Here is today’s commute to work… this time we were one car back at the railway crossing, so I decided to film people driving through the flashing lights…
And still have not heard back from “The Leader” yet either 🙂
and some one posted a comment as to who cares..
I’ll leave it to Top Gear to show you what happens when you don’t care.
Google has turned on street View Australia. but it is not just Capital Cities. Places like Broome have been done as well.
This image shows the extent for beyond Melbourne for example.
This is the google video for street video Australia…
and more info here on the Google Australia blog
But there are interesting issues as well. take here for example….
Notice the bits missing. this is not due to any privacy issue. My GPS always freaks out going through this area called the Black Spur. The reason, tree density. The trees are so thick here, that it is hard for the gps to get a fix, espically when moving at speed. (from the Kml Page this kml shows what i mean)
And round the same area is a road called The Acheron Way. A single lane dirt road.. and even that has been done, but it also has issues with tree density.
And here are photos of the type of car that Google used. These were taken in Toorak on December 2 2007. (Click for bigger versions)
I have also updated the previous post (on boom gate madness) with an iframe to show the google street view in use. By adding in these 360 views you can dramatically expand out a users understanding of an environment.
However you can’t go passed this video to show the power of google maps.
small update :- channel 10 on the late news on 5/8/08 says google street view invades privacy. They of course then go on to say how google will blank out faces or things if you ask them. Then as the do the voice over on the story they show standard stock footage of people walking across a pedestrian crossing. I don’t think they get it yet.
Ok..so back from another driving trip… Up to Hanging Rock and Mt Macedon. (which will be a post later today).
For this post I have a highlighted video (speed up to double only) of one of my biggest annoyances on the road – the fact that the speed limit around roadworks is some what optional in Victoria. On the drive down City Link I notice that there are signs saying roadworks 60kph. Of course at this time I have to dive across from the fast lane to the slow lane so I am not a moving road block (to other vehicles which do not slow down).
I have the gps trace showing that I was doing 60pkh past the roadworks (and approx 101kph once I accelerated once the roadworks finished).. All the time the car is on cruise control as well! You will also notice that everyone goes flying past me in the 60 zone. In some cases flying is an understatement. 21 cars all up broke the law speeding past. Within a few minutes of getting past the roadworks I have over-taken 6 of the 21 people that went gone flying past me and I catch up with most of the rest of them within the next 5 min as well.
What annoys me is that these are the people that will complain about speed cameras and speed limits, yet here they all are BREAKING THE LAW. Of course if I exceeded the speed limit I would probably get nailed straight away, but that is my luck.
Well I spent all day yesterday out on another snow chase.
Firstly I approached the bank to get a load to pay for the fuel, lucky for me I wasn’t going alone and was taking a 4y/o with me as she had never been to the snow before having lived in Darwin for the last few years. (On an amusing side note, she has for reasons that escape both me and her father started to refer to me as Captain Wolf. I can live with that, I have been called worse!)
But to keep things on a technical nature so that I can justify putting details onto the blog I have a few new goodies… They are a KML of a Toboggan Run (which has the distance at 600metres and the max speed at 16kph!), the video of said run and a whole pile of new photos. The trip was the same route as a few weeks ago so the trip KML has changed really. Apart from the fact that I was stuck behind the same stupid slow guy for 50k’s who refused to go above 60 at ALL! (will put up video shortly!)
And on to the media….
The Toboggan Run (KML File on the KML Page here)
More Photos here.. http://flickr.com/photos/wolfcat_aus/
And the Drive home which is once again the webcam attached to the Asus R2H to recorded the whole trip. This time I have New Order’s The Beach as the soundtrack, simply because it is the same length as the video was meant to be (of course it is 20 second to short but what can you do).:-)
This video is just to cute to ignore and not share.
Video taken on our little Pentax Camera (as I can not use my phone even in flight mode when landing. What the difference is between a video camera and a phone in flight mode I have no idea… yes I know that people will just leave their phones on e.t.c and the rule therefore is no one can use a phone full stop. ) to take video..
And here is the video compressed down to 1 minute… makes the landing a lot more interesting…
But here is the normal speed version of the plane landing at Adelaide Airport.
I finally managed to have a little spare time over the weekend so go to indulge myself in one of my strange little habits… Weather Chasing 🙂
Yes I drove for 300k’s just to see some snow, take some photos and drive back again. Yep, I am that strange. However it the spirit of nerdom I have the following… geotagged photos (link to flickr set), a kml trace (showing the route home only, I have a proper track file from the R2H but haven’t converted the raw nema data yet and given that apart from a bit of the city the rest of the trip is the same anyway what does it matter) and I will in the next day or so try and compress some of the video that I made of the actual drive (Video is up on youtube… keep reading below). The video being a complete capture of the trip at 10fps at 320×240. The only reason they are this small is that the portable hd I use is only 60gig and so I can fit four hours of video like this comfortably. One day I will get around to increasing it to a 320gig version of the WD Passport then I can get higher res capture.
I also managed to send a geotagged twitter (via twibble) on the way home as well (only because Vodafone don’t have coverage at the top of the mountain). So I think the all round trip to the snow was a technological experience.
Oh yeah and I used the R2H with an FM transmitter for all the music along the way as well. So that was my weekend…. 2 gps’s a car and some snow…. all round lots of fun.
I like this photo just about the most of all the ones I got today
This was taken coming through a bit of the road called the Black Spur.
Both of the following videos are just the bit between Healesville, through the Black Spur, Marysville and upto the top of Lake Mountain. There are a couple of stops to take photos as well. The drive through Melbourne is all a bit boring really!)
Video 1 – Up to the Top of the Mountain.
Video 2 Down the Mountain
This covers Facebook… watch, enjoy. (and yes it came via a real life friend in facebook!)
Trippy Train Trip – Town Hall Station to Wynyard station
This is a sample post from my youtube account to my blog. The video is of a small train trip in sydney a few weeks ago with a new bit of audio over the top. All the wigging out however is all in camera. The nokia n95 tends to wig out in black environment with moving lights less than a metre away doing 60kph. Go figure.
