Mostly a TODO-list/wishlist of travel-related software that would be useful to have or that would be interesting to implement if traveling didn't take most of the focus. Let us know if something listed here already exists.
Tool that takes a GPX file as input and as output generates a Google Earth style movie where the camera flies over all the locations in the GPX file, in the correct sequence, pausing and zooming in to places where there is a larger concentration of trackpoints (or where there is a waypoint). For such locations also human-readable placenames would be shown. In the corner of the movie, the timestamp (e.g. "Day 12, afternoon") that corresponds to the current location is shown.
The duration of the resulting movie is given as an input argument. The movie could be recorded in real-time allowing for the simultaneous recording of audio commentary and mouse pointer movements.
[BUG: maybe already possible with Google Earth?]
Software that takes a list of timestamped long-lat coordinates as input and outputs a timestamped list of human-readable names of border crossings that correspond to the GPS data.
See also: Software for analyzing GPS tracklogs to extract human-readable placenames.
Program which updates the F-Spot database (photos.db)
and the Picasaweb representation of the photos of the database if a photo
is changed (tags, caption, location etc. edited)
in the database or on Picasaweb. UI example:
photo-sync trip20092010 ~/.config/f-spot/photos.db
... that works under Linux. My Sony-Ericsson cell phone can record sounds only into the amr-format, which I've only managed to playback with Quicktime on Mac. ;(
Given a set of lon/lat-coordinates this program would create a waypoint for (i.e. in the center of) every larger concentration of coordinates and map this point to a placename and plot it on Google Maps. This would allow us to list and visualize all the major towns that we have passed through.
Given a sequence of waypoints generate a PDF- or HTML-file containing articles (based e.g. on Wikipedia and Wikitravel) about the towns, natural features etc. whose geographical location corresponds to one of the waypoints (given a certain value of proximity). Does Wikipedia or DBPedia provide a webservice implementing the function φ(location, radius) → set of articles? Such a program could also allow for the specification of sections which should not be included in the guide (e.g. restaurants, hotels above a certain price range).
Motivation: we don't want to carry around a collection of out-of-date lonely planets which among useful things discuss also locations which we do not intend to visit, hotels/restaurants which are too expensive, etc.
Program whose input is the names of two countries C1 and C2 and whose output is TRUE if citizens of C1 require a visa to enter C2 as a tourist, FALSE otherwise. Each country should be required to make sure that the data behind this service is up-to-date.
Such a service would enable an automatic generation of pages such as Wikipedia: Visa requirements for Estonian citizens, and ranking countries by how mutual is their visa policy.
Given a sequence of timestamped lon/lat coordinates (like in a GPX file), map this sequence to a corresponding sequence of (links to) news stories, where each story describes an event which happened in a given time and place. This would help to discover events which happened while we where there, but which we missed for some reason.
Is this possible with http://news.google.com?
Same as with news, but the coordinates and timestamp pair would be mapped to a description (and not a prediction!) of the weather at that place at that time. As we do not record the weather data during the trip, this would later help to answer questions like: where did we experience the heaviest rainfall, highest temperature, strongest wind, etc?
Program to list the most viewed photos on trip20092010 Picasaweb.
Strangely, the number of views does not seem to be available using the Picasa Web Albums Data API. See also this post.
Maybe doable via Google Analytics?
Add EXIF lat/lon values to all the photos on the trip20092010 Picasaweb, based on the GPS data.
Needed: Picasaweb API + software for aligning photo timestamps with GPX timestamps.
Program to find all the photos of a given person, and sort them in the order of the length of the person's beard on the picture. This would give a useful insight into the dynamics of the beard length (which is changing all the time during the trip).
Needed: Picasaweb API + Google face detection software (probably not exposed yet through the Picasaweb API?) + (yet to be implemented?) beard length detection API.
Program to spellcheck all the video captions on trip20092010 YouTube.
Add lat/lon coordinates and timestamps to all the videos on the trip20092010 YouTube, based on the GPS data.
The movie file that our camera creates does not seem to contain any timestamps, but this information is available in a separate JPEG-file created together with each movie. The timestamps in these files could be aligned with the timestamps in the GPX-files to obtain the geo-coordinates. The YouTube API could then be used to update the properties of the uploaded videos.
Out of all the GPS tracklogs find a pair of lon/lat points that are "most opposite" to each other. See Wikipedia: Antipodes.
Program that finds the furthest inhabited place from a given place (e.g. Tallinn). Is there a webservice (e.g. SPARQL query over DBPedia, or a query over Freebase) that does this?
Reported to the Google Charts API team that the flags for Papua New Guinea and Macau are missing, see the report.
Implement a Google Map (or a KML file) with the locations of all our blogposts marked on it and linked to the content of these posts.
Implementation is based on Blogger Export format, XSLT, and KML. See atom_to_kml.xslt.
Program that lists the most viewed videos on YouTube, that have been uploaded by a given list of users (e.g. trip20092010, nairobicapetown). YouTube's own display of the most viewed ranking seems to suck.
Program to spellcheck all the photo captions on trip20092010 Picasaweb.
Solution:
Result: 52 captions fixed in 32 albums.
Note that in mid 2010 Picasaweb started supporting the editing of all the album's captions on a single page. In this way the built-in spellchecking support of Firefox can be used to search for spelling mistakes and fix them. This solution is somewhat more convenient to use than the one described above.