Richard's Tech Reviews

Qstarz BTQ1000P (Platinum) GPS logger with photo geocoding - reviewed

NOTE: This 2008 draft blog post is being published in 2022; it may be incomplete and the information is certainly out of date.

Summary

The BT-Q1000P is the second generation of this logger from Qstarz, featuring some hardware enhancements and completely new software.  The hardware interface has been bumped from 38400 to 115200, making for much faster downloads, and track storage has been doubled.  The software features selective track download, sophisticated Google Maps integration, photo geocoding, altitude view and speed view.  This combination of features makes the Q1000P my new preferred logger.

As with the Q1000, the Q1000P is also compatible with the Mac over USB and Bluetooth, using BT747.

It can be set to 5Hz (5 track points per second) logging. [using special software?]

Details

The Qstarz BT-Q1000P (available through Amazon.com in the USA) is a compact GPS track logger, it stores tracks in its internal memory, as well as providing the ability for real-time navigation using USB or Bluetooth GPS-mouse mode.

It uses a replaceable, USB-rechargeable li-ion battery, with reported battery life of [].

The basic hardware appearance and controls are unchanged from the Q1000, so you can refer to that review for more information.

The hardware changes from the Q1000 are:

• interface speed increased from 38400 to 115200, much faster downloads
• Bluetooth download and control??
• storage increased from [] to []

You can see the GPSpassion.com review for additional information about hardware improvements.

Note that the number of storable track points Qstarz advertises is for logging lat/long ONLY.  With altitude (which is included by default), the needed storage space increases, so that actual number of track points available is only about ?135000?  This is an area where some standardisation of counting record storage would help for comparing between loggers.

The Q1000P also brings major software enhancements over the Q1000.  It includes two applications, an updated version of the original Travel Recorder software (now called V3), and a completely new application, called Travel Recorder V4.

I will not look at the V3 software, it is an incremental improvement to the original software I got with my Q1000, with photo geocoding added.

Travel Recorder V4 is similar to the GiSTEQ PhotoTrackr application, it is great to see the vendors starting to provide sophisticated mapping and photo geocoding applications to go along with their excellent hardware.

I will caution that I had a fair bit of trouble connecting successfully to the Q1000P over USB.  Although I am using the same USB-to-serial COM port driver as with the Q1000, it seemed to have some initialisation issues.  I was pretty consistently successful if I first turned on the logger (to LOG mode), and only then connected the USB cable.  You may find that a Windows reboot is the only thing that clears connection problems.

Travel Recorder 4 (henceforth TR4) opens with a blank Google Map (unlike GiSTEQ, you do not have to register for a Maps API key).

Before you're able to start using the product, you will have to enter the product key provided by Qstarz.  Keep this in mind if you're installing on a laptop before heading off on a trip.

When you select "Read GPS Log" TR4  will scan all the logs on your device and then offer you the option to download only selected tracks.  This is by far the nicest implementation of track downloading I have seen so far, compared with the GiSTEQ, which downloads all tracks every time, and the original Travel Recorder software, which also downloaded all tracks and then required manual editing in Excel to separate/split them.

You can see that Qstarz is using a sort of brushed metal look reminiscent of iTunes in some of its internal dialog boxes.

Uses idea of project, imt format, bin format.

Facebook photo privacy and locations

Location Privacy

Facebook has lately gotten a lot more interested in attaching locations to status updates and photos.

One route for it to get this information is directly from your device, e.g. from your iPhone location (if you've given it permission) or from your browser's location function.

In Firefox, if you've already given a page permission to access your location, there is no "location manager" to help you see what you've authorized.  You can only go per-page and then go to the obscure Tools->Page Info->Permissions tab and then change Share Location.

To globally disable location sharing in Firefox, open about:config and change geo.enabled to false.

See more info in Firefox Location-Aware Browsing FAQ.

In Chrome, it's buried in Preferences... Under the Hood->Privacy->Content Settings... (click the button then scroll down to the Location section).

However, even if you block the browser from sharing your location, it can still be extracted from the information invisibly embedded in your photos.  This may be full EXIF-GPS (the exact location the photo was taken, embedded automatically by most cameraphones and by some cameras) or e.g. IPTC keywords giving the location as a text string e.g. "Ottawa, Ontario, Canada".  (IPTC actually has many fields for location text strings, including creator contact address and image location broken down into city, province and country.)

It's not clear what Facebook is using and what it is storing.  It is certain that in some cases it has enough data to create plots like this of where photos were taken:

(from What Facebook knows about you)

Facebook has also gotten a lot more aggressive about asking for explicit location information, both when uploading (every photo now has an attached location field) and retroactively for albums:

There's not a lot you can do easily to protect your location information.  Some basics are disabling the location-aware features in your web browsers, and not completing the blank Location fields Facebook provides.  You can also disable location features in your camera phone, e.g. on an iPhone go to Settings->Location Services and either turn Location off entirely (which means maps won't work) or go into the list of apps within Location Services and set Camera (and any other photo apps) to OFF. 

