More information about the 10K Race and 5K/3 mile Walk on Sunday, 28 September after the cut. Race proceeds support Friends of Steven Creek Trail. Don’t forget the eWaste recycling event on Saturday, 6 September, to support the Stevens and Permanente Creek Watershed Council. The church location is adjacent to Hale Creek, a tributary of Permanente Creek.
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Today’s installment from macmap (Macintosh Mapping and GPS Group) had a notice about HoudahGeo 1.4.12 release, in turn from MacInTouch.com. I have a few projects from July where i’ve photos and my GPS tracks, and i’ve been experimenting with using iShowU to record the GoogleEarth animation to include in a slide show. So, i’m ready to play with HoudaGeo.
I imported my three hundred plus whale watching photos (from our great Sanctuary Cruises trip) into HoudahGeo. That took noticeable time, but wasn’t long enough to get distracted. Then i imported the tracklog in GPX format (after a quick conversion with MacGPS Pro). HoudahGeo has a function to import from the GPS , but i did not test that. A quick prompt to verify whether there was time difference in the camera, and voila, a lat long for every image. I’ll note that the interpolation wasn’t well tested in this experiment, but it sufficiently automates what one would do without the code. Most importantly, the software is very easy to use. There’s an opportunity to title and write descriptions within the HoudahGeo interface, and since the application makes standard sidecar files or (presumably) will produce new EXIF data, i find that more appealing than creating image data in iPhoto.
Exporting, with the trial limitation of three images per project, was straightforward as well. (Note that the second image i exported wasn’t the nice image of the Risso’s Dolphins i expected. Pout.) My note about “presumably” above is because i produced sidecar XMP files the first time round, and my subsequent change of configuration did not rewrite the image with edited exif. Bug or limitation of trial or user error are all possible explanations.
The Flickr export went well, although i’m disappointed to find Flickr’s map doesn’t import the geolocation tags.
The win is, in my opinion, the kmz export option. Viewing in Google Earth is very pleasant, and it’s a format one can share with others. If you have a place to host your kmz file, you can give folks the URL and they the photos and the track in Google Earth: houdahgeotest.kmz (248 kb). Note that the time line function in Google Earth is supported! With a hosted location, i was also able to import the kmz into my maps at Google Maps. I’m not sure why there’s an offset between the trail and the red dots. If Google Maps is your destination for the images, it looks like you should edit the kmz in GoogleEarth (or your KMZ editor) before posting. Still, it’s a neat way to put your images in a place. I admit that the “featureless” ocean surface may not be the best example of this; the track over the USGS relief map of the Monterey Canyon gives the whale’s view of where we were.
Where: First Baptist Church Los Altos, 625 Magdalena Ave, Los Altos, CA 94024 (View larger Google map.)
When: Saturday, 2008-09-06 9 am - 4pm
We are accepting all electronics such as but not limited to: computers, monitors, printers, mouse, keyboards, scanners, copiers, stereos, speakers, servers, LCDs, phone systems, PDAs, PS, switches, test equipment, cellphones, TVs, cables, wires, DVD players, CD players, MP3 players, game systems, electronic test equipment, RAM, VGA, cameras, projectors, CPU, HDD, FDD, zipdrives , motherboards, memory, VHS, laptops, calculators, overhead projectors , battery chargers, power cords, microphones, cartridges, etc.
All recycled in the US.
Please bring your items over and help us fund our continued work.
For more information please call (408) 356-8258 or email ed@spcwc.org.
A recommendation for your blog reading: for Santa Clara Valley Water District politics, follow Diana Foss’ Running Water blog. The Friends of Stevens Creek Trail also have a weblog, but it lacks an RSS feed.
The Ping.fm Beta Robot sent me a beta sign up code. I thought i’d fiddle with it for a few days to find out whether it would work for me. It provides a method by which one can update multiple “status” conditions as well as micro/blog in multiple places. I’ve been using twitter to that effect as the spatial services try to post to twitter and twitter posts to facebook (but the broke IM support seems to thwart that at times).
I went to set up my identi.ca site in ping.fm and found the connecting tool doesn’t support OpenID. I’ve run into this problem with Facebook apps, in particular the explode.us application, in the past.
Is it a lack of will? I’d wondered with the Explode.us account whether it was just too few users to bother to implement in the facebook app. It turns out, it’s not a lack of will, but a usecase not supported in the design of OpenID. From the GetSatisfaction discussion:
To answer your OpenID questions: There is no secure way to establish an OpenID session through Ping.fm. This is because OpenID requires you sign in at the ID server of the site you want to login to. You can’t login to a website with an OpenID on other than the site you are requesting (i.e. Identi.ca). We will soon support OpenID for Ping.fm as account representation, but there is no way currently to connect third party sites through a Ping.fm OpenID login.
A quick search for ping and twitter on the OpenID site didn’t turn up any discussions, but i surely wasn’t looking in the right place. It may be the level of trust one shows when cross-linking services like twitter and ping and facebook just isn’t a level of trust OpenID is prepared to support.
I took the Mechanicrawl as a chance to play with toys: my GPS, camera, SMS systems like brightkite, whrrl, and twitter. The following is less about Mechanicrawl and more about how i played with my toys while traveling.
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I’m planning an extended Mechanicrawl outing on Saturday. I poked around this evening creating this KML file which can be viewed in Google Earth or Google Maps.
Following are notes about the event copied from the Mechanicrawl web site, the maps, and other places.
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I’ve updated my blog entry about my GPS unit today with some notes. The Garmin Webupdater works! I may have lost the code to unlock the map detail on the device: that’s a chat to have with Christine. Otherwise, the documentation is of a number of software frustrations that ate up a good bit of my free time. *headdesk*
First, read this article about how Google’s roll out of the Street View function in Britain is being slowed by the need to comply with privacy laws. For example, they may need to implement code to automatically blur faces.
Then, read Eric Johnson’s report of a band that used video from surveillance video cameras to make their rock video. British surveillance video.
Clearly, Google doesn’t need to bother with running up their carbon budget by zipping cars around that country.
This collection of links focuses on the Stevens Creek Nature Trail and the sag pond which is the source of Stevens Creek.
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