Baton Relay Path

The XIX Commonwealth Games is due to start in a little under two weeks in India. The Queen’s Baton Relay is now under way on its Indian leg, from the Wagah Border in Punjab to New Delhi.

The Queen’s Baton started its journey on 29th October 2009 from Buckingham Palace in London. It will arrive in New Delhi in time for the opening ceremony of the Commonwealth Games on Sunday, 3rd October.

Mibazaar has created an animated map of the route of the baton relay that runs through each of the 100 stages of its journey in India. The map automatically connects each stage on the journey and opens an information window for each stage displaying the date and location when the baton arrives.

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Thermostat Control Based on Location and Weather

Hans Scharler has designed an automatic thermostat for his house that uses Google Latitude, WeatherBug, and ioBridge to control his heating based on his location and the weather.

Using Google Latitude on his Android phone Hans is able to control his thermostat automatically when he leaves his house or when he is coming home. Leaving home is relatively easy. Using Google Latitude his ‘Location Aware Home Automation’ system can turn off or enter power saving modes when it detects he is away from his house.

When he is returning home the system checks the weather using the Google Weather API and the WeatherBug API, and then checks his home temperature (via ioBridge) to see if the house needs to turn on the air conditioner, the heater, or neither.

If you want to try and replicate this Hans explained how he put this together on his I am Shadowlord blog.

Via: ReadWriteWeb

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USA States Map

Here’s a little Google Map I created today to show the meaning of the names given to each of the states in the USA. The origins of the names of U.S. states have been taken from this Wikipedia entry.

As fun as it is to read the meaning behind the names for the U.S. states the map is really a demo to show how you can use the new Styled Map option in the Google Maps API to remove the name labels from Google Maps.

Removing the labels with Styled Maps is easy enough. It is just a matter of turning off the visibility of options in the administrative layer. However once I’d removed the names from Google Maps I then had to figure out how to add my own labels. Luckily Marc Ridey has written an excellent Label class for Google Maps V3.

If you have a look at the example I’ve created you can see my design isn’t very pretty. The next stage is to play with the font weight and font size to create something a little easier on the eye.

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