Contour SPS Maps

Closed Contour SPS Maps

SPS (Sierra Peaks Section)

Closed Contour SPS Maps

Version 2 of the SPS Map by Closed Contours

New Specs:

  • Whiter glaciers/permanent snow with blue contour lines.
  • Change forest color depending on density (only in Yosemite and Sequoia/King’s Canyon NP so far). I also mentioned this in a previous post.
  • Non-SPS peak names. Discussed earlier as well.
  • Pass names.
  • Trail names, mostly in the NPs.
  • Removed many bogus ‘lakes’ which were actually mis-characterized permanent snow.
  • Added styling for scree, talus, and meadow/marshes.
  • Changed font for SPS peaks to slightly larger, darker, and italic to set them apart from non-SPS peaks.
  • Not a tile change, but added UTM coordinate display in lower right.

 


 
The SPS Maps have 248 peaks in the Sierra Nevada range of eastern California (plus Mount Rose in Nevada). The list is maintained by the Sierra Peaks Section, Angeles Chapter, Sierra Club. The map was designed to encompass all of the peaks on the list with a small buffer around them.

Cartography

Using a Transverse Mercator projection with a central meridian of 120° W, origin latitude of 0°, scale factor of 0.9996, WGS84 ellipsoid, and no false easting or northing. This projection was chosen as a compromise between UTM zones 10 and 11 which unfortunately split the Sierra Nevada vertically right through Lake Tahoe. Here’s the proj.4 string for the projection:

+proj=tmerc +lon_0=120w +k=0.9996 +ellps=WGS84
Data

Data sources:
DEMs are from the USGS NED program. (To generate hill-shade and contours.)
Road data are from TIGER.
Hydrology data are from the USGS NHD program.
Trails data are from the NPS and Forest Service.
Land cover data is from NPS and FRAP.
Buildings are from NPS and Mono County.

Map
http://www.closedcontour.com/

More information
http://blog.closedcontour.com/sps-map/

Pentax GPS Unit for Its Digital SLRs

Pentax O-GPS1


Pentax already makes a compact digital camera with built-in GPS  so their announcement yesterday of a GPS unit for use with some of their digital SLRs is not too surprising. The $250 O-GPS1 GPS unit works with Pentax’s K-5, K-r and medium-format 645D cameras, and appears to do a bit more than just work as a GPS logger. It’s weather-resistant (something I sometimes worry about when using my Nikon GPS unit), and it even has an astrophotography function: it uses GPS, a compass and accelerometers to figure out where the camera is pointing, and activates shake reduction to reduce star trails in long-exposure images. (Considering the wide field of view in camera lenses when used for astrophotography, that could allow much longer exposures without having to resort to an equatorial mount.) Available in July.

About Browsers and the Web

Late last year, Google released an illustrated online guidebook for everyday users who are curious about how browsers and the web work. In building 20 Things I Learned about Browsers and the Web with HTML5, JavaScript and CSS with our friends at Fi, we heard from many of you that you’d like to get your hands on the source code. Today, They’re open sourcing all the code for this web book at http://code.google.com/p/20thingsilearned, so that you can use and tinker with the code for your own projects.

20 Things I Learned was celebrated this year as an Official Honoree at the 15th Annual Webby Awards in the categories of Education, Best Visual Design (Function), and Best Practices. For those of you who missed our initial release last year, here’s a quick recap of the APIs behind some of the web book’s popular features:

  • The book uses the HTML5 canvas element to animate some of the illustrations in the book and enhance the experience with transitions between the hard cover and soft pages of the book. The page flips, including all shadows and highlights, are generated procedurally through JavaScript and drawn on canvas. You can read more about the page flips on this HTML5rocks tutorial.
  • The book takes advantage of the Application Cache API so that is can be read offline after a user’s first visit.
  • With the Local Storage API, readers can resume reading where they left off.
  • The History API provides a clutter-free URL structure that can be indexed by search engines.
  • CSS3 features such as web fonts, animations, gradients and shadows are used to enhance the visual appeal of the app.

With this open source release, we’ve also taken the opportunity to translate 20 Things I Learned into 15 languages: Bahasa Indonesia, Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Russian, Spanish, and Tagalog.

We hope that web books like 20 Things I Learned continue to inspire web developers to find compelling ways to bring the power of open web technologies to education. 20 Things I Learned is best experienced in Chrome or any up-to-date, HTML5-compliant modern browser. For those of you who’ve previously read this web book, don’t forget to hit refresh on your browser to see the new language options.