Mapping Hacks

Geo-Warchalking with 2-D Barcodes #94

Chapter 9, Mapping with Other People

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HACK

unit to your laptop and get a continuous stream of geo-annotated Wi-Fi

stumbles from a program like kismet for *NIX, kismac or MacStumbler for

the Macintosh, or netstumbler for the PC. See “Map Nearby Wi-Fi

Hotspots”

[Hack #17] and “Map Wardriving (and other!) Data with MapS-

erver”

[Hack #92] for more details on stumbling your own maps of wireless

access points.

Poor person’s location finding. You don’t have a GPS. But you have the Inter-

net! A local mapping or geocoding service can help you figure out where you

are. In “Geocode a U.S. Street Address”

[Hack #79], we show how to use http://

geocoder.us to provide latitude and longitude for most U.S. addresses, as

well as intersections. In the UK, you can get this information from http://

www.streetmap.co.uk/. Sadly the big online mapping services like MapQuest

and Multimap no longer give latitudes and longitudes for free. At the time of

writing, Maporama still does, as detailed in “Tweak the Look and Feel of

Web Maps”

[Hack #37]. One of the authors of this book used the Maporama

geocoding service to look up the locations of his hotels for a trip to Italy and

then enter them into his GPS.

Instead of recording places with latitude and longitude, you could just

record the URL of a mapping site pointing to that location. “Put a Map on

It: Mapping Arbitrary Locations with