Someone on #lplug mentioned that they had purchased a USB GPS thingy (not that actual one, but one very much like it) and had been playing with Kismet. I almost ordered one for myself, but instead got a USB/Serial converter for my existing GPS, since that was considerably cheaper. I just got back from driving around the neighborhood, and found several dozen wireless networks in my brief drive. Almost all of them have a default name (“default”, “linksys”, or “NETGEAR”) and are open. The iStumbler GPS plugin allows me to capture that information along with location coordinates. Very nice.

There are a few things that I wish it could do, such as give me a Google map of the area (that part it does) with a location pin in each wifi network location (that part it doesn’t do). However, I have no idea how hard that would be. I have been reading a little of the google maps API documentation, and I’m hoping to have a little time to play with that over the next few weeks. Maybe I can contribute something useful to this project.

It would also be nice to be able to export the data into some useful format. The most useful format, for me at least, would be GPX, which would make it easy to convert to dozens of other formats.

I guess at some point I should get onto the iStumbler mailing list(s) so that I can make actual feature requests rather than hoping that the author will notice that I’m blogging about him. 😉