Links: SR22 Cockpit, Jane Austen, Magnetic Pole, Taiwan GE Bonanza, Tutorial, VE3D on Mac

SR22 Cockpit – Not satisfied with just doing a cockpit add-on for the F16, Gerardo has also done a cockpit add-on for the SR22 for Google Earth’s built-in flight simulator. It’s a screen overlay showing the cockpit while you fly the simulator. Make sure to check out the tips on using GE’s flight simulator.

Jane Austen – An excellent Google Earth documentary showing the life and works of literary legend Jane Austen (3.5 Mbytes) has been posted by GEC member ‘LuciaM’. The collection is organized into three sections: The biography layer shows the actual places that she experienced over the course of her life from the small town of her birth to estates in Kent through to her final resting place amidst Saxon kings. The second marks the real places in her literary works. The final section identifies the historical buildings used as backdrops for the major film adaptations of her books. The placemarks are annotated with information about Austen’s life, as well as quotes from her letters and books. LuciaM also developed the excellent collection about the Six Wives of Henry VIII.

Magnetic Pole – An excellent collection of time animations for Google Earth visualizing the Earth’s magnetic fields changing over time has been posted at the GEC by Stefan Maus. The animation covers from the year 1590 to 2010. Be careful not to load all the visualizations at once as they will bog down your memory. But, carefully used these animations are excellent. Turn on the time animation and prepare to wait a while to load each frame.

Taiwan GE Bonanza – Steven Ho of Taiwan has done a huge amount of work in Google Earth, but most of it hasn’t been seen in the English-speaking world. He has recently started a new blog in English to share some of his amazing collection for Google Earth. His posts usually have YouTube videos as well as links to the KML files. I especially like this post with a very innovative application of screen image overlays. Note that the KML file has a jet fighter instead of a remote control plane in the animation.

Tutorial – Spatial education site Geochalkboard has released a tutorial for the spreadsheet mapper which Google released that lets you create nice KML files without programming KML.

VE3D on Mac – Stefan Geens discovers that the Windows emulator software for Mac OS X from VMWare called Fusion is now good enough to run Virtual Earth 3D on Internet Explorer. While you still can’t run VE3D on a Mac natively – this at least lets you check things out with it without having to boot up Windows under bootcamp.