the GPS Revolution part 2

3 Play Tag, With Strangers
Application: JOYity
Platform: Android
Price: FREE!

Not all GPS programs are practical; some are just fun. Like JOYity, which includes three location-savvy games plus an interface to create your own. Here's how to play YouCatch, JOYity's digitally enhanced game of tag.

Target Log in and the app will determine your coordinates and briefly show you the location of the person you need to tag. Remember, once you start your game, someone else will be looking for you as well. Everyone's location will be displayed at regular, decreasing time intervals.

Tag Get within 80 feet of your subject, then press the trackball on your phone to execute the tag. Then go after your next victim. Every time you catch someone, you're assigned a new target. But keep moving, because someone out there is still looking for you. The last person standing wins.

the GPS Revolution

Inside the GPS revolution it's more than maps and driving directions: location-aware phones and apps now deliver the hidden information that lets users make connections and interact with the world in ways they never imagined. The future is here and it's in your pocket.

1 Drive Fast, Avoid the Cops
Application: Trapster
Platforms: iPhone, BlackBerry
Price: FREE!

People like to go fast. Two-thirds of drivers frequently exceed the speed limit, according to a recent study, and we suspect the other third just filled out the survey too quickly. This means everyone can benefit from Trapster, a program that pulls together crowdsourced info about the location of police traps. Drivers report red-light cameras, speed cameras, or cops hiding in wait, which all get added to a map of law enforcement hot spots for the next lead-foot coming down the highway. You can even set your phone to warn you audibly when approaching the fuzz. Coast clear? Floor it.

Install Windows Vista from a high speed USB 2.0 Flash Drive

WHY INSTALL FROM USB FLASH DRIVE?
Why would someone want to install a client OS from a thumb drive instead of a DVDROM or over the network? One reason: Performance. Installing Windows Vista from a high speed USB flash drive is in my experience the easiest & fastest way to complete a Windows Vista install. This is much faster than using a DVD, gigabit ethernet, or possibly even some external USB 2.0 hard drives, due to differences in access speed & transfer rate. To put this into perspective, y'know how installing Windows on a Virtual PC virtual machine from an .ISO CD image is really, really, really fast? Imagine something roughly just as fast, except for doing installations of the OS on to actual workstations.

STEP-BY-STEP INSTRUCTIONS
Here's some step-by-step instructions on how we do this, some of which was adapted from Josh's instructions, again, kudos to Josh.

1. Acquire an ultra-fast USB 2.0 flash drive
   The drive I and my coworkers recommend is the Apacer 4GB Handy Steno USB Flash Drive HT203, 200X Hi-Speed USB 2.0. It's the fastest USB 2.0 Flash Drive that we've found - it has a read speed of 25MBytes/sec. & a write speed-14MBytes/sec and also works great as a ReadyBoost cache. You can get them from $56.99 each:
   http://www.directron.com/ht2034g.html
   
   Incidentally, once you've got Windows Vista up and running, you may want to consider getting an ultra-fast SDFlash card, installing it into your laptop or desktop, and leaving it there as a ReadyBoost cache. Why? It can't hurt and they're so cheap that it's worth getting. I personally got a SDFlash card for every one of my machines - the A-DATA 2GB Secure Digital Memory Card, 150X Turbo SD Card has a read speed of more than 22.5MB/s and a write speed of more than 15MB/s. You can get them for $19.99 each:
   http://supermediastore.com/adata-2gb-sd-secure-digital-card-150x.html
   
2. Format the Apacer Flash Drive
   Run CMD.EXE and type the following. Note: This set of commands assumes that the USB flash drive is addressed as "disk 1". you should double check that by doing a list of the disks (type "list disk") before cleaning it. If you have multiple hard drives, like an SDFlash drive or a Multibay drive, you could end up wiping your second drive using this command.
   (This was a warning that Josh added to his post along with the following commands that I copied from him, so kudos to Josh)
   1. diskpart
   2. select disk 1
   3. clean
   4. create partition primary
   5. select partition 1
   6. active
   7. format fs=fat32
   8. assign
   9. exit
      
3. Copy Windows Vista's DVD ROM content to the Flash Drive
   Simply issue the following command to start copying all the content from the Windows Vista DVD to your newly formatted high speed flash drive.
   • xcopy d:\*.* /s/e/f e:\

And that's it. Boot up the machine, have it boot off the USB drive, and watch how fast the installation completes. If you thought Windows Vista installed quickly before then let's see how you like it now. The slowest part of the install will probably be the computer waiting for you to type in information in the setup fields, and even that can be automated using the Windows Automated Installation Kit.