Eye FireEagle

A few weeks ago, I purchased Eye-Fi's fancy geolocating and wireless-uploading SD Card, which I'd seen a demo of at WhereCamp. I love gadgets, perhaps too much, but this thing is indeed a great implementation of a cool idea. And, as yet another harbinger of how almost everything will soon be location aware, it has all kinds of potential.

For example, devices like this could be used as the poor man's (no iphone) location updater.  Since they haven't opened up their API (allegedly it's on their to-do list), and because I've been looking for any excuse to play with FireEagle, I just finished up a little python script that queries my flickr photos every few minutes and (if there's a new one that eye-fi has uploaded), it grabs the WOEID and updates my FireEagle profile.  Working with the Fllickr and FireEagle API's was fun.

Obviously a bit of a hack, but once they do open their API (so I don't have to pull for data), or otherwise allow us to get access to the additional data they collect (like the strength of and MAC addresses of all access points near where you took the picture), all kinds of other things (OpenSkyHookDB?) become possible.

I'm enjoying not having to even think about transferring my images, let alone geocoding them -- but I'm really looking forward to more of these poor-man's geo devices.    In the meantime, for those if you who check out my FireEagle data - I'm not still at the bar, I just haven't taken any new pictures today.

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