Skip to main content

Geosense for Windows: Location sensor for Windows 7

The Windows 7 operating system provides built-in support for sensor devices, such as GPS devices, and offers an API that allow third-party developers to build native application that are location-aware. However, Microsoft didn’t integrate a default geolocation provider. Thus developers could not take advantage of this until Windows 7 PCs started shipping with GPS sensors.

geosense

Blogger Long Zheng of iStartedSomething and Rafeal Rivera of Within Windows fixed the flaw made by Microsoft by creating a Windows 7 sensor driver that connects the location platform of Windows 7 with geolocation service providers, including but not limited to Google Location Services.

This new tool called Geosense for Windows is a Windows Sensor feeds the Windows Sensors and Location Platform relatively accurate positioning information, like a GPS device. Instead of communicating with expensive satellites, Geosense simply gather some metrics (i.e. your IP address, WiFi access points) to securely query huge databases with. In return, the databases provide location data for us to share.

Right now, Geosense plugs into Google Location Services for WiFi and IP triangulation. Support for others such as Skyhook Wireless and Navizon will be added soon.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

How to Record CPU and Memory Usage Over Time in Windows?

Whenever the computer is lagging or some application is taking too long to respond, we usually fire up task manager and look under the Performance tab or under Processes to check on processor utilization or the amount of free memory available. The task manager is ideal for real-time analysis of CPU and memory utilization. It even displays a short history of CPU utilization in the form of a graph. You get a small time-window, about 30 seconds or so, depending on how large the viewing area is.

How to Schedule Changes to Your Facebook Page Cover Photo

Facebook’s current layout, the so called Timeline, features a prominent, large cover photo that some people are using in a lot of different creative ways. Timeline is also available for Facebook Pages that people can use to promote their website or business or event. Although you can change the cover photo as often as you like, it’s meant to be static – something which you design and leave it for at least a few weeks or months like a redesigned website. However, there are times when you may want to change the cover photo frequently and periodically to match event dates or some special promotion that you are running or plan to run. So, here is how you can do that.

Diagram 101: Different Types of Diagrams and When To Use Them

Diagrams are a great way to visualize information and convey meaning. The problem is that there’s too many different types of diagrams, so it can be hard to know which ones you should use in any given situation. To help you out, we’ve created this diagram that lays out the 7 most common types of diagrams and when they’re best used: