It’s about time that movie GPS technology has finally hit the mainstream. This odd little device uses 2 AAA batteries and captures GPS tracking data for up to 8 weeks on one charge. The device is great for catching cheating spouses, kids who say they’re going to the library when they’re really going to the malt shop, and Will Smith when government agents steal his identity. It even turns itself off when the car isn’t in motion.
The Super TrackStick, as it’s called, has 4MB of memory and overlays your victim’s path over Google Earth, resulting in lots of shouting, then quiet, then divorce proceedings. Thanks, technology!
Product Page via GPSLodge
…and law enforcement DOES NOT need a Judge’s ’say-so’ in order to use this type of device on your mode of transportation!
Would have been nice to write this article with a lit bit more seriousness, since this device is actually pretty cool.
I just bought the Trackstick II (which is the smaller brother of the Super Trackstick) and I’ve been playing around with it for the last couple of days, and I like the accuracy of the data very much. They claim 8 feet horizontal accuracy on the website, and indeed I can even see which side of the road I was driving on and where I was walking around. It measures altitude and speed in addition to the coordinates.
However, the main reason why I bought this is for geotagging of photos. For that reason I wrote a little tool that takes the exported GoogleEarth data (since it’s XML as compared to the internal binary trackstick file format) and a folder with photos and finds the closest match to the time in the EXIF data of the photo and the recorded GPS data to geotag it. The tool is primarily meant to work with Flickr, and as soon as I got it stabilized a bit more I will put it up for download (+ source) on my blog.
I am by no means advertizing my blog here (and I don’t have any contextual ads, AdSense or anything on it, so I wouldn’t profit from it anyway!), but if anyone comes across this post and has the same (or any other kml-format exporting) GPS recorder device and would like to try the software, that would be the place to look for it. It might take another week or two before I put it up for download, though, since I’m in the middle of working on some other important stuff.
I agree. It’s pretty cool. They really talked up the “cheating” angle.