"Good Old Games"

Cool -- semi-retro PC Games: Cheap, and reportedly made to work within modern Windows OSes.
http://www.gog.com/en/catalogue/

I finally did some GeoTagging

Went out on the kayak on the body of water formerly know as Town Lake (which now bears the official moniker of Lady Bird Lake). I have a waterproof housing for my Canon PowerShot G10, and have a nice waterproof bag that fits the Droid. So, both key pieces of GeoTagging field technology were safe on the water.

I fired up MyTracks (an Android app) at the dock and ran a GPS trace of the 2 mile bridge-and-back roundtrip. During said trip, I took a few photos of birds, turtles, and the city. So, now I had a set of photos on one device, and some GPS data on a different device. "How ever shall you properly GeoTag the photos and subsequently display them in an interesting or useful manner?," you may ask. "Furthermore," you may point out, "you seem to have forgotten to synchronize the camera's clock with that of the phone/GPS logger." The answer and solution are both relatively easy:

1. Fix the lack of synchronization:
• Later that night, I took simultaneous pictures with the phone's camera and the actual camera. To minimize the difference caused by lag, I "pressed halfway" on both devices and therefore got as close as possible to popping the shutters "at the same time". With the approximations that will happen later, a few hundred milliseconds isn't going to be significant.
• (Subject and actual time relative to the rest of the photos don't matter -- this is just establishing the offset between the two clocks.)
• (NOTE: Simultaneous shooting of a common subject is also a great technique for dealing with situations where there are multiple cameras involved in a shoot.)
2. I use Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, which makes correcting the time offset simple. In my case the Canon hadn't been adjusted for the end of daylight savings, and was off by a couple of minutes, even if the hour had been correct.
• In Lightroom, I examined the metadata for the phone's version of the "common picture," and noted the capture time.
• I then selected the set of pictures from the Canon -- starting with the "common picture," and Shift-clicking back to the first one in the series that needed to be corrected.
• Lightroom has a function for modifying the date and time, and if you apply a correction to this type of selection, it is clever enough to know that you want to change them all by the same offset, versus setting them all to the same exact time. This is a nice, big, timesaver!
3. Since I was already in Lightroom to fix the captre times, I processed the RAW photos from the Canon, and exported them as JPGs (because most of the cost-effective/free GeoTagging apps don't really handle RAW files).  
4. So, now I had the photos, but I needed the Geo data...
• MyTracks lets you export a GPX trace file to your SD card. 
• Copy that over to your computer because most tagging apps know how to use GPX.
5. I used a Mac app called GPSPhotoLinker to stick the location information into the EXIF data for each JPG file.
• This program lets you load the GPX trace file and the images, and then you can apply the location data either manually or as a batch process. 
• It will also interpolate the location based on the time, and give you a better estimate of the location when there isn't a perfect 1:1 match between the time a picture was captured and when a point in the trace file was recorded. (Of the 13 photos I tagged, only one lined up exactly -- and that was sheer luck.) 
6. So, now I have pictures that are technically GeoTagged, and I can stick them in a traditional gallery. But that's not the best way to benefit from the location data...  
7. Enter JetPhoto Studio, which can not only export a KML file that you can modify to use absolute paths and then overlay on a Google Map (I didn't modify this file, so the pictures use relative paths and don't show up in this view), but also uses this to build a fully functional Google Maps-based web gallery that can be easily uploaded to your site.
8. The results are pretty cool. If you want to see larger renditions, the "traditional gallery" does still have its uses ;^)

My take on the Nexus One "Google Phone"

I think it's an experiment to test the American consumer's tolerance to a more open model for mobile telecommunications. Right now, we generally begrudgingly accept the subsidized phone hardware with a two-year expensive contract model. But, there are already a couple of other similar experiments going on:

• T-Mobile has introduced an alternative set of plans (Even More Plus) wherein you pay more up front for the device,  but get a cheaper monthly rate for the same services. If they would extend the lower pricing but allow you to "bring your own device", that would be nice.
• Nokia is offering their N900 only as  fully unlocked and completely un-subsidized device.

I see this as a way to test the waters and see if we are willing to look to a model more akin to how we deal with our computers and ISPs. Most of us would think it was completely ludicrous if Apple would only sell us a Macbook for $899 with a two-year contract from Time-Warner's Roadrunner division. But somehow we have allowed this business model to prevail for the devices that are always with us. Just replace Macbook with iPhone, $899 with $199, and TW/RR with AT&T if you doubt that statement.

If all of this had been imminent 6 weeks ago, I probably wouldn't have purchased the Droid. I really do like the device, but now I'm stuck with Verizon for 2 years and will have to deal with crazy stuff if my hardware fails during that time. I was also glad that there was no VCast NASCAR that I can't remove from my phone's ROM. That would actually have been a deal-breaker, despite the other compelling features and functionality.

Having a model where I can pick the "best of breed" for the device and the carrier independently -- while finding a way to not get reamed on the price of both -- seems like a fundamentally good thing to me. If this is indeed Google's intent, then I certainly hope it proves to be successful. Outside of things that are essential for functionality, I would prefer if this model also means that no "crap" will be installed on the ROM -- giving the device's owner more control.

Minor Updates to the Home Page

http://lonewolf-digital.com/ has a new index page, and an alternative QR Code based index page, too.

I ditched the huge graphic in favor of the one below, added a couple of direct links, etc. Still have to clean up some of the old-school tags and refine my CSS to get it to validate as "good" XHTML, but most browsers are forgiving enough that it will render reasonably well in the meantime.

One of my favorite Mac developers dislikes the App Store...

http://www.rogueamoeba.com/utm/2009/11/23/airfoil-speakers-touch-1-0-2-is-now-available/

Links back to the ordeal they had using legitimate API calls and still having their app held up for months because of undocumented internal Apple processes that -- in this case -- arbitrarily managed to change for the better. (It's also possible for said processes to arbitrarily change for the worse...)

Austin on Two Wheels

http://austinontwowheels.org/

Things Google Search can do...

Nice link that covers some functions you may not know about... I knew about the calculator and conversions, and recently discovered the localized "movies" search on Android. Would never have thought to try the package tracking (I still prefer going directly to the shipper's site)...