Gundam Navi: [Via: Comics Alliance] "If you're a Japanese otaku growing bored of your crippling iPhone GPS dependence, Namco Bandai could have the solution for you -- gaming your way to destinations with Mobile Suit Gundam. Gundam Navi, the first of a line of Character Navi programs, is a new GPS app that transforms a user's commute into "battle events" that pit a location marker against randomly generated enemies lined up on a given route." Gundam Navi is available for iPhone 4 and iPhone 3GS. The app costs ¥3,500 for one year of usage.
[Screenshot 1] [Screenshot 2] [Screenshot 3] [Screenshot 4] [Screenshot 5]
posted by Fizz
on Jul 30, 2011 -
28 comments
Mau Piailug passed away last week at 78 years old. He was a
Master Navigator from the tiny island of
Satawal. In the seventies, he traveled to Hawaii to help the
Polynesian Voyaging Society revive the
wayfinder's art, navigating by the sun, moon, stars, animals, waves and clouds. In 1976, he steered the Hokule'a, a
traditional sailing canoe, from Hawaii to Tahiti without even so much as a compass. He began teaching a new generation of navigators and
helped launch a revival of Polynesian culture. To honor him, the Polynesian Voyaging Society is
raising money to assist the people of Satawal, while also preparing for a world wide voyage on the Hokule'a, to use their
ancient wisdom to help imagine a new relationship to the planet we share.
posted by cal71
on Jul 21, 2010 -
18 comments
Peter Morville is widely recognized as a father of the information architecture field, and he serves as an advocate for the critical roles that search and findability play in defining web user experience. His recent project titled
Search Patterns, is a sandbox for collecting search examples, patterns, and anti-patterns; for example
spime search, the ability to query objects in motion and find things in the real world. Morville is also on the editorial board of the new
Journal of Information Architecture.
posted by netbros
on Jul 31, 2009 -
4 comments
The Lighthouse Directory. An information portal for over 9000 lighthouses, and sites of former lighthouses, all around the world. Photos, histories, technical specifications, etc. Most of the links are very thorough, with some including excerpts from keepers' logs. The site also includes links to current news stories and general historical articles related to lighthouses.
posted by amyms
on Apr 22, 2008 -
28 comments
Great Circle Mapper "Never again will I sigh and stammer when presented with the question, "Why does my flight from Chicago to Hong Kong fly over goddamn Siberia?" (via
Salon registration or viewing short ad required)
posted by quonsar
on Mar 10, 2005 -
30 comments
Cartography is a skill pretty much taken for granted now, but it
wasn't always
so. Accurate maps were once prized state secrets, laborious efforts that cost a fortune and took years (or even decades) to complete.
How things have changed. (Yours now,
$110) It took almost 500 years to map North America, but it's only taken one tenth of that to map just everything else. In the last 50 years, we've been able to create acurate atlases of
two planets and
one moon (with a
second in the works). Actually,
we've done a lot more than that. We're actually running out of things to map.
Maybe Not.
posted by absalom
on Jan 27, 2005 -
17 comments
The most accurate navigation in history. "We had to know everything from how the iron molten lava in the center of the Earth was churning to how plate tectonic movements were affecting the wobble of the Earth to how the plasma in the atmosphere delayed the radio signals to and from the Deep Space Network stations". ..even the seemingly insignificant solar radiation pressure and thermal radiation forces acting on the spacecraft to a level equal to less than a billionth of the acceleration of gravity one feels on the Earth needed to be taken into account. This mission set a new standard for navigation accuracy for all future interplanetary missions.
posted by stbalbach
on Jan 4, 2004 -
2 comments
Evil SBC acts like bully going after small sites with an absurd patent. If you've ever designed a web site with "selectors or tabs that... seem to reside in their own frame or part of the user interface" such as Metafilter's header or Amazon's tabs or c|net's yellow side bar, then your design is in violation of SBC Communication's patent number
5,933,841. Here's the abstract:
A structured document browser includes a constant user interface for displaying and viewing sections of a document that is organized according to a pre-defined structure. The structured document browser displays documents that have been marked with embedded codes that specify the structure of the document. The tags are mapped to correspond to a set of icons. When the icon is selected while browsing a document, the browser will display the section of the structure corresponding to the icon selected, while preserving the constant user interface.
Armed with this patent SBC is going after web sites with a licensing fee of $100,000 to $16,000,000. Will this insanity ever stop?
via Jarle's Cyberspace
posted by DragonBoy
on Jan 21, 2003 -
47 comments
Gov Agency creates bare-bones web index Web sites assume that you know a little about what you're looking for. One US Federal agency has created a
navigation engine that requires virtually no understanding of anything.
I'm torn. Part of me wants one of these navigation tools for every website I use. Part of me is a little disappointed that sites have to be this least-common-denominator-simple for people to use.
Do you like it? Would you want one for the sites you use? Discuss.
posted by basilwhite
on Oct 25, 2001 -
14 comments
During a severe Air Defence Emergency in the US a regulatory scheme known as '
SCATANA' is automatically invoked to deal with the situation and minimise threats. The central provision of the plan is to 'disable navigation aids which the attackers might be relying on'. This didn't happen last Tuesday (FAA confirmed, NORAD refused comment). Could it have prevented the planes reaching their targets? Are there now serious grounds for concern regarding the implementation procedure of military provisions essential for preserving American airspace security?
The Register appears to think so.
posted by Kino
on Sep 17, 2001 -
7 comments
These sliding menus may not be anything much to you design mavens out there, but to a simple engineer/management consultant like myself, they are addictively neat. Whenever I check out the site, I find myself pulling them out and playing with them while deciding where to go in the site. How'd they do that?
posted by fpatrick
on Jul 28, 2000 -
9 comments
MSNBC's Robert Wright seemes confused in this story about the Global Positioning System. He misinforms the reader about how terrorists can now use the military's encrypted GPS signals for more accurate positioning. (FYI: you are still unable to use the military's encrypted GPS signals, contrary to what Wright claims.)
more inside>>
posted by darainwa
on Jun 28, 2000 -
2 comments
