Friday, January 23, 2009

Exploring Middle Egypt with Google Earth - further notes

Ogle Earth (Stefan Geens)

In the rush to publish the previous post about my Middle Egypt KML trip report (I was also packing for a day just spent travelling) I forgot to mention several further points I had on my mental to-do list:

* Google Earth + iPhone = awesome ruin navigation tool:
While the iPhone isn't any good for making tracks, it was a most excellent mobile Google Earth — Especially in Egypt, where the base imagery is 2.5m Spot Image instead of 15m used elsewhere, and where most archaeological sites have glorious high-resolution DigitalGlobe imagery, the result of many special requests by archaeological institutes over the years.

My iPhone happens to be locked to a Swedish contract, which implies ridiculously expensive data rates abroad, so I don't do mobile surfing with it while in Egypt. (When-oh-when will EU regulators call this practice what it is — cartel pricing — and make it illegal for European carriers?). I do, however, surf on hotel wifi (provided free even in the cheap ones) so during my trip, I spent some time each evening visiting the next day's sites on my iPhone.

Since Google Earth for iPhone keeps its imagery in a huge cache, I don't need to connect to the internet later to use Google Earth while in the field — all the imagery is right there in the cache from the night before.

See the above page for additional details.

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