My GPS Logs • Aaron Parecki

I've had a fascination with maps for as long as I can remember. During family road trips to San Francisco I remember tracing our route on a map with a highlighter in real-time. Many, many years later, I am able to trace my route automatically with a GPS receiver on my phone.
I have been carrying a GPS tracker with me at all times since 2008, walking, biking, driving and flying. I use this data for various things, including:
I log my bike rides, flights and other ways I travel around from this GPS data.
The header of my website always shows my local time and the current weather at my location.
The background image of this website is a large map centered around my current approximate location.
I have a "magic clock" in my house that points to where I am. "Home," "Work" and "Traveling" are based on my GPS location. The others are based on Foursquare checkins.
Nearly every post on my website is geotagged based on where I am when I posted it. When the device I use to create the post doesn't have a source of location, my website looks up my location from the GPS tracker and uses that location for the post. This is also used to set the correct timezone for each post.
I don't have a GPS logger in my digital camera, so my photos don't have location data in them. When I upload them to my photo archive, I query my GPS logs to find out where I was when I took the photo.
Over the years, I've gone through a few iterations of the software and hardware that makes this work. Here is my current setup, running since 2014.
Previously, I've used other software and hardware:
Below are images generated solely from the GPS data. There is no underlying map. The color of the lines corresponds to the speed I was traveling. Frequently-traveled paths appear thicker because of how many overlapping tracks there are.
Read more about Geonotes, Proximal Notification Systems, and Automatic Check-ins with GPS and SMS
Hey Aaron! What software/library are you using to generate those maps with your location? Can they be considered heat maps? And what about the animated video?
Hi, I'm Aaron Parecki, Sr Director of Identity Standards at Okta, and co-founder of IndieWebCamp. I maintain oauth.net, write and consult about OAuth, and participate in the OAuth Working Group at the IETF. I also help people learn about video production and livestreaming. (detailed bio)
I've been tracking my location since 2008 and I wrote 100 songs in 100 days. I've spoken at conferences around the world about owning your data, OAuth, quantified self, and explained why R is a vowel. Read more.