Mike Pegg at GoogleMapsMania just let me know about a Google Earth file which shows traffic cameras 
for Quebec and Montreal in Canada. What is interesting about this collection of placemarks is that they put the camera shots in the icons above each location. It makes for a fast way to look at lots of camera shots. Not only that, but it is a network link which updates every 2.5 minutes so you’re getting a pretty much near-real-time picture of the traffic situation in these two cities. You can see a Google Maps version of this site as well, but I like the GE version better. via GoogleMapsMania.
Network Links
FSEarth 3.0 – MS Flight Simulator and Google Earth
Just got a tip that the latest version of FSEarth is now available: Version 3. This tool lets you integrate Google Earth with Microsoft’s Flight Simulator 2004. The new version of FSEarth has some nice new features including: the ability to view your flight plan from MSFS in Google Earth, ability to see other aircraft in the MSFS world (including the AI planes), and it supports multiple configurations (two separate computers, two monitors, or just two windows). (See the earlier GEB review) This is a really cool way to use Google Earth’s client/server capabilities to link applications together and see GE’s unique visualizations. Watching the 3D views in GE with its real-life satellite/aerial photos and comparing them to MSFS’s simulated views is very interesting. FSEarth is available to try for free, or you can buy it for a very reasonable price. If you are into GE and Microsoft Flight Simulator, you should at least try this out.
Magnalox Provides Live Tracking Interface for Google Earth
Magnalox is one of my favorite GPS visualization tools on the market. As mentioned recently, Magnalox provides both free and premium services to allow you to load, analyze, visualize, and share information you’ve collected by GPS and supports more methods for visualizing the data than any other tool I’ve seen. This past week Magnalox announced a new service allowing you to produce live tracking which can be viewed in Magnalox and, more importantly, with Google Earth. You can use a variety of methods to track and connect to Magnalox for the live tracking. It uses an efficient software package designed to run on many PDAs, and requires a GPS capability and some sort of communication method. It’s possible to use this tool world-wide and combinations include: A fully integrated PDA phone with GPS, a PDA-GPS-Phone, Bluetooth GPS-PDAPhone, etc. The system can still upload an archived copy of the track if live communications aren’t possible. Here is a simulation of how a live track would work in Google Earth. For a limited time the live tracking software and service are availble for free. More details available in the announcement.
Tour de France by Google
Google has just announced the Tour de France Google Earth network link they helped create for the official TdF web site (which I just wrote about this morning). This new Google Earth file includes details showing the route, beginning and end points for all 20 stages of the 2006 TdF. One thing I hadn’t pointed out is that the TdF web site lets you select one of four languages and the Google Earth file is available for each language (French, German, English, or Spanish). Just go to the Tour de France 2006 web site and select your language. Then look for the link to “Tour in Google Earth”.
By the way, I still encourage you to use the live tracker for the TdF I wrote about earlier which also has the stages (and in fact was used to help Google create the file mentioned above). The live tracker shows the current progress of the stage live while the bikers are racing.
Weather and Storm Tracking Tools for Google Earth
Last summer Google Earth Blog collected a few of the better tools for tracking storms in Google Earth. Now GEB will maintain a network link with some of the best weather tracking tools available. If you save the weather and tracking tools network link in your My Places you will automatically get the latest collection when you turn it on. The current collection contains a global hurricane tracking tool, global cloud maps, severe weather warning data and radar data from NOAA for the US, weather observations for the US from WeatherBonk, a real-time day/night viewing tool, and the global annual lightning flash rate map from NASA. The collection will grow and improve over time. Here is a list of the current contents with links to stories about the tools here at the GEB:
- Hurricanes – Live positions
- Global Cloud Map
- NOAA Severe Weather
- Weather Bonk – For Google Maps, but GE file available
- Real-Time Day and Night Earth
- Annual Lightning Flash Rate