While Hurricane Ivan whips ashore in the gulf coast this morning, it's nothing but "fun and fog" for north Virginia this morning.

Our thoughts and prayers go out to the gulf coast folks this morning..

Up until recently, sunrise was before 6:30am. For the past few weeks, I could watch the sun rise as I drove to work. Not any longer. Soon the leaves will start changing and fall will be upon us.

I'm hoping to visit Catoctin or the Shenandoah this fall with the Sony Clie UX-50 and Canon SD100 Elph. It's been a few years since we got some great fall foliage pics.

My Sony Clie TG-50 has been given a new home by a co-worker, and I now have a Sony Clie UX-50 instead. Now Vicky and I both have a Sony Clie UX-50 with 512MB MemoryStick Pro.

I was able to restore from my TG-50 backup to the UX-50, so I didn't lose any apps or information. Now I just need to recreate all my Bluetooth trusted devices and network connections.

Using TiNGLE for OSX, I was able to add 17 out of the 23 WLANs I found as newly discovered WLANs in WiGLE database for Loudoun County, VA. The other 6 had been found by other wardrivers (amusingly enough, someone else had already discovered my 'Foremans-B' and 'Foremans-G' WLANs).

With Hurricane Frances approaching the Florida coast, Flagler county residents have begun evacuating. My mom called yesterday to tell me she had pulled her corvette and solara into the garage, loaded up the RV with pets and neighbors, and that she is leading an exodus of seniors to Mississippi.

It looks like us in Virginia may be feeling the effects of it by Sunday. Vicky and I are going to Atlantic City with family for the weekend, so I may blog it from up there.

Grilled chicken sandwich with fries and a coke... it's whats for lunch.

(*eep* ...do not look at the Powerbook monitor... nothing to see here... move along)

Now that I have a bluetooth GPS, I thought I might as well try it with MacStumbler and KisMAC. With MacStumbler, the bluetooth GPS was recognized instantly and it started retrieving the lat & long of discovered access points. With KisMAC, I need to configure and compile GPSd to allow realtime GPS use.

Given the number of red dots in the above map, you can see most of my neighborhood is secure. One of our homeowner's association members is a network engineer, so in addition to running an access point with an amp and several directional antennas, he's given sermons on the use of WEP and MAC address locking. If you would like to see the discovered wireless LANS from Chantilly through Sterling, I found a number of insecure WLANs along Sterling Blvd, but found my neighborhood mostly secure.

Where in the World is Ken? is very much a work in progress, but this page shows how the code is currently working and what the final result will eventually look like. I still need to code the timer routine to do website updates every 10 minutes, but then I might be able to release the python source and step-by-step notes if others have a bluetooth gps and laptop or handheld to run it with.

I also need to link to it from Innovations: Adventures in Moblogging with an INCLUDE to a lite version of the page, but I am WAYYY TOO TIRED after working on this for nearly two days to do a link & include tonight.

Anyhoo... getting there.

OMG, it works! :)

I wanted to thank the good folks in the Apple Discussions under "Bluetooth", and the nameless reps at PharosGPS.com and gps4fun.com for their help today. I've successfully connected my Pharos Bluetooth GPS to the Powerbook and retrieved a streaming GPS lat/long in realtime.

I'm now in the process of writing a python script to grab the lat/long, pass it as terraserver url params, thumbnail the resulting image, and update a webpage with the resulting date/time, lat/long, and a thumbnail of the area image. Currently, the Powerbook keeps a 24/7 internet connection to the Motorola V600, and run the python script on it to update a webpage.

Once I get everything to a useable stable state, I'll release the webpage, source script, and a step-by-step process on how others can do this too.

I'm in an Apple Discussion forum reading others' experiences with Bluetooth GPSes and how to configure them. Here was my contribution and question:

I just recently bought the Pharos Bluetooth GPS (PT200, which is an iGPS-360 in an iGPS-BT dock). I paired it without a problem, but only this morning got it working with the Powerbook.

I used the Bluetooth Serial Utility and created a service called "iGPS". Its mapped as a Outgoing port to device "Pharos iGPS-BT" using the "GPS RFcom" service.

Using TerraBrowser, I selected Protocol "NMEA", port "iGPS", and Connected. The light on the GPS changed from the blinking Discovery mode to the steady connected mode, but TerraBrowser doesn't appear to update even after enabling "Live Updates". I need to move my laptop and GPS to a better view of the sky to see if the GPS isn't getting a signal, or if it isn't passing one.

Is there anyone else using a Pharos Bluetooth GPS? Does anyone have any suggestions/experiences?