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Traveling to all those foreign places that you want to visit is easy now that you have your GPS - but how are you going to make the most of your trip? With Lonely Planet’s guidebooks and your GPS you’ll be sure to make the most of your journey and see all the things you want to. As you know Lonely Planet is famous for their travel and knowledge of the world. They’ve explored different cultures and places and now they are bringing you travel guides to help you enjoy your journey even more!

It doesn’t matter if you’re going to be traveling in the USA, Thailand, Italy, France, India or Tahiti! Lonely Planet has a guide for just about everywhere.

Most Lonely Planet Travel Guides are less than $20 so hurry up and Get Your Travel Guide Today!

More and more tourism outfits are getting on the GPS technology bandwagon and renting ‘GPS Tours’ and I’m not convinced that it’s really worth it for the consumer to go out and rent one of these devices.

One example of this type of service is the GyPSy Okanagan Wine Tour in British Columbia, Canada. You can rent a GPS device pre-programmed with a tour of the Okanagan Wine Making District. The guided tour has audio prompts that tell you (more…)

Sometimes even really big companies make small mistakes that allow you to get their stuff for free and Garmin isn’t above doing that.

We’re not sure on how long Garmin will leave the door open on getting their MapSource for free with no cracks or hacks so you’ll want to do this as soon as you read it.

The first part (more…)

There’s a few places on the internet that offer FREE (as in beer) user generated maps for Garmin GPS owners. Of course nothing replaces a comprehensive map database but if you’re planning on traveling to foreign lands check out these maps to see if they’ll get you around to where you want to go - it might save you a few bucks in buying a whole map disc that you might not even use.

First here’s a couple of sites with a lot of maps:

Map Center
Free Garmin GPS Maps

Here’s some more sites with specific location maps.

Australia - Tracks for Australia
Canada - Canadian ‘eh’ Topo Maps
Caribbean - This maps site has maps of Japan, Bermuda and Antarctica too.
China - Yunnan Explorer
Greece - Greece GPS Maps
Morocco - Maps of Morocco
New Zealand - The New Zealand Open GPS project
South America - Argentina and Uruguay with some more countries on the way.

If you don’t have it already you’ll need a utility to help you get your .img files to your Garmin GPS you can download Img2GPS to help you along with that.

Don’t forget that a lot of these projects are all driven by public contribution, if you think you can help the project in some way don’t be too shy to send them an inquiry.

Since Macintosh has been scraping together more and more of the computer market share with every passing day I thought that I’d check out just which GPS manufacturers were willing to recognize the aggressively rising popularity in the OS X operating system.

My goal was not to find out which GPS devices could with a whole bunch of tweaking and 3rd party software possibly be hooked up to a Mac and have some type of support. I wanted to see which manufacturers put the time in to produce their own software that slips right into the system without any fiddling around.

This OEM type of support for a less popular operating system really represents who’s working hard to keep their market share and their users happy.

The results were no less than what I expected with OEM support for Mac OS X on TomTom and Garmin devices and with Magellan and Mio being left out in the cold totally unsupported.

Garmin devices have a small, powerful suite of software to use - all beautifully integrated with the Mac operating system. Bobcat, MapInstall, POI Loader, Connect and the Communicator Plugin for other software and services like Google Maps, Mapquest and Geocaching.com allow you to do everything you’d expect and more from your Garmin GPS device and a Mac based system. All their OS X software is available on the Garmin Mac OS X Software Page.

Although TomTom devices also have OEM support for Mac OS X the software seems to be a bit more of a storefront to help them sell more services to you. The TomTom software however is fully functional and allows you to do all the things you need to do with your device like adding points of interest, doing backups, changing voices and updating your maps.

With the software storefront you can also purchase subscriptions to their ’safety camera’ updating service and their traffic service - both of which will for sure save you time and money.

You can download their Mac OS X software from the TomTom Plus Services web site.

Not that it’s a super-surprise to me - but Magellan doesn’t have OEM support for Mac OS X and the Magellan devices.

You can see from my interaction with the Magellan uber-cool Ask Maggie Web Support System that no Mac software support is available.

I do find it kind of funny though that Maggie decided to ask me if the ’solution’ provided was helpful or not. Even though Maggie ever so thoughtfully provided a link to the front page of the Apple web site I’m going to have to say “No her SOLUTION was not very helpful”.

Mio was the least supported - Yes… even less than Magellan without even confirmation in a search on their web site that Mac support was not available.

With the type of support that Garmin and TomTom offer their users you can see why they are the real front-runners in the GPS market. You can expect them to hold on to this position because they’re going to work hard on the development of their devices to expand their user-base and keep you happy.

Pretty cool that both the TomTom and the Garmin let you change the voice files at your every whim if you want to. It’s so easy to do that you can have someone different tell you where to go every day (Like that doesn’t happen at work already right?).

