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⬅️ Previous capture (2021-12-04)
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One proprietary tool I haven't been able to fully exorcise from my life is Google Earth. I enjoy being able to fly to any part of the world and see satellite imagery of it, exploring remote parts of Russia or Chile, viewing miles of crowded apartment blocks in China and South Korea, or finding tiny dots of land in the Pacific Ocean.
Part of Google Earth's draw is its Photos layer. These are user-submitted photographs with location information tagged to them, so a picture of a beautiful desert steppe or striking city skyline can be pinpointed to the spot on Earth where it was taken. Some of the pictures are so aesthetic that I use them as desktop backgrounds.
The most similar open-source tool I've found, which I don't think is fully libre software, is NASA's Worldwind. Worldwind is a combined SDK and API that allows developers to project and analyze data onto a 3D globe, useful for everything from weather patterns to hydrological studies.
If I were to learn to code more seriously, I'd probably make my own program with WorldWind toolkit and implement some of Google Earth's features myself. I'd want to find a way to scrape Photos data from Google Earth and place markers for them on the globe, and I'd want to able to read KML data to track my own pinned places.
Of course, I could drop all of this entirely and simply go to the places I want to see in real life. That's also a possibility.
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[Last updated: 2021-10-28]