However, as time went on, I think we all noticed that buildings in our areas which were knocked down years ago still appeared in the program.

As it happened, Google Earth wasn’t updated instantly, so despite what YouTube videos would have you believe, you can’t spy on your neighbours or track the movement of Chinese naval vessels.

So just how often is Google Earth updated? Well, that depends on a few variables.

Location

As with all mainstream software programs, Google Earth aims to serve the masses. Thus, they invest their funding into keeping the most frequently searched and viewed areas updated. This variable is the most definitive in how often an area is updated in Google Earth.

So for example, New York will be updated quite regularly and in high detail using low flying aircraft to get good resolution imagery. They may also add an extra layer to popular locations which makes prominent buildings 3D. You can see this in the image above.

On the other side of the same coin, in answer to the question how often is Google Earth updated, you can bet your life savings that the imagery of the remote Irish countryside or Russian mountain ranges are still in very low resolution and have never been updated from their original state.

Security

Another reason location might come into play is for security reasons. Sensitive military bases and installations are often blurred and not updated by Google when requested by world governments. Area 51 in the Nevada desert is one which springs to mind, and the Royal Stables at The Hague in The Netherlands is another, as seen below.

Also, Google may cease updating a certain area if they get wind of their imagery being used for military intelligence or crime. For example, Hamas have been rumoured to use Google Earth to pinpoint rocket strikes at Israel from the Gaza strip.

Finally, “˜no fly’ zones and conflict zones won’t be updated with high resolution pictures from aircraft because it’s not allowed for security reasons. For example, you won’t be able to find detailed imagery of Southern Afghanistan or Iraqi mountains due to the current conflicts. All you’ll get are old, blurry satellite images.

Google is sensitive as to how their software is used, as any company would be, and have taken action to prevent it being used in malicious ways.

The Time Factor in Determining How Often Google Earth is Updated

As I’ve referred to in the above paragraphs, the low level, high resolution imagery on Google Earth, such as that of cities and infrastructure is not done by satellites as many people believe. When you zoom in on Google Earth, to the point where you can see your car very clearly parked on your driveway, then that’s the work of aerial photography. If however, your house is a barely discernible brown blob amidst a landscape of psychedelic blurs, then that’s the work of a satellite suspended above the Equator.

Obviously, it takes time for these aircraft to run those photography update missions. They are also run by a number of private companies, not by Google itself, so getting all these images pieced together takes even more time. Finally, the databases cannot be updated until a new version of Google Earth is released which happens every few months. Thus, it takes more time.

On average, imagery of an area is updated every 1-3 years. Some areas are updated more regularly, others have never been updated. It all boils down to where you live and how important Google reckons it is that your area is given fresh images. Most urban areas will have been updated at least once since 2005.

What about your area on Google Earth?  Is it regularly updated or are you just a big blurry blob?  Let us know in the comments.

The key to tracking any signal, whether it be cellular or radiowave signals, is something called trilateration. In order for trilateration to be used effectively, your phone needs to be picking up on at least 3 satellites – 4, or more, is better.

Your GPS-enabled phone receives a constantly streaming signal, from the satellites, containing information such as the time the signal was sent and the orbital information of the satellite.  Based on that, your phone’s GPS receiver calculates your location in latitude and longitude. It can also calculate your current speed, based on the time between readings and distance covered.

So how exactly does this trilateration thing work?

How Do Satellites Track Mobile Phones?

Imagine a cone extending down from each of the three satellites covering your location. These cones make ellipses, close to circles, when the hit they Earth. Now, you have three intersecting circles. The centers of those circles are then used in a trilateration equation to determine roughly where you are. The point where all three circles intersect is your position. Let’s see how that might look in a simplified view.

The actual equation is more complex than the scope of this article will allow. However, I think this will give you a good high-level understanding of how it all works.

Since the GPS system employs from 24 to 32  global positioning satellites, your position can be determined almost anywhere on Earth. Take a look at the animation below and you’ll see how multiple satellites can transmit to your phone simultaneously. When there are 4 or more satellites transmitting their signal to your phone, the calculation is far more accurate.  Originally, the GPS receivers could only use data from 4 or 5 satellites at once. Now they can use as many as 20.

What can stop it from being tracked is anything that is going to block the line of sight. For instance, if you are in a building, away from a window, the satellites cannot communicate with your cellphone. So it isn’t a foolproof system.

