Anyone who has followed Spiderman knows about the Spidy Tracer – a device that Spiderman can throw at his enemies which allows him to trace bad guys wherever they go. Apparently somone at the LA Police Department is a big Spiderman fan, because they’ve started using GPS unit they can propel at cars to track their movements rather than engage in a highspeed chase. Way to go true believers!

A company called Mapion has launched a new service that lets phone users point at a building, click, and find out what’s in that building.  If your phone is GPS and integrated compass enabled, you can wonder around the streets of Tokyo pointing and clicking all over the place to find out what’s in what building.  Pretty cool.

Via Engadet

I’ve mentioned on the podcast my interest in virtual worlds and gaming worlds in particular.  Here’s a google map that details the World of Warcraft atlas.  They’ve actually attributed the map pretty well and the ‘arial photography’ is pretty decent!

I personally find virtual worlds mapping an interesting niche in the mapping world.  Most world builders have no real training in any sort of geographic principles, so I find it facinating how they link various geographic regions together in world.  Here’s an interesting site that shows maps for vintage video games (and a couple of not so vintage ones too!)  I’m hoping we get to do a podcast in the future on virtual world mapping.

This story on CNN demostrates why you need to clearly mark a geocache as such. From the article, “In June, a bomb squad in De Pere, Wisconsin, used a robot-mounted shotgun to blast the lid off a suspicious-looking military ammunition box found in a park. It also turned out to be a geocache.” It’s a little bit funny, but also a tad scary. So paint a big red ‘geocache’ on your geocache boxes!

Via Digg

The Link has been corrected now!  Sorry for any confusion. 

While there are a few tools out there to do this sort of thing, I thought this one was a nice, clean, simple interface for it. It features AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML) as its base technology, which helps make it faster than most implementations. It’s a pretty usefull tool for those interested in doing IP lookups to find geographic coordinates.

Here’s an interesting article about the effects of sleep deprivation. The interesting note is that sleep deprivation appears to most aversely affect spatial learning and spatial tasks! So if you’re having trouble with any of your GIS projects, maybe you need more sleep….?

The full article.