Entries Tagged as 'n95'

Puffing Billy KML File

After living in Melbourne for 5 years I finally got to do Puffing Billy last weekend…. We did the full return trip from Belgrave to Gembrook. And I left my Nokia N95-8gb running with Sports tracker and created this KML file of the trip. You will notice that in places it jumps a bit which would be due to the thick tree coverage on the route.

Enjoy.

Get the KMZ file here as well


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And my fav photo from the trip…

On Guard

See the previous post for video from the trip as well taken on the D90.

New Driving Video (may make you motion sick)

Driving video from the weekend trip to Lake Mountain.

This is the drive home… this time coming via the back road via Warburton through Yarra Junction.  (Where the police pull me over… his question… what was the thing on the windscreen in my car.  The R2H setup I have didn’t look like a GPS.  Poor officer he asked me what it was… didn’t take long for his eyes to glaze over and for him to let me on my way :-). (The standard clip format… R2H video via a webcam under the passengers front visor)

And don’t say I didn’t warn you about the road.  It has the advantage of little or no traffic and is a fun drive and is about the same time and distance as the Black Spur trip as well.

(And the KML)

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And the obligatory shot from the location as well.

Lake Mountain Sunset - 1

The Drive to Bendigo Video + KMZ File

The Video

175K from home to the Bendigo Art Gallery… Video c/o Logitech Webcam and Asus R2H running at 640×480 10fps

The Route as KMZ File

The KMZ File is made via Sports Tracker on the Nokia 95-8gb exported as KML then quick edit it google earth then uploaded to wolfcat.com.au…. you will also find it on the KML Page


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#wtrip09 – The complete route travelled

Here is the complete KML file of the trip… This covers most side trips as well as the main trip up to Coober Pedy via Roxby Downs


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I still have a few more photos to sort and some video as well.. but at least you can see the whole trip now.

Too Late for Rain

The file is made by exported all the Sports Tracker files from my N95-8gb out to Google Earth, then topping and tailing the file to get rid of the junk from each end of the trip that is more often than not just the gps jumping around.

I have the Oziexplorer track files as well.. but they contain even more noise as I would leave the R2H running a lot longer and also it didn’t come on a number of the smaller drives such as the drive to the Breakaways just outside Coober Pedy.

#wtrip09 – The Drive to William Creek, the video, kmz and a picture

I thought I would start with one of the side trips as a blog post for when I got home.. it may take me a while to put all the stuff I have together…

so here we are…

This is the 166k drive from Coober Pedy to William Creek as a 6min video down from the raw 15.4gig 320×240 10fps video of 1hour and 46min.

The Journey

The Route


View Larger Map

The Destination
and here is a small panorama I made at the end of the World famous William Creek Pub on the Oodnadatta Track.
William Creek Hotel Pano

KML File came via sports tracker on the Nokia n95-8gb, Pano from my Nikon D90 and the Video care of the usual set up on the Asus R2h

Buy Too Late for the Rains

finally an update about geotagging software

yes.. I know I have been very slack with the blog as of late… but when your job consists of herding cats and then do html templates at the same time it all gets a bit to much. but back to the entry.

I have been meaning to write about this for sometime… and I am sure most of you have heard of it… but hey better late than never.

As you are aware I have a very nice Nikon D90… and boy do I love that camera. But the one thing I do not have is the GP-1 Nikon GPS device (only cause I can’t afford it). However what I do have is the Nikon D90 and my NokiaN95-8gb running sports tracker. Now the great thing about this is… sports tracker not only exports to kml, but also to GPX. And GPX just happens to be the format that Microsoft Pro Photo Tools read.

Fat Cats Playground
And this very clever bit of software will let me take the gpx trace file and point it to my collection of photos from the camera… match up the timestamps and hey presto they are all geotagged.

Now it is not without issues… namely it currently doesn’t write to the .nef files and in Nikon View it will break the pairing of the images. (which is a major downer really)  But it still means I can geotag my shots very quickly as well.

I will be watching the development of this bit of software a lot more closely in the future…  so I do recommened if you have a good dslr and are running software like sports tracker than can export out a gpx file… download it from here

Ah for a Decent Camera…

You know those moments when you see something and you think, wow I wish I had a camera. I get those moments all the time… (of course I still want a real camera) but having my Nokia N95 with its 5meg camera on me all the time means I can get those photos that I have always wanted to.

Tonight was no exception. I caught up with an old friend over a glass of wine in town to discuss how to build some web presence for a friend of hers and ended up catching the train home at dusk.

So here are the best 4 of the photos that I took…..

Flinders Street 1

Flinders Street 2

Flinders Street 3

Flinders Street 4

But instead of just saying here are the photos, I thought I would add a few more comments.  Firstly, 70% of the photos I took worked… that is to say what I saw on the screen of the phone was what I saw on the screen of my computer.  But of course that leave 30%.  One of the reasons I don’t often load images straight to Flickr or Ovi from my phone is that on the 320×240 screen they look great.  But take that 5mg image and see it 1:1 on a big 24″ monitor and it looks utter crap.  There is still a big fail of expectation between what you see and what you get.  Sure some of it is me but a lot isn’t.

The other catch is that controlling the colour is an interesting experiment most of the time.  Of course what I see in the camera is what I get, but it is often not what I actually see 🙂 But notice that, I did refer to it as a camera. Not my phone.  When I am calling some one my nokia is my phone, but it is now my camera as well.  And depending on when I am using the device and for what is often how I refer to that device.  Perhaps for me at least convergence of technology has reached a threshold.  For a truly convergent device is one that does many things with out you thinking about it.  This has become such a device.

