Catch Up!

CRUD! Catch up time!

I’m in the middle of my last semester and coming up on midterms. I’ve been through new years, many boring classes, a hard drive failure, a caucus, facial hair loss, fun times with friends and am now watching the oscars! My blockbuster queue is now very large...

Hillary Clinton visited UPS!! I have to get the pictures off my friend’s laptop, but I’ll put a few up soon. The next day I got to participate in a caucus, which was horribly depressing because no one had any real knowledge of the issues. I blame the media. haha.

Anyway... time for work. More soon.

Heehee!

Well, its the day after christmas, and hooray! No more school until late late January.
In the news:

Putin just launched a bunch of satellites into space. Apparently the motherland wants something different than GPS, which is run by the US and can apparently just be switched off for certain areas. So they revived their GLONASS program Global Navigation Satellite System, from the good old Soviet Days. Might there be a future bluray/hddvd squabble between GPS or GNSS? Probably not, but it is always good to have alternatives. Soon Tom Tom will have new features, “Turn right, comrade! Head straight on to capitalist marketplace!”

An aside:
A 4th person has found our geocache! hooray! Hopefully Team Inferno will be going on hikes soon. Expect more posts!

Finals...

Yeah, so I don’t update so much when I’m in school... According to my new iCal in Leopard, I’m busy:

But Navizon seems to be working on the mac now. They updated their client so it sees wifi. Will test to see if it works with the GPS soon. Marin isn’t in their database, so I might do a bet of driving around and see if I can’t make a buck or two filling in the gaps!

UPS (my school) puts off a newspaper called The Trail Its written by students and funded by the ASUPS student government. Its articles are horrible, and people didn’t really read it until they added the “Hey You!” section, a page long piece full of one sentence anonymous shout outs. Everyone is always so excited for the week’s trail to read the funny, and awkwardly personal, Hey you’s! Real Politzer winning stuff.... Well someone finally came up with a satirical newspaper, The Anti-Trail. Its crude. Its rude. It is amazing. On one page, it rips on every problem the campus has, and for some reason refuses to fix. Satire and comedy really is the way people my age find out whats up. Look for a link later! Hooray for things to distract us from our studies.

Navizon + iPhone = GPS?

        I am way too busy with classes... But I am taking a break this evening so that I can mess around with a few things. My super l33t hax0red iPhone loves to keep me busy when I should be doing other things. My only lament is that it lacks GPS... or does it? Via Installer.app I found a new app called Navizon. Basically, as you are walking around, it triangulates your location based on available WiFi networks AP and cellphone towers! The only catch is that someone has to have documented the coords of cell towers and WiFi spots in your area with a GPS for it to work. But, thanks to their handy app, one can drive around town with their GPS enabled laptop or smart phone, and everything will be compiled and ready to drop into their database. They will even pay you for it!
        It seems to be a small venture so support is limited and bugs are plentiful, but the cleverness of the idea makes me giddy. Sadly, their app is a spindly java client that emulates a cell phone on your computer. It is having problems finding my GPS and iPhone attached to the Powerbook, so my network/tower locating days may not be coming for awhile. le sigh... It would be like a lame version of geocaching.. except you get paid! WOO! Why do they have to taunt me so?!
        Hopefully everything will get worked out soon and then we could have GPS(ish) on our iPhones! *drool*

Geotag iPhoto with HoudahGeo

        
        So you want to geotag/geocode? I know I’m a bit late with this... I have been messing around with my iPhone, and will talk about that soon (tonight?). But for now is time to learn how to quickly Geotag photos on a Mac! If you are looking for a super fast way to do this, simply download HoudahGeo and it can be as easy as click and drag! I’ll give you a quick step by step just for help and to clear up any doubts about this cool little app! This program can work with or without a GPS, I’ll explain both!

        But first, what is Geotagging? A Geotag is a bit of metadata attached to an image or even a blog/wiki article, that shows the lat/long/alt of the subject of the media. So, if I take a picture of the Grand Canyon, and geotag it, Google Earth, Flickr, and many other apps and website will be able to quickly lay the photos on the map! Here is the most famous example on flickr! http://flickr.com/map/ Basically... its super awesome if you are taking pictures of obscure locations, where other people may want to visit.

        Kristin and I went on a quick bike ride around Tacoma the other day. I brought my GPS and made sure that it was set to track, and also made sure my camera matched the time of the GPS. Once I got home, I plugged my GPS in on one side of the my Powerbook, and my camera in on the other, and away I went (YES! Garmin will work on a Mac wonderfully with Google Earth, GPSBabel and HoudahGeo! Comment or email me if you want to know more about it!).

        What HoudahGeo does, is compare the time of the tracks, with the timestamp of each photo. It then adds lat/long metadata to the photo. After quickly uploading picture to iPhoto, drag the pictures you want tagged directly into HoudahGeo. You can then either upload GPX info from a GPS receiver or a saved file. There is even a cool feature for people without GPS receivers! Just select the photo, then select the point on the map. Then bam! Just hit write EXIF tag and you are done! You can even export directly to flickr! Check mine out here!
http://flickr.com/photos/bentup/map/ Here is the clipping from Google Earth:


It all works really well, and will cut a lot of time off of any geo blogging experience! Im stoked! Expect more posts soon! And please comment/email if you have anything to say!

Its About Time!

Ok, so I have been back in Tacoma for awhile and haven’t been updating. I have TONS of pictures from our trip to the UK and have yet to put any of them up. I was hoping to Geotag them, but it seems as though I am really too lazy to. Geo tagging over 2000 pictures may just be too much. With the way I have been doing it. So, I have created a flickr album, one for each day, and linked it from here and from each appropriate blog entry. I’m getting bored here, so expect geocache stuff in the near future!! Tomorrow, I am rolling out a guide on how to Geotag photos using a Mac!

Stonehenge/Glastonbury! 8/15

So Stonehenge was pretty cool. Sadly, we couldn’t get too close to it, so it was a little small. Check out the pictures, linked bellow!

We then drove over to Glastonbury, said to be the location of the Isle of Avalon, the final resting place of King Arthur. We checked out the old Abbey of Glastonbury, which was completely torn down. It is said that the Abbey is the oldest Christian Church, and that Joseph of Arimathia visited here on a few occasions (locals say that he even brought Jesus). It is even said that Joseph brought the Holy Grail here, and washed it in the well. Whether or not the stories are true, there is a lot of history here. Overlooking the abbey is a large Tor, with a small tower on top, the last remnants of a small, sister abbey. Sadly, Cromwell, had the Glastonbury Abbeys destroyed, so ruins are all that are left.

Check out the pictures here -> http://ups.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2022097&l=7045e&id=17700012
and here -> http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2022098&l=efea0&id=17700012