and scenes from the port city of Kobe.

Robert Sollis, a student at the Royal College of Art wrote an email to Google asking for a marker to be placed on Google Maps for the college's temporary site in Kensington Gardens. All he got back from Google was an automated response, so he decided to create his own marker out of individual carpet tiles, each measuring 185mm square which directly corresponds to Google's pixel information from their satellite images. Pretty impressive build that also reminds us of the MAP project.

Google Carpet via It's Nice That

Yesterday I bought the first cellphone of my life. I had been using the junker phone that my niece lost two years ago when she was in 7th grade. It resurfaced when she finally cleaned her closet. The phone was already on the plan and they had replaced it Tmobile was going to charge to turn it off. My entry phone almost worked, and it wasn't pink. Eventually I would need to get an 'adult phone'.

So a few months ago Google started making noise about the Android. Open source, touch screen, 3G, browser, all the good stuff in modern phones. I had thought about getting an iPhone, but that was so last Spring. Verizon has a few iPhone copies, but they are basically wannabees. Why not get the real thing?

Since I live in a fringe area, they don't have Tmobile stores nearby. The noncorporate stores don't carry the phone yet. I went twice to the store on Newbury street in Boston, but their hours are not late enough for my schedule. Yesterday I finally got my G1.

My uncle asked last night if the G1 was any better than the iPhone. I told him that it probably isn't better as far as a design standpoint. Apple has been working up the various parts of that interface for years. The true value to me is that the Android and G1 are open source. By encouraging people to not only use the phone but actually improve it, the G1 has much more potential than the locked down design from Apple.

Here are a few observations about the device and what it has me thinking about:

The web browser is okay, pages load pretty slow. Having a web browser in my pocket is definitely a plus.

When you turn the phone on its side, the screen doesn't adjust. You have to open the slider to get it to switch to landscape mode. That's annoying to me, and certainly somebody will hack into the motion sensor and fix the flaw.

On the keyboard, there are not arrow keys. The keys are pretty small, but seem to work ok. After a bit of practice I have gotten the hang of a bit more. It took me a while to figure out that the rolly ball is like a track ball and allows you to move the cursor around. It is pretty sensitive.

Email: The phone is linked to my Google account. So this means that gmail, google documents, youtube and blogger all know that I am me. I think I signed in once and everything else was good to go.

Photos: One of the reasons that I got this phone was that it has a 3 megapixel camera. A couple of years ago I started carrying a Nikon S4 digicam in my pocket every day. Having a camera with me all the time changed the way I think about photography. That camera finally died in September, and I have missed the smallish size of it compared to my larger Canon S515. The exposure of the G1's camera is not that great in low light. It is not yet seamless to shoot and have it go straight to my flickr account. At this point, the best way seems to be to take the picture, then email it to the flickr address tied to my account. Pictures go up, but don't have tags, nor are they added to sets. Certainly that will be figured out. Since the phone has a micro sd card reader, I could use my other camera with an adapter and micro sd, then use the phone to upload on the fly. That will be useful. No video yet. Somebody will solve that issue, right?

Internet: for me, web access is a new thing to have in my pocket. I think I will like it.

Power: The battery took its first charge while I sat at the counter in the store and played with it. The seat was comfortable and there was much to learn about the phone, so I stayed a couple of hours. Several times it shut itself down in the store. I pointed this behavior out to the salesguy, but he did not seem inclined to replace the phone. A great feature of power is that the phone charges with a standard mini USB plug. This means that I can get a charge any time I am near a computer. It also means that I do not need to have a special phone charger. They tried to sell a car charger to the guy after me in line. I quietly told him that the phone used USB and saved him twenty bucks. You could probably use a Minty Boost to top it off if for some reason you were out of reach of the great USB.

Reception: This phone has much better reception in my fringy town in the suburbs than my middle school hand me down. Originally, I thought that I would only be able to use it as a phone around home base. Instead, I have been able to get email and web access in town, and the coverage seems better than I anticipated. Apparently the 2G coverage includes data. In the house, the phone does not seem to be able to see the wireless N router very well. Tomorrow I will see how it likes the routers at school.

Maps: Since the phone is tied to all things Google, google maps and street view are ready to roll. I looked at the street in Boston where I often park my car, but the photos must have been taken on a day when I was out of the city. When there is good coverage from lots of cell towers, the phone can pinpoint its gps location pretty well. Out in the boonies, it shows the one tower that is in range. One really nice thing about that is that the phone can show me where the cell towers are in my area. I have been wondering where the cell towers are for quite some time. It appears that the phone can show me the location of the Tmobile cell antennae through the maps data. The other day, I was actually seriously considering looking up the coverage maps in the FCC documentation. To me, the gps reception/simulation means that back country geocaching will not be successful, but innercity hunting could work fine.