Of course I still don’t have my real camera.  I know which one I want however (and for the record I have my heart set on the Nikon D90), and whilst my heart it set on it, my wallet is not able to stretch that far.  But maybe next year I will get the camera I want.  But then even when I do get it, I will still have my phone on me the rest of the time… and then that will be my camera, or was it my phone.

Macro on the Sun


Macro on the Sun

Originally uploaded by wolfcat_aus

Two reasons for this blog post… 1.. seriously this is one of my better photos for a while. It is a photo that I am happy with both on a technical and an aesthetic value as well.

This is a photo taken on a phone. I do think people need to stop and think about that for a while. We all rush to get the latest tech all the time. I remember the first digital camera I purchased in 1997 (yes I am an early adopter) it had a resolution of 320×240 (and yes I was a poor early adopter) . Now my phone (yes my trusty Nokia n95) has a 5mg camera with an amazing lens that captures photos like this. The other thing to notice is that this photo is geotagged. My phone has my GPS as well. First time I got to play with a hand held GPS was a Magellen Unit back in 2001. Now I am lost (not figuratively) with out one. I used the GPS on my phone to find this particular object that I have photographed here.

So I do think we all need to stop and think what really interesting times we live in.  Now I am reflecting on less than 10 years of tech in the above paragraphs…. consider what we are going to have in another 10!.

And the second point, is the subject.

Artist Chris Lansell has created a 1.1billion scale model of the sun. Not only that but now has been now laid out from St Kilda to Port Melbourne in the same scale the rest of the solar system. From the model of the sun to Mercury is 58 metres, then other 100 or so to Venus, then Earth. Saturn in scale is nearly 2 kilometres away from the St Kilda marina. Poor old Pluto is 5.9km. (all controversies about it status aside :-))

for more info on the project go here. http://www.melbournesolarsystem.com.au/ .

But for getting a sense of scale of our place on the planet you should go and visit the St Kilda foreshore.

Qr Codes – Nokia Style

Nokia have expanded their QR Code Generator to now give you the ability to create Business card barcodes.  More than just a URL, it will embed all the standard business card info.

(See the funny red square of to the side… that is what I am talking about)

Watch the video to see how to do it 🙂

more here… Nokia Beta Labs

and now there is a downloadable version of the QR code reader as well…. http://mobilecodes.nokia.com/scan.htm if you don’t already have it..

In case you are wondering if you do… Nokia N82, N93, N93i, N95, N95 8GB, E66, E71, E90 or 6220 Classic should all have it preinstalled.. but you can get the Nokia version for the Nokia N78, 6210 Navigator, N96by clicking on this installer file  Nokia_Barcode_Reader_S60_32.sis

Plus you can find readers for other phones here… http://mobilecodes.nokia.com/scan.htm

Nokia Photos 1.5

Nokia Photos has hit 1.5 (Beta that is) …. (which is kind of amusing as I didn’t realise there was a 1.  But I digress with my lack of knowledge….)

  • Better integration with Share on Ovi
  • Maps view and geotagging: your photos and videos on the map
  • More supported devices
  • Import pictures from also from your digital camera
  • Ovi look and feel

Fully supported: N70, N71, N72, N73, N75, N76, N77, N78, N80, N81, N81 8GB, N82, N90, N91, N91 8GB, N92, N93, N93i, N95, N95 8GB, N96

Partially supported: all Nokia S60 devices and most digital cameras (import pictures/videos only).

PC system requirements:

  • Operating system: Windows® XP (Home and Professional, Service Pack 2 or later), Windows® Vista”

Important! If you are a Windows XP user, you must first update your computer with the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 from here. This update is not necessary if you are using Windows Vista

………

So that is the standard hype… here is what I think…

It does things that lots of other things do for my photos already…  yet for me this is the big and very nice kicker… the maps.

And by using the Navtec maps it means I can zoom in nice and close (unlike Flickr) on street level to see where to place a photo that did not get geotagged correctly.  Once you have opened a photo you can move its geodata as well. The one thing that is missing from the Navtec Maps however is a Satellite view.  So what most people would say… but if you have a photo that is not correctly tag and you took the photo in say a wilderness area that is easy to recongnise from Satellite imagery then you can easily tag it, this you can’t do.  I have actually got quite good at this, but that is mainly due to flickr using yahoo maps for Australia which basically suck big time.

The software is not without it bugs mind you.  I am having trouble navigating between images in map mode for example. Also it says it can intergrate with other hosting sites, but it does default to OVI.

Perhaps, just perhaps I will shift a bit more to OVI for my photos as well.  Yet this is a bit of software I think I am about to become very accustomed to.

But if you want to set up Nokia Photos with flickr (and I do)

here are the instructions… (care of http://europe.nokia.com/support/nokiaphotos)

Settings for Flickr:
Note: Flickr requires Nokia Photos to use a special login that is different from your normal Flickr/Yahoo! login. Get your special Flickr login here.

  • Server address: http://www.flickr.com/services/atom/
  • Username: get your special username here
  • Password: get your special password here

I am going to set it up at home simply to use it as the primary way of accessing my photos at home.  The geotagging and maps feature alone mean that I will want to use this over anything else.  The maps are not another application that has to be launched and then data passed back and forth.  They are a tab.

Now I must go and start geotagging 10 years of digital photos….