I’ve had it for quite a while and love it: a new and improved of my original GPS design for my D200. This time it’s smaller, practical and easy; just mount it on the flash shoe, plug it in to the 10-pin connector and turn it on! Within no time at all GPS coordinates will be flowing into the camera.

This version eliminates the need for the expensive MC-35 and even the special 10-pin connector. I’ve opted for a quick GPS receiver and encased everything in a small black box with a flash shoe mount. Because it is powered through the camera’s power source, a switch on the side of the box turns off the GPS. Version 3 should include a battery, rechargeable through a USB connection.

Read on for directions on how to create your own GPS. (more…)

Unfortunately, I am tiring of my iPhone; mostly due to the slow network speed. Now that the iTouch has all the cool apps as the iPhone (Goole Maps being the most useful for me) I’d like to give up the phone capabilities but still want to make phone calls through Google Maps. It would be great to have an iTouch application (or any platform in general) that could place a call through a bluetooth-connected cell phone. This would give me most of the same functionality of the iPhone without the headaches of the AT&T network.

I’m amazed at the tie-in between entertainment and social networking. A recent episode of my favorite podcast (Standford University’s Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders) had a group of notable entrepreneurs talking about the future of social networking. Of course their thinking is aligned with their company direction as of course my thinking is greatly influenced by the current events in my life.

Being a new father to twins and often pondering the potential cost of education has guided my thoughts on this podcast. We desperately need a shift in the education paradigm; I’m not sure I’ll be able to offer a decent education for my children considering the current college trends. I imagine removing the walls of the learning institutions and replacing them with social networks. And as technology removes the language and distance barriers, social networking can be the driving force behind sharing knowledge - there are so many bright people all over the world.

I also thought about the Borg (Star Trek’s Next Generation version of a highly functional social network) and how a primary goal is to get smarter though collective thinking. Social networking can be used as the medium to add brainpower to solve problems. I would hope in the years to come that the focus of social networking is to share information allowing us all to get smarter.

I just purchased an ElmScan 5 OBD II wireless scan tool to peek into the dynamics of my engine. That tool, coupled with my Nokia N800 and some cool software called CarMan sent my mind wandering.

I am able to capture the engine load at a point in time. What if I calculate an average load for a commonly traveled route? I can then take variations of that route and determine which path minimizes the impact to the car. I could factor a lot of variables including time, distance, average engine load, gas consumption, frustration, etc. I could then determine a set of heuristics that could suggest the optimal path.

This could be useful for frequently traveled routes like to and from work daily. Or any other profession that does a fair amount of repetitive automobile travel. I believe the software could just sit there gathering information with little input from the user. This would allow it to collect a vast amunt of info and make decent determintions based on user preferences.

Many of us with vacation homes don’t need to have full-time phone service at the second location. In fact, typically we only need it in one location at once. It would be great to have a little appliance that would allow us to share the service between the two locations.

If I have high-speed Internet access between the two homes this problem should be trivial to solve. All it takes is tunneling the dial tone across the Internet. How awesome it would be to have a box that I could plug in at home and connect my phone line and a network connection. Then, in the vacation home, I can take a sister appliance and plug into it a phone line and network connection. Even better would be some type of proximity configuration so the two appliances could discover and validate each other. The only task left after that is the tunneling of the dial tone and possibly dealing with being behind a NAT router, both of which are not difficult problems to solve.