Physical form: The phone is a bit clunky and big, but not as big as a blackberry. Last night some Blackberry addicts found me out at a family party and had a wonderful time showing me how good my phone was. I was worried about the hinge, but it seems sturdy, and I think HTC is the company tht makes the Sidekick. Getting the back off to change the sim card and battery was a tool-free event. Fingernails and a couple of tugs got the plastic back off.

Interface: I have found the interface both good and a bit complex. I like the touch screen response, but wish it had the magnification feature I see on the iPhone. My 10 year old daughter has enjoyed poking around in the menus, and figured out the music player aspect pretty well before I did. She seems to think that it will be easy to learn the features and add more capability to it.

What does the G1 Android have me looking to learn? It would be nice to make a headphone adapter that can make use of the regular 1/8th inch stereo plug. The board and surface mount components could be made easily in the Fab Lab. A usb keyboard would be nice to be able to plug in and use at times. Custom cut vinyl will be very possible, there is lots of real estate on the back that is just waiting for a skin. My friend Perry is anxious to learn about programming in Java so he can make his own apps for the android. Could students in programming classes learn to program for the G1?

What possibilities do you see in the G1 Android? What does it make want you to learn? What has it taught you already? How will it change the way people see phones and hardware? Can it change the way people learn?

This is a little blog post about a device I built to provide me with an accurate time reference I can use to synchronise all the timepieces in my house. It used a GPS module and a PIC 16F628 microcontroller with a small two line LCD screen to display the time (UTC and local). Everything is housed in a art deco style casing with eye pieces to peer into the inner workings of the device. A crank handle on the side must be turned to cause the display to light up in a flickering manner similar to and old mutoscope machine.

So, I wanted to add a GPS receiver to my Mini 9, but I didn't want to have to use a dongle or other external device. I figured that a netbook really ought to just have it built in, so that's what I decided to do...

The idea behind the GPS-A-Sketch was to create an open shareable design that many users could use as the foundation for a modular, user-programmable, portable, GPS receiver. As the technology comes down in price (A Garmin eTrex of slightly lower specs can currently be had for $130), this technology should begin to be used for alternative uses (other than getting directions to the Walmart).

Potential uses could be in entertainment (locative games), art, r/c robotics, tracking and hopefully some things I haven't even thought of.

The device should be easy to program (with user designed modular libraries), and allow for modular hardware addition, such as WiFi, accelerometers, sensors and interface components. I've chosen the Arduino based RBBB from modern devices as the initial processor, because of the vast resources and ease of use associated to the Arduino microcontroller platform, and the tiny form factor of the RBBB.

For now, the cost of a unit comes in at about $130 with the addition of an FTDI cable and shipping, bringing the total closer to $160 on a per/unit basis. Obviously there will eventually be ways to get this cost down below $100, including a single circuit board, and some shared bulk ordering on components.

Jon Warner of Argonne National Laboratories set out to examine GPS security one Saturday afternoon. Jon is part of the Vulnerability Assessment Team (VAT), a small group whose goal is to uncover flaws in our systems so that they can be fixed. “We try to think like the bad guys,” Jon said, “so that we can plug the holes they might use.”

To test out GPS security, Roger Johnston, head of the VAT, challenged the team to demonstrate how to steal a cargo truck and get away with it. Cargo trucks generally contain a GPS tracking device which relays position and speed information to a central office. This enables freight companies to track their drivers’ locations and ensure that trucks are on course. If a truck veers off course, it sets off an alarm at headquarters. If an attacker could falsify or “spoof” GPS information, he or she could hijack the truck and steal the cargo without being noticed.

The chips cost $4,000 plus an annual fee of $2,200....

Xega, based in the central Mexican city of Quererato, designed global positioning systems to track stolen vehicles until a company owner was kidnapped in broad daylight in 2001. Frustrated by his powerlessness to call for help, the company adapted the technology to track stolen people.

Most people get the chips injected into their arms between the skin and muscle where they cannot be seen. Customers who fear they are being kidnapped press a panic button on an external device to alert Xega which then calls the police.

"Before, they only kidnapped key, well-known economically successful people like industrialists and landowners. Now they are kidnapping people from the middle class," said Sergio Galvan, Xega's commercial director.

...Xega sees kidnapping as a growth industry and is planning to expand its services next year to Brazil, Colombia and Venezuela.

Anyone know or have some guesses?

More:

• RFID and Text-To-Speech Modules Video Podcast.
• Interview with RFID implanter.
• RFID aesthetics article.
• @ DEFCON RFID World record attempt...
• MAKE VIDEO PODCAST - Getting "Chipped"

It's the first day of 5 in 5 and there's a parade of projects. See the gang free themselves from Positioning Systems, choose their food decisively, sash a speaker, stick socks to a tee, mate software circles, print Mega Man, enliven their claw prizes, greet with robots, calm a TV, root for poops, Eco-nomize a billfold, season some mittens, dramatize their voicemail, cut their own coins and Franken their Faces. This motivated group of ITP students and their Guest Star, Bre Pettis did each project in a single day and they'll do another four each this week for a total of around 50 different projects in five days!

Days: 1 2 3 4 5