Australian supermarket chain Drakes recently started a trial of putting GPS locators on expensive meats in order to reduce losses caused by shoplifting.

A South Australian supermarket chain has become so exasperated with meat shoplifting that it is currently trialing a security system that involves putting cuts of expensive meat into transparent cases fitted with GPS locators that allow the product to be tracked. The polpolycarbonate cases are usually used to prevent theft of high-priced items in supermarkets, but Drakes is the first in Australia to use them on meat. Technically, high-quality meat like Wagyu qualifies as a luxury product, so Drakes believes the security measure is justified.

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Polish environmental group EkoLogiczna recently had to pay a massive phone bill, after the SIM card in a GPS tracker they put on the back of a white stork, so it could collect data about the bird’s winter migration route, got stolen.

In April 2017, members of EkoLogiczna fit Kajtek, a white stork, with a GPS tracker so they could monitor his migration route to Africa, as well as his feeding habits. In the next year, the bird flew around 6,000 km and EkoLogiczna was able to collect the data they wanted, but in February of this years, something weird happened. On his way back from Africa to Poland, Kajtek stopped in Sudan, and “for unknown reasons” remained in the area for over two months, “travelling 25 kms in different directions during the day”. Then, on April 26, they lost the signal completely.

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Stephen Lund, a cyclist from Victoria, Canada, follows a rather unusual method while deciding his biking routes. Instead of going for the shortest route on the map to get from point A to B, he charts a complicated course that traces out brilliant doodles on street maps and records his artworks with a GPS app.

Some of Lund’s GPS doodles include simple messages like ‘Happy Birthday’, while others feature more complex drawings of animals, fictional characters, and pop icons. He’s been doing this for the past one year, creating a bizarre collection of GPS art work on an app called Strava.

Lund started the extraordinary project on January 1, 2015, as a way to wish people a ‘Happy New Year’. But he kept going after that first doodle, creating a total of 85 works over the course of the year – all of which are posted on his website, gpsdoodles.com. He begins each project by creating a doodle on a map of Victoria that he’s built into Photoshop. He then uses Google maps to find the best route that would follow the shape of his drawings.

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If you thought Skywriting was a romantic way to propose, wait till you hear about GPS writing. The ingenious idea belongs to Yasushi Takahashi – a.k.a Yassan – who spent six whole months trekking through Japan as a way of proposing to his girlfriend. At the end of his journey, the GPS records of his travels spelled the phrase ‘Marry Me’ with a heart sign to boot.

It all started in 2008, when Yassan, then 31, quit his job and planned a journey through Japan, taking with him a GPS device and a map. His purpose was two-fold: to experience a Japan that he only knew in books, and also to draw a special message for his girlfriend using GPS tracking technology. Yassan managed to cover over 7,000 kilometers in six months, mostly by foot and sometimes by car, ferry or bicycle. Every place that he walked through was carefully planned beforehand to get the gigantic magic phrase just right.

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For Michael Wallace, the streets are his drawing board and maps, his canvas. For a paintbrush? He uses his bicycle! GPX Riding is what he calls his art. Confused? So was I, at first.

When I got a hang of what he’s been doing, I was simply amazed. He explains his artwork on his website in simple terms, “GPX Riding is my general term for using a GPS device to track and record my location while riding my bicycle. In short, I use GPS technology to record where I go in a planned effort to create massive images.” Massive images indeed, his gallery of artwork displays pictures of guns, hammers, snails, monsters, scorpions and more. Pretty basic stuff if you were drawing on paper, but very complex if you are tracing it out with your bike.

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