In the name of prototyping and quick idea validation I have turned to Telegram to validate both the technical, social and emotional sides related to spatiotemporal matching. Telegram is an easy and cheap alternative to building a mobile app for user tracking. Although there is less control over how the data is collected, it is a decent way to test several things out before fully committing to such big project.

In this post I am going to cover the technical aspects of implementing the collection of position information using Telegram. Later on I will write a bit more about the social and emotional aspects that come with fully automatic flight logging over at the Skyhop blog.

Sometimes it’s just easier to deal with a flat grid representing coordinates than to deal with certain cartesian projections. Though I understand that these projections are there for a reason, there are situations where it might be beneficial to have a simple grid representing the number of kilometers from the equator as Y value and the number of kilometers from the Greenwich meridian as X value. Read on for some quick and dirty map projection magic;