Juan Buhler (former SIGGRAPH sketch chair, current Pixarian, and cool street photographer) sent me a link to his cool idea for using the video ipod to store maps. He realized that the thumbnail viewer in his iPod video displays six thumbnails in each row of his video iPod, so he stitched together a map of San Francisco from Google Maps that was 6 times the native screen resolution of the video iPod, (6×320=1920).   He then used the Python imaging toolkit to break the big map up into columns of six pictures using the Python Imaging Library, and loaded them onto his video iPod.  Now, he can quickly scroll through the map of San Francisco, and bring up individual maps at the native resolution.

What a cool idea!

Addendum: I did something kind of similar a couple of years ago with Python and the Terraserver.  You could basically convert latitude and longitude into a collection of urls, and then download the tiles from the Microsoft Terraserver and stitch them together, allowing you to create pictures like this one of San Francisco.

[tags]iPod Hack,Juan Buhler,Google Maps,Google Maps Hack[/tags]