Author: Cj B

Prague and Vienna… Here we come!

We are leaving for Prague and Vienna sooon! I can’t wait. You have no idea how excited I am.

Let’s see.

Passport… Check
Money… Check
Heavy winter clothes… Check
Camera… Check
Tickets… Check
Everything else… Check!

We’re ready to go!

Be sure to follow along with our Itinerary here!!

It’s almost like you’ll be there too!

As I said before, I’m going to be geotagging all our photos, but that probably won’t be done till we get back in the states. I’ll try and keep updates here daily, but in case we don’t have internet access I will just post them all once we are back.

And let’s hope the Riots in Prague are over with by the time we get there! Why are there always riots in the cities I want to visit!

We’re out!

A Slightly Annoyed Weekend

So this weekend had a few road bumps, but overall it was pretty good.

Friday, Const came over and we headed out to Sport Chalet and then Fry’s to get stuff for the trip. I still have to buy a portable alarm clock. After that I took him out to Hermosa Beach because a while back he mentioned that we’d never been there. Anyways, we got there and started walking around and I was a little annoyed by how indecisive he was being. We ended up going to this Sushi place which really wasn’t all that great and cost way to much money for what we got. Went home after that and ended up just staying in and watching TV.

Saturday we got up and headed out to Target to get some more stuff and then came home and made Lamb for lunch and watched Touch of Pink. Which was a really good movie. I highly suggest seeing it.

Const left after that and I lounged around, finished planning Europe and did some other stuff. Erick came over a for a couple minutes and a cup of Apple Cider. I just sat alone all night after that.

Got up early the next morning and drove to Santa Monica for a bike ride. Went less then a mile and my chain kept slipping off. Very annoying. Got home and found out that Erick and Const had hung out Saturday night, which was a bit annoying to me. That’s just not something you do, hanging out with a friends boyfriend without even inviting the friend. Anyways…

I spent Sunday cleaning and packing. Const came over about 5 and we went and bought wine and cheese for the dinner party. Headed over to Jason’s about 7 and we had an excellent night, till the end when Jason brought up the whole Ben thing, which put me in a sour mood. Got home about 11 and tried going to bed, but I couldn’t hardly sleep all night. So I came into work late.

Yep, that’s about it. Adios!

Leopard is Failing me….

Leopard is failing me… I installed it the day it came out, and I really enjoy it. But there’s just so many unfinished items in it.

First was the Green Screen of Death.

Then, I wanted to test out Time Machine. I took my external drive that I’ve been using for backups forever. I reformatted it and then turned on Time Machine and told it to use that drive. The first backup worked great! After it was done, I was able to enter into that wonderful timewarp thing. But then, I couldn’t get back out! I clicked the “Cancel” button, nothing. I pressed “ESC” on my keyboard, nothing! I pushed the power button, NOTHING. I had to hold the powerbutton to force a power off…

The next day, I tried a new backup. I plugged in the same drive… And it chugged for a minute and then froze my entire computer! I couldn’t do anything. I had to force a power off. There have been other reports of this.

So that’s just annoying. Then I plugged in a different drive and Time Machine poped up asking if I wanted to use it as a backup drive. I clicked “No” and then tried ejecting the drive and my computer froze!

I am also having issues with Frontrow. I can get into it just fine, I can move around and access everything just fine. But as soon as I try and exit and get back to the desktop. My computer freezes completely.

Next, if I try and view a folder with lots of Images/PDFs in Finder, the whole computer freezes up again!

Then this morning, I was working on my computer and then went to finder and suddenly my computer thinks it has two identical drives in it!

WTF!

Lastly, I love having a fast connection!!!
My home connection:

My work connection:

VA Paperwork!

So I heard from my dad yesterday afternoon. I don’t recall if I mentioned it, but nearly three weeks ago we put an offer in on a house owned by the VA. We put the offer in the DAY the house became available (after months of watching it sit there empty, waiting for them to put a price on it). Then we were told they were taking bids for the whole week.

Then we were told that they haven’t opened the bids and won’t until a week after the bidding ends. NOW we find out there’s all this paper work we have to do. I guess the Realtor filled it out and my dad is going to sign it today. lol. What a mess.

Anyways, last night Erick and Sirin stopped over while I was planning the Europe trip and they drank wine and chatted while I did that. It’s coming along great. You can see our Prague and Vienna itinerary here. I have only planned up to the 21st so far. Hopefully Thursday I will planning the 22-25. One week till we leave LA!!! How exciting is that!

Last night Consty went to some business party. When he first mentioned it over the weekend, I kinda thought maybe he was hinting at inviting me, but I guess not cause I didn’t go. Would have been fun to meet him work people after hearing so much about them all. Either way, it sounded like he had fun.

Tonight I am hoping to go and buy new glasses! 🙂 Yay! I am debating about buying some sunglasses as well.

I’m also in the process of cleaning/organizing my apartment for the time that Brian is there to watch my cats while in Europe. I’ve been going a bit crazy though and cleaning out drawers and cabinets!

Nothing much else going on. Adios!

GeoTagging Photos on a Mac

UPDATED: 2008-01-22 (GPSPhotoLinker)
UPDATED: 2008-03-26 (iPhotoToGoogleEarth)

In short:

The Long Story

I’ve recently got very excited about Geotagging photos. I’m getting ready to head off to Europe for a couple weeks, visiting both Prague and Vienna. I wanted to be able to track where we go in the cities. My past couple trips, including Berlin and Paris, I always get back and start trying to comment on my photos and I no doubt have trouble remember where in the city they were taken!