Beyond that, you could strip all EXIF information, particularly GPS and IPTC keywords and location fields, but that is often difficult or impossible to do on a camera phone, and awkward to do in photo editing apps (which are more intent on preserving EXIF than destroying it).

Photo Privacy

It is important to realise that there is no "private" on the Internet.  There is only "systems attempting to enforce privacy".  Systems can be hacked or have holes, intentional or unintentional.

Facebook very much wants as much of your content as possible to be public.

One consequence of this is that every single photo in Facebook has a public URL (a public link) regardless of what limits you have set on it (e.g. "Friends only").

It is easy to find this link for an entirely album.  Simply go to one of your albums (your wall photos are also an album).  If you don't know how to find albums, go to http://www.facebook.com/media/albums/

Click a photo to go into a specific album.  Scroll to the bottom if necessary.  You should see "Share this album with anyone by sending them this public link".  That's right.  Regardless of your photo controls.  With anyone.  Public link. 

It's a bit more complicated to see this with an individual photo, but you can find it: Right click on a single photo within an album, to pull up your browser menu.  In e.g. Firefox then do "Open Link in New Tab".  At the bottom of the new photo tab that opens, you will find "Share this photo with anyone by sending them this public link".

With "more than 250 million photos uploaded per day" (Facebook Statistics) and Facebook already hosting on the order of 150 BILLION photos (yes, billion, with a "b") that's a lot of surface area for photo privacy attacks.

Facebook doesn't even provide minimal location exclusion features, unlike Flickr, which lets you geofence important locations, so that even if by accident you upload EXIF-GPS data for e.g. your school or your home, Flickr won't display it.

Thanks to Neil Saunders (@neilfws) for getting me thinking about this.

per-tweet location info coming to Twitter

Currently in Twitter there is a single location attached to a user's profile.

This is not really well supported or exposed in the web interface, and most people don't know that you can use near:location as a Twitter search parameter, e.g. near:ottawa or near:45.44,-75.62

There are ways you can declare location changes in a particular tweet, e.g. the l: syntax, a Twitter nanoformat, but these are only supported by a few tools, not by Twitter directly.

The applications that I have seen with the most support for location information are smartphone Twitter clients, they typically have an icon to let you set your profile location to the current location (as determined by the phone), and some will let you do "nearby" searches based on your current location.

Providing location information for web apps has been difficult in the past because there was no API to ask the web browser where it was, but now geolocation is supported in Firefox, Safari, in Google Gears, and on various platforms.  This is being enabled by a standard W3C Geolocation API.

Now Twitter has announced the rather more logical option of having a location attached to each tweet, rather than globally to your entire account.  This is another step in adding more metadata attached to the raw 140 characters of a tweet.  This will make possible lots of interesting tools, one obvious one being to display all of the tweets posted at a particular location.

This does of course have privacy implications - and I hope that the system will provide per-tweet opt-in to sharing of location, rather than a global opt-out.  We need systems that understand you may want different granularity of sharing depending on your location - a typical example is that you may want to share your exact location when you're at a pub downtown so that friends can meet you, but you may want to share only city-level location or no info at all when you're at home.

There are already examples showing up of embedded location giving away rather more information than someone probably intended, such as a thief whose photo of stolen goods has embedded EXIF-GPS (via @jblyberg).

The official word from Twitter is

We're gearing up to launch a new feature which makes Twitter truly location-aware. A new API will allow developers to add latitude and longitude to any tweet. Folks will need to activate this new feature by choice because it will be off by default and the exact location data won't be stored for an extended period of time. However, if people do opt-in to sharing location on a tweet-by-tweet basis, compelling context will be added to each burst of information.

from Twitter blog - Location, Location, Location - August 20, 2009

Widely reported, e.g. PC World, New York Times, CNet.

via Dean Giustini (@giustini)

MacWorld on manual geotagging in Places

A MacWorld article "Working with Places" by Derrick Story (@Derrick_Story) goes through the steps to manually attach a geographic location to a photo in iPhoto '09, and gives some suggestions on how to do it efficiently.  Online date is April 2009, and there is also a version of the article on pages 68-69 of the July 2009 MacWorld in print.

Engadget reviews Eye-Fi Pro wifi geotagging SD card

There are various Eye-Fi cards.  For "Share" and above, it will upload to online services, for the "Explore" card and above it will geotag using Skyhook (which is reasonably good in dense urban areas, but of no use where there isn't wifi).

Engadget reviewed the top-end model, the 4GB Pro, U$150.  It adds the ability to upload RAW files, as well as to send photos directly to your computer over an ad-hoc wireless network (which requires some configuration).  This effectively means that (within the range of your computer) you have a remote hard drive that can store your photos as soon as they are taken.

It's hard not to like the functionality of the Eye-Fi Pro. Before this, having pictures sent directly to a PC was something only on offer by higher-end DSLRs. Now any cheap compact with an SD slot can do it.