Not all phones have the hardware to be tracked by satellite, but many do. BlackBerry and Treo are popular brands of cellphones that have satellite-trackable models. If your phone has GPS but doesn’t use satellites to trilaterate, then it is relying on the trilateration of cell towers, or even WiFi, to determine your location. Same principle, slightly different technologies.

Once your phone has calculated your position, how does it let anyone else know what that position is? I wasn’t able to find a definitive answer, but I’m led to believe it does it via your cell signal when a call is made,  or SMS. I bet one of our readers has an answer to this question.

Interestingly, the entire Global Positioning System of satellites is run by the United States Air Force’s 50th Space Wing, located in Colorado. The system has been around for quite some time and was made accessible to the public during President Reagan’s administration.

Of course, there are those people that fear that having their location tracked by their phone will lead to some sort of uber-surveillance. Personally, I don’t see it. How many cellphones are there in the world? What kind of massive server farm would you need to keep track of all that?

Very generally speaking, if law enforcement wants, or needs, to track your phone, then a warrant must be obtained and provided to the service carrier. There are situations of emergency where this process is sped up and may not include the full warrant procedure. Surely you’ve seen at least one story of how a stranded or kidnapped person was found alive, thanks to cellphone GPS services. Due to all those safeguards, the system is reasonably free from abuse and a technology that truly does add to our lives.

Image Credits: 50th Space Wing, Wikimedia Commons

With access to several hundred channels worldwide you’ll barely ever run out of something to watch. And the best is yet to come since ProgDVB is offered for free!

ProgDVB supports various types of data sources:

• Internet TV and radio
• DVB-S (satellite), DVB-S2, DVB-C (cable), DVB-T,ATSC
• IPTV
• Analog TV
• Playback from a file

Key functions:

• High Definition TV support including H.264/AVC
• Picture-in-picture support as well as independent simultaneous recording/playback of several channels from one or more devices
• Support for the majority of DVB and ATSC devices including DiSEqC and CAM interfaces support
• Support for all digital TV audio formats: MPEG, AC3, AAC,…
• Time shifting functionality using the RAM or disk buffer of unlimited size
• 10 Bands equalizer
• TV and Radio channels recording
• Playback from disk based files
• Electronic program guide (EPG) from Digital TV or XmlTV.
• Teletext
• Subtitles (Teletext, image-based and closed captions)
• Support for VR, VMR7,VMR9 and EVR renderers including OSD (except VR) independently from channel type or signal presence
• Network broadcasting
• Skins for OSD and GUI
• Both Win32 and full-fledged Win64 versions are available
• Interface Language Localizations

Setting up ProgDVB

You’ve read the above main features (or a portion of it). Now comes the moment when you’ll quickly become knowledgeable on how to download it and set it up. Despite the complexity level that this new software may seem to have acquired, it is actually quite simple.

First off, click here in order to download your .exe file, and to begin installing the application.

Once you’ve completely downloaded and installed ProgDVB, you’re now ready to begin watching Digital TV through satellite. All you have to do is click on your desired country within the left hand side and scroll down to your desired channel. Once you’ve located and chosen a channel you’d like to watch simply click on it and it should momentarily begin to load on your ProgDVB TV screen.

Setting up ProgDVB to make scheduled recordings

There are three different ways to record content in ProgDVB. These is immediate record, scheduled record and selected program record (like a Sky+ box).

Note that when making scheduled recordings, no two schedules can overlap!

Immediate Recording

To make an immediate recording, simply select the channel to record from the left column and press the record icon. Press the record icon again to stop the recording when desired.

User set time based scheduled recording(s)

To set up a simple scheduled recording, tune to the channel to record from. Click the “˜Service’ menu, select “˜Scheduler’ and click “˜Add’ on the scheduler box. Select a date to record (if not today), enter a time in 24 hour format (e.g. 20:00 for 8pm), select “˜Start Record’ from the drop-down field and click “˜OK’. Click the “˜Add’ button again, select the date to stop recording (if not today), enter a stop time in 24 hour format, select “˜Stop Record’ from the drop-down field and click “˜OK’.

To make two or more recordings from independent channels, follow the above steps to schedule the first recording, then do another “˜Add’ on the scheduler box, enter the date and time one minute before the second (or later) recording and choose “˜Change Channel’ from the drop-down field and enter the name of the channel in the channel name field. Then follow the steps above for making a simple schedule for the second recording.