So this time, I want to be able to geotag them all. Needless to say, I don’t have the money to spend on a DSLR with built in GPS support, or even a DSLR that can support an external GPS unit. So I have to find a way to tag my photos from my trusty Canon Powershot SD630.

I started off with a Garmin Forerunner 201, which I borrowed from a guy here at the office. I used it for a few days of tracking my driving, it seemed to work pretty well, but it had trouble acquiring the satellites fast enough. It would take anywhere from 5-15 minutes, which just isn’t fast enough for me. Also, I was afraid that when in Europe it wouldn’t be able to hold a whole days worth of tracks.

There were a few other issues with the device as well. First, I could not find ANY software to work with it on my Mac. Even GPSBabel couldn’t seem to find it. Second was that the windows software only exported in Garmin Training Center (.TCX) file format. After some searching I was able to find a website that could convert the files to the correct GPX file format, but this would require that I have internet connection while in Europe. Which is not a guarantee.

So, this weekend I went out and bought a fairly cheap used Garmin eTrex Vista. I didn’t need or want anything too fancy. The maps, etc are unneeded. Plus I’m going to be attaching it to my backpack, so I don’t want anything expensive in case it gets stolen while in Europe.

The device so far seems to be working pretty well. It acquires signals in just a few minutes, and can hold 10,000 track points.

As for the Mac Software, I’ve found tons of software out there, however none of it seems to actually work!

For transferring the data points from the Garmin device to my Macbook Pro, I have found the best solution to be GPS Babel. It was able to easily and quickly find my GPS unit and then transfer the trackpoints off into the correct GPX file type data.

From there, I then was able to find Photo GPS Editor. It’s a pretty straight forward interface with a really nice wizard. It even gives you the ability to select a location on the map and set that as the starting point. It will then try and find the correct information for the pictures.

My major complain with this software is the “Offset”. Probably because I don’t understand what I’m supposed to be setting here. It seems that no matter what I put there, things are “close” to where they should be, but not quite correct. I know I’ll probably never get it EXACTLY on where the pic was taken. But still, I think they should be closer then where it’s being shown. IE. I have a picture of the “Fairfax Exit” on the I-10 freeway here in LA. The Photo GPS Editor is putting that picture as being taken about 2 miles past where it was actually taken at (2 miles north on Fairfax from the I-10).

I’m also very confused by the listing of the GPS unit’s data. It shows that there are 8 different track logs with many different points each. So I don’t quite understand what those all mean.

I’d been playing around with GPS PhotoLinker before I moved over to Leopard. However now it doesn’t seem to start (Something about a missing perl module). I have emailed the developer and he says it’s a known issue and should be fixed shortly. (UPDATE: The developer has been actively releasing beta versions that work on Leopard. Check out the site here.) UPDATE:// I have been using this software for a while now that it’s working on leopard and it works great! This is by far the best software to use!!!

Lastly, I tried out ImageIngester. At first the interface is very confusing and has way too much going on. It’s in some serious need of a redesign. However! I found at this software actually worked the best out of all of them!

Even though this software is very cumbersome in the design and not very intuitive (I’m not really going to go into what should be changed here), it was relatively easy to actually get the photos tagged with GPS data. The first thing I did was go to “ImageIngesterPro” and click “Switch Mode”. This disabled a lot of the advanced features which are useless for this experiment. Second, was to click the “Tools” option and select “GPS Input” to enable the use of GPS data.

Here the Offset stuff is much easier to change. I knew that my GPS and my camera were both set to Pacific time and I knew that my camera was an hour faster then my GPS. Under the option for “Camera Time Adjustment” I changed it to remove an Hour.

Next, click the “Choose” button to select your photos, then click “Start”. It was that easy! ImageIngester did all the rest.

Some of the other software I’ve tried has been:

  • GeoTag – This was a really nice software, however it only works on Windows because there is no Java 6 build for the Mac yet.
  • GeoTagger – This software wouldn’t even start on Leopard
  • HoudahGeo – This software seems nice, but it crashed my Mac every time I tried to export to Google Earth (which is something I really want to be able to do!). I’ve emailed the developer, but he’s been unable to resolve the issue at this point. (UPDATE: The developer has emailed me saying this will be fixed in 1.3, I have yet to try it out, but I am looking forward to giving it a shot tonight)

Now, as for getting things onto Google Earth. I was hoping for a quick and easy solution here. And Sure enough, there’s one available… That is, if you still have iPhoto 6. It’s called iPhotoToGoogleEarth. It’s supposed to export directly from iPhoto to a Google Earth KML file format. Of course, I no longer have iPhoto 6. Again, I emailed the developer and he is unsure when a new version will be available. So off I go to find a new solution.

UPDATE://iPhotoToGoogleEarth now works with iPhoto ’08! Great news and it appears to work great!!

The guy who wrote ImageIngester also wrote a nice blog entry about how to do this with some simple PHP. However, this is not exactly what I was hoping for. It’s a great way to do it, but I want people to download a KMZ format file and open it in Google Earth Locally. (And hopefully have a link back to the full size image online).

It seems that Picasa is the best solution, but last I checked it’s still only for Windows?

So far it looks as though I am out of luck on this issue. I’ve spent countless hours searching the web, perhaps I’m googling the wrong things, but I just have not been able to find anything! If you have any suggestions, let me know!

There’s a great article on GeoTagging on Wikipedia.

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