You can learn how to change your GPS voices with these tutorials:
http://www.sourcegps.com/2008/04/21/change-your-garmin-gps-voice/
http://www.sourcegps.com/2008/03/08/changing-and-creating-tomtom-voices/

However - I’m going to have to say that Garmin is the front-liner though when it comes to customization and total tweaking control because not only do they allow you to have the ability to change your voice files but you can have some real control over your vehicle icon too. Garmin has a garage (actually a web site) set up just for storing cars to share with the planet. There’s over 50 vehicles in the garage to choose from like the blue RC Buggy pictured on the left.

Some of you knowledgeable people are going to say “TomTom lets you change theirs too!” - but the cheezy little vehicle bitmap icons that TomTom utilizes don’t even come close to comparing to the vehicle icons that are available for the Garmin GPS Navigators.

Garmin says their vehicle icons will work for the Nuvi series, the Zumo series and the StreetPilot c510, c530, c550 and the c580. You can download the vehicle icons from The Garmin Garage.

Check back at SourceGPS in a little while and we’ll have a tutorial on how to make your own custom icons for the Garmin series of GPS Navigators.

One thing I always want to do is plan a trip before I go out on it if there’s some danger of getting lost. If I’m going to visit a couple of islands with a boat, trek out into the wild Sierra Madre or even visit a town that has no road data available there’s just no way to get the Navigating Part of the GPS device to function the way I want it to.

So how can one plan a route to take when there’s no concrete or asphalt pathways (and no navigational map data available either)?

The guys over at GPSies (pronounced Gypsies & meaning vegabond) have made available a conversion utility that will convert between 21 different formats! Now you can plan your route in Google Earth, export it as a KML and then convert the KML to whatever format your device supports! That means that this will be compatible with the different varieties of Garmin, Magellan, TomTom, Trimble and lots of other brands. Not to mention that with Google Earth (http://earth.google.com) you’ll have access to some of the best satellite imagery of the world to make your route.

Wow - Check out what www.GPSies.com has to offer.

Geotagging is a fairly-new, automatic and easy way to keep your digital photos organized. With a GPS enabled camera you can include GPS location information within the Exif data in your pictures. The problem however is that the cameras that have this functionality built in are still very expensive. Pictured on the right is Nikon’s D300 which is a GPS enabled camera. The last time I looked at the price for this camera it was about $1,700 which is a little outside my budget especially since the price doesn’t include any lenses for the camera.

No kidding around the D300 is a beautiful camera and I would love to have one but I still want to be able to eat more than a little bowl of rice every day next month so really I can’t afford one.

Lucky for me (and all the rest of the people on strict budgets) that there are alternative methods to automatically Geotag your digital pictures without burning up the money you’re going to spend on food for the next two months.

The i-gotU Travel Blog Master is the best deal at about $50 and it comes in two different models.

The water-resistant and non-water-resistant models are the same price so you might as well go for the extra security of having a more rugged model that comes with a cozy rubber-bumper case too.

The i-gotU Travel Blog Master is compatible with all digital cameras and camera-phones and can actually be used as a PC-GPS as well. It comes with the software that helps you easily create a 3D photo-journey in Google Earth and in Google Maps.

If you’re wondering about accuracy you can be assured this will be as accurate as any other device on the market. It comes with the widely popular SiRF III Chipset that is used in many GPS systems.

Sony says that the GPS-CS1KA GPS Image tracker is compatible with virtually any digital still camera and camcorder. Record the time, date and location to each shot you take. You can use with any of camera since now Picture Motion Browser software is included in GPS-CS1KA. Once the images and data are on your PC, the supplied image tracker software synchronizes the photos with latitude, longitude and time reading from the GPS-CS1KA unit. Activate the Picture Motion Browser software are your photos will pop up next to push pins on Google Maps or Google Earth by the actual location where you shot the picture.

But wait just a second! This is selling for $150 which is about $100 more than the i-gotU model that does exactly the same thing.

Alright - it does have a pretty cool design and also the hook for a carabiner (those ever so popular clips that are used for hiking and now everything else too) which makes it something you can just clip to your backpack and forget about until the journey is over. Your call on whether it’s worth the extra $100 though.

The GiSTEQ PhotoTrackr Lite is also a great choice - it’s reasonable priced at about $100 and has all the features you’d expect from a device like this.

They claim that “the most exciting feature of all is that you can upload your photos to flickr online” which you can do with any other picture too! That particular feature is not really unique to any device and if you’ve geotagged your pictures with any other device flickr will treat them the same when you’ve uploaded them.

With a cool design and also the clip for the carabiner you’d think it’d be worth as much as the Sony model. I’m guessing the extra $50 on the Sony is the price you pay for the little painted on Sony logo.

There’s been mention that this GPS device doesn’t live up to the advertised 22+ hours of normal battery usage time but that would be totally dependent on where the device is being used. If it’s always searching for satellites it’ll use up the battery a lot faster than if it has constant locks on them. Even so 10 hours on a rechargeable Li-ion battery would suffice for most users.

So there it all is! Geotagging your digital pictures automatically, cheaply, and easily!