Recording a program using EPG (Electronic Programming Guide)

Choose the channel from the left column to schedule a recording for. Click the “˜i’ EPG icon to bring up the TV Guide for that channel. If no information is shown, then this channel does not use EPG. In this case, follow the steps above for “User set time based scheduled recording(s)”.

Select the program to record, click “˜For Record’ and click “˜OK’ to confirm. To record other programs (even from other channels), repeat these steps for each recording.

To cancel a schedule, click the “˜Service’ menu, select “˜Scheduler’ and remove the three entries (change channel, start record and stop record) for the schedule to cancel.

Summary

ProgDVB is a powerful and creative way to watch satellite TV all from your PC with the use of a few mouse clicks. The only real complaint or “critique” I have for ProgDVB is the quality of sound. Depending on which channels you decide to view the quality of sound and mainly the quality of picture may vary. Hopefully in the future this can be fixed as technologies via satellite advance.

Let us know in the comments what you think of ProgDVB and if you think this is a good replacement for normal regular TV.

If you want to explore planet earth from your home, Google Earth is the place to start.

Fly over our world and zoom into different locations, skim through your own neighborhood in bird’s eye view, dive into the Grand Canyon, follow the Great Wall of China or have a peak onto the rainforest, maybe you’ll discover an exotic animal. There is nothing like it.

To make Google Earth even more fun, I have a few treats for you today.

Cool Google Earth Resources

These are the websites you should visit if you are looking for background information, insider news, adventure, exciting discoveries or sights.

Google Earth Blog – Here you’ll find the latest news, interesting sights, helpful tutorials, technology, and happenings for Google Earth.

Google Earth Cool Places – This website features a huge collection of extraordinary sights. Click yourself through the screenshots on the front page, roll the dice for a random image, rate the sights, leave a comment, browse the categories and if you find something you want to explore further, open the placemark in Google Earth. Endless fun, reserve an hour or two for this trip.

Google Sightseeing – Discover the most unusual places and sights found on Google Earth. View the latest or browse by location or category. All images are commented and of course a placemark is available at the bottom of each post.

Google Earth Community – A forum with thousands of screenshots, images and placemarks as well as articles on various topics.

GE.findr – A Google Earth search engine.

Earth Contest – The world’s biggest interactive and free game, where players use Google Earth placemarks, follow clues and utilize the Checkpoint feature to beat a GameMaster. Probably the most exciting live adventure you can complete right from your desk.

Google Earth Plugins

Panoramio – Share your photos with the world right inside Google Earth using Panoramio. The plugin enables you to see all photos people have posted for locations worldwide. To upload and share your own favorite shots you have to sign up for an account. Up to 2 GB storage is free.

Mount Fuji surrounded by thumbnails and one photo featured by Panoramio.

The World Wide Panorama – This one works similar as Panoramio, but instead of plain images offers 360° panoramas.

Night Lights of the World – NASA has provided several interesting layers for Google Earth, one of them showing the blue planet at night.

Realtime Weather Observation Overlays – Weather Bonk offers weather overlays with data in degrees Fahrenheit or Celcius with or without wind barbs.

Geepeeyes – A GPS plugin that supports the NMEA protocol. Geepeeyes plots location, trail, speed, heading and speaks the driving directions on a dynamic map view even if Google Earth is offline and cached.

CBS News Seismic Monitor – Offers scroll through or playback of worldwide seismic activities for the past seven days.

Google Moons – This plugin contains 34 real scale 3D models of the largest natural satellites in the Solar System crammed around the earth inside Google Earth. Very nice model for size comparison.

So for all the newbies, parents, grandparents, techno-phobes and computer doofs out there, here’s what should be on your computer.

1. THE BASICS

A good firewall – my personal preference is ZoneAlarm

A good virus checker – why pay through the nose for Norton when you get the free and excellent AVG Anti-Virus?

A good spyware checker – despite their 2007 version not quite being up to scratch as its predecessor, I still recommend Ad-Aware for ease of use and efficiency at finding those nasty spyware critters.

I covered AVG and Ad-Aware in a previous MakeUseOf article which you can find here. They were also mentioned in our round-up of free security programs .

2. BROWSER AND EMAIL

You’ll obviously get Internet Explorer as the default browser but you should definately shun it in favour of Mozilla Firefox. If you prefer, Opera is also excellent but Firefox is (in my opinion), the top browser. But don’t try to uninstall Internet Explorer. Best to keep it on the PC, at least to get the Microsoft security patches downloaded (Microsoft doesn’t allow you to download their patches using the Firefox browser. You also cannot use Firefox to access the Microsoft Office templates.)

