As I'm sure some of you realise, I've been shipped off to Europe for a couple of months to allow some of the EPPers to actually get work done without me around to bug them.
So I went to the specialist CERN Accelerator School (CAS) on Beam Diagnostics in Dourdan, visited ESRF in Grenoble and am working at CTF3 at CERN, Geneva.
And throughout all of these trips I have taken a few photos. Well a fair few photos. Now, years of computer games, television and wikipedia have almost reduced my long term memory to a useless gray slab of protein in my head. So I needed a way to help me remember where I was when I took my photos, in an attempt to jog my memory into a state of awareness.
This is where geotagging comes in. Now geotagging is the tagging of photos to the specific location you were at when you took the photos. It's not a new idea, I'm sure photographers have been marking shot #'s down on maps since last century but lately photo sites online have been taking advantage of the data to place the photos on interactive maps.
So what equipment do we need to automate this process?
1. A camera. I'm using a cheapish Samsung L100. It's a nice point and shoot, nothing to fancy for me to lose or destroy.
2. A method of logging the position of each photo. At the end of last year I bought an iBlue 747 GPS logger off eBay for $70. This little gps puck is about the size of a small mobile phone, and can spit the GPS NMEA data out on bluetooth for a phone or computer to use. The other mode of operation is a logging mode where every second it writes the current time and location to internal memory for downloading later.
3. Some software to bring the GPS data and the photos together. I used COPICS Photomapper, available for free here
The first step is to make sure that the time on your camera is set correctly. The GPS signals are timestamped to UTC time, so make sure that both the current time and timezone are correct on your camera.
Turn on the GPS, and stick it in a backpack or equivalent. As long as there isn't metal between you and satellites it should be able to maintain a strong connection. Leave it on near you while you roam around and take a slab of pictures.
Download the pictures from the camera and the GPS tracks from the logger. The GPS tracks should be saved in "NMEA format" not CVS or Google Earth.
Open up Photomapper and use the file menu commands to load both the photos and GPS track information. Down the bottom you can make fine adjustments to the time in the photos (to correct for daylight savings for instance), but it won't allow for major fixes, like the wrong year set.
How the program works is that it takes the exposure time from the photos and find the nearest point on GPS tracks and inserts the position in the photo using a set of EXIF tags embedded in the file.
Select all the files in the list and click "Tag Selected Images" to update the photos with the GPS data. If you want to check out the results immediately click "Export to Google Earth" and you should be able to view the pictures.
Now that the pictures have the GPS data saved, you can upload them to sites such as Flickr or PicasaWeb which will place your photos on a map and in Flickrs case, allow you to see other people photos from around the same area.
For some examples be sure to check out my Paris pictures from the CAS excursion at
http://picasaweb.google.com/dave.peake/CASExcursionToParis/photo#map
These may very well be the greatest invention ever: Built in USB Charging AA Batteries
Here's Binx trying to figure out how the chopsticks work.
This a great site with a bunch of fantastic infographics. Learn about the Global Arms Trade, Smoking and Fast Food. Great for wasting time.
Some crazy CS-er (though you couldn't tell by the description he gives of the boxes), has created real-life versions of the crates from de_dust. Comes complete with pixelly goodness and a odd feeling of needing to crouch and jump onto them.
Seems that Jet is having an easier time with my notes than I am.
