GPS for the old non-GPS iphones

If you are an early adopter of iphone which did not have the GPS capablity and if you wish that you also had GPS, you are not left far behind. You can shell out some money and can get an add-on for your iphone and make it GPS-enabled.

Holux is one of the makers of GPS receiver devices. You can use its device (M1000b/M1200b) to pick the GPS location and feed it into the iphone. The best parts is that it can be integrated into the maps application provided by default. To do that you need to install an application named "GPS Live" which can read the GPS location input from the external GPS device and point the map to the exact location.

The whole package of Holux GPS device + connecting cable costs around $100. If you already have a Holux GPS receiver, the connecting cable costs only $16. It can be ordered from here.
The "GPS Live" application can continiously update your current location on the map. To see the device in action, see this video on youtube. See the instruction to download "GPS Live"

It is important to acknowledge the very first efforts on bringing the GPS to iphone. It is by an application called "xGPS" (link here). They found a way to integrate the input data to the Maps.app application. This the gateway to feed the GPS location input from the external GPS device to the default maps application.

Hack your canon powershot camera

Incidentally, this is my first post on gadget other than iphone. I will try to do more justice to my blogname "gadgetsandyou"(not "iphoneandyou") by trying to write more about other gadgets too. Technically, the following is not really hacking, but just upgrading the fimware in a twisted way.

Do you know that you can power up you canon powershot camera with enhanced capabilities. All you need to do is to install an add-on firmware to the existing firmware. The best part of this exercise is that the original firmware from canon does not get erased or overwritten.

This is the article that I first came across related to this topic. It finally lead me to the home page of the CHDK project. With this you can enhance your cameras which has DigicII/DigicIII processors. This is the list of supported cameras.

Some of the cool additional features that you would get are as follows
- Enhanced Image Capture
- Additional display information
- Additional Settings
- Support for custom scripts (I am exited about it)
- Continuous display of battery charge
- RGB Histograms
- Motion-detection triggered photography
- Additional applications like calendar and games.

The above is just a tip of the iceberg. There are lot of major and minor enhancements. I am going to try this out this weekend. I will post my experience.