If you want to have your email downloaded to your PC, Microsoft will naturally push you in the direction of Outlook but again, you can shun that in favour of Mozilla Thunderbird. Similarly to Firefox, Thunderbird is full of useful extensions. If you decide on Thunderbird and don’t want Outlook cluttering up your computer, you can remove Outlook (and any other Microsoft product for that matter) by inserting your Windows set-up CD into the CD drive of your computer then go to the start menu then Add/Remove Programs –>>Add/Remove Windows Components (on the left side). You can then uncheck what you don’t want and they will be uninstalled for you. But you need the original Windows installation disk for the programs to be uninstalled properly. You will also need the Windows installation disk if you want to re-install anything later. So keep that disk safe!

3. THE REST (IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER)

Winpatrol – alerts you when programs secretly try to burrow their way into your start menu. You can also customise and control your other computer functions as well as set up scheduled tasks. You can see the MakeUseOf review here.

Winamp – for playing audio and video. Customisable and easy to use.

7-Zip – for zipping and unzipping files. There’s also the previously reviewed Universal Extractor but that is only for unzipping files. To zip them, you would also need something like 7 Zip.

TrueCrypt – for encrypting those files you don’t want anyone else to see. See the MakeUseOf review here.

Picasa – one of the best photo management tools out there. I like how you can set up photos on the page before printing them out on photo paper.

Skype – the best VOIP telephone program on the internet. Also has an excellent chat function, and is highly customisable.

Pidgin – got more than one chat ID? Manage them all with this alternative to Trillian. Constant upgrades being put out.

The Google toolbar – I am not normally a fan of toolbars but the Google toolbar is the exception. Highly useful with quick access to the search engine and most Google services. The Firefox version can be found here.

Unlocker – helps you to stop any system processes that may be stopping you from deleting, moving or renaming a file on your computer. See the MakeUseOf article here.

Google Earth – this is my time-wasting application. I like to zoom in on people’s houses!

FileZilla – for moving bulk files from my PC to my website. See the MakeUseOf review here.

CDex – it’s perfectly legal to make private backup copies of your CD’s and keep them on the computer. I use CDex which is an easy CD ripping tool.

CCleaner – clean out all the junk that has accumulated on the computer. Cleans out temp files, cookies and much more. See the MakeUseOf review here.

Auslogics – along with CCleaner, use Auslogics to get your files defragged and in order. You can see the MakeUseOf review here.

eBay Turbo Lister – if you sell on eBay, Turbo Lister can help you to write and list your auctions offline. Totally invaluable, although sometimes it is a little buggy.

That’s the basic list but of course there are other programs based on your needs. For example, I find a video editing program called VirtualDub totally invaluable but unless you deal with a lot of raw video footage, VirtualDub will be not much help. I also use a paid program called SnagIt but some of you may not want to pay for a screen capture program (does anyone know of a free screen capture program?). Oh and if any of you have a website and need to make thumbnail pictures, a good program is Easy Thumbnails.

So that’s the total sum of my PC at the moment. What do you think of the above list? Do you agree with my choices or do you have better alternatives? Let’s hear it in the comments.

“Google Earth puts a planet’s worth of imagery and other geographic information right on your desktop. View exotic locales like Maui and Paris as well as points of interest such as local restaurants, hospitals, schools, and more.” Link

Image quality is quite good. The quality and the speed of this service(given you are on broadband) truly shows how far technology has gone by bringing to your desktop something that we used to see only on the blockbusters not so long ago. Google earth has free and premium version which comes with more options. To start using service, a software download(approx.14 MB) is required. If your PC is more then 1.5 years old, then before you install it check ‘recommended hardware configuration’ here.

What can it be used for?

• zoom in from space to any physical address
• checkout schools, hotels, restaurants, etc
• discover driving directions
• View 3D terraing of buildings
• Possibility to Save/ Share location searches

With Google earn not only you can view almost any physical address on the planet, but also browse through fun earth tours produced by other users. For instance, there is a tour featuring satellite images of 10 most expensive homes in the world(view images, 3D terrains of these houses and etc.). Someone may also find it helpful for cheking out an hotel or resort before actually booking it. You can see yourself whether the beach house you are about to book is actually a beach house and not a ’100 meter away’ beach house. Well, the rest is up to your imagination. To get more tips from Google itself visit Google Earth Showcase here.

Sample pictures provided on Google Earth (click to enlarge):