Google have announced a partnership with BMW in germany to enable you to send directions to car when you need to find somewhere and have a suitable gps navigation. That’s a cool feature but a) are users driving along the road and googling directions at the same or b) have not learnt how to use the GoTo button on the gps unit already? Either option sounds rather scary to me.
I’ve been trying to use Microsoft’s WWMX application to geotag some of the photos that we took on holiday ready to upload to zooomr, but the level of mapping detail for Jamaica and Grand Cayman Islands was pretty awful However I have found that by using Garmin’s mapsource to load the track data from the gps and then saving the tracks to a gpx I can then use wwmx to automatically tag the photos if I had the gps on at the time the photos were taken.
However, for the rest of the photos that were taken without the gps I needed a better way of marking where they are taken. A combination of picassa and google earth makes the job very easy. First the photo’s need to be loaded into Picassa – this will probably be done automatically (although for some reason Picassa doesn’t like to find my cruise photos and they disappear from the folder view even though I can see them being scanned). Anyway, once the photos have been loaded, select the photos that need to be geotagged and then go to the tools menu, geotag, geotag with google earth. Then use Google Earth to navigate to the spot that the photos were taken -the satellite view does an outstanding job for this. Then just hit geotag, select the next picture and repeat (or do geotag all if they are all in the same place. At this point, the locations are written to the picture (exif data I presume) and can then be uploaded to flickr or zooomr already geotagged for you.
As it will take some time to load the cruise photo’s, I took some pictures of the Pumpkin Festival at Oakland Nursery including the Worlds Fastest Pumpkin Carver and entries for the Worlds biggest pumpkin.
Each time I spend a bit of time on the geocaching.com website (which is a LOT of time) I am amazed at how good the programming is and how useful the features are. I’m not sure how much of it is .net programming or how much of it is some fancy java programming, but the location based logic is really good. I tried (re)-using the MAP-IT screen which gives me the list of all caches nearest my home co-ordinates and lists the ones I have not done yet but in a graphical view as opposed to a table view. Previously I’d written this facility off as useless outside the US as it doesn’t show you any street level detail that you would get in the US locations, but it does show you the relative positions of caches as in the picture.
I really didn’t think I’d see those four words in one sentence, but there is a Livejournal user, kitiara who blogged about Geocaching and firing a machine gun in the same post!
Sounds like double the fun!
My GPS is broken – I turned the gps back on when leaving my parents I got the message that there was no map loaded in the gps, initiating upload – no idea how it’s done it, why its done it or how I’m going to fix it!
A quick visit to Matalan was very profitable this afternoon. I got a waterproof jacket, with inside pocket for mobileGPS, another one for headphonesPDA and other pockets for the pens, paper, mobile and goodies. As it was only £17.50 it will keep me warm and I won’t have to worry too much about damaging or getting it dirty. I also got some waterproof tracksuit bottoms so I can wear them alone or over my work trousers and go caching without worrying too much about getting muddy. Just need a portable shoe/boot cleaner now and I’m set!
Just spoke to the Where’s my Rebate helpline on 1-800-390-2344 to see where my $50 rebate is for the GPS that I purchased on the 24th November. Apparently it’s been approved and will be sent out on the 25th Febuary….now call me cynical but I don’t remember signing up to be a bank for Magellan for three months….now let me see – $50 at 19.7% APR for three months is…… (I’ve no idea)
Went up to the Angel of the North Cachethis afternoon. The statue isn’t that big and very rusty. There was a plaque by it, giving a description of the statue, but no details as to why on earth they decided to commission it and stick it on the top of a hill!
Spent the last two days on three Geocache’s. Yesterday I hid my first Geocache near the office – about 10 mins walk away – as of yet, 24 hours later, no-one has visited (although it took a while for it to be approved). Today i went back and tried to find the Bosley Locks one and STILL can’t find it. In disgust I went up to the Cloud, which overlooks Congleton and found the Cumulonimbus Crevice cache and left my double-blank travel bug there.
Yesterday I found my first year of the year, which was a first to find, and also my first “first to find”. What made it even better was that looking at the logs for the cache, 3 other people also went looking for it on the same day but none of them could find it. It’s a shame that I couldn’t find the second cache that I was looking for at Bosley though 🙁