Jive SBS Syndication Feed

The Hong Kong Trail

Tim Haden — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 19:15:46 GMT

Today I went for a walk:

and took some pictures:

!http://lh3.google.com/trisonygps/R0SHDiRsQ4I/AAAAAAAACm0/B7c7vAdfyhs/s400/Hong%20Kong%20Trail.jpg!

And you thought New York was built up!!!

Tim Haden — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 08:22:35 GMT

I arrived in Hong Kong on Saturday evening for a break over Thanksgiving. As a Brit the holiday is kind of wasted on me, but I am more than happy to take the days off work

As it is so built up it has proved difficult to pick up any GPS reception but here are some pics anyway:

Asphalt Green Takes home the Cup! Prospect Park Duathlon

Tim Haden — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 20:59:19 GMT

It was a cold morning but we put in a great showing and took home the cup. Here's the club race report straight from Grace - Chief Motivator:

"We had about 10 AGTC people pre-registered for the Gotham Cup Club Challenge in Prospect Park. We were only 10 points ahead of BrooklynTri, and the race roster listed only Brooklyn residents. I didn't think we had enough people to take home the Gotham Cup. Most AG club members are in their off-season, and for those who aren't, traveling to Brooklyn on a cold, Sunday morning is a hard sell. But surprisingly, another 4 diehards AGTCers showed up Sunday morning. Talking to the race director before the start, she told me many in the Brooklyn club had cancelled over the weekend due to "injury" or "being out of town." "

hose racing for our club were:

1st place Overall - Ben Leese

2nd place Overall - Jen R (the birthday girl)

3rd place Overall - Kate M ?

1st place AG - Marti M, Julie C, Billy M (5th overall)

2nd place AG - Erika B, JR, Neil C

3rd place AG - Grace B

Also racing - Paul S, Tim H, Jen B, Ben L, Ben's girlfriend Tricia and Vero R was running the course.

Ben Leese was the overall winner of the race!! And being the only person in one of those funny bike helmets, it's a good thing he won He was leaps and bounds ahead of the pack. How fast was he going? According to one of the teenage volunteers, "Yeah, that guy was blazin!!"

There was some controversy with the awards. Maybe it was because the scoring chips were antennas wrapped in saran wrap?! Depending on how you look at it, Kate M placed 3rd overall, 4th overall or maybe 1st in AG? Kate, you'll always be a winner in our eyes. At the time of this report, the official times were not available Maybe the controversy had to do with the required number of laps for the bike course? Tim H decided to bike 5 laps instead of the required 4. Overachiever!! I received my first triathlon award. Maybe the timing errors worked in my favor...

All in all, it was a great day...as long as you had ski clothes and a snuggle buddy. We crushed the other triathlon clubs in awards, numbers, enthusiasm and volume. What other club serenades their teammate as she's receiving her award?!! We went home with major metal. The club trophy is huge! I will be posting pictures to the AG website later this week. In the meantime, check out the Gotham Cup on display at AG. You earned it!!

Thanks for the reportGrace!

Yes I did do 5 loops of the park when I should have done 4 - I blame brain freeze but maybe I just need to practice counting!

I actually carried the GPS reciever with me the whole day and found a great site that allows me to upload my GPS tracks for the entire day rather than just with the photographs.

Gotham Cup Club Challenge at EveryTrail

Map created by EveryTrail: GPS, Photos & Geotagging!

Looking at the data I collected you can actually see the route I took too and from the race and if you zoom in me wandering around in transition and the 5 loops I did in error - Pretty cool!

!http://lh3.google.com/trisonygps/RzjNYjwokVI/AAAAAAAAB6k/fiQ1M0OE8I0/s400/gothamcup.jpg!

Here are the pictures:

!http://lh4.google.com/trisonygps/RzjOvzwokWI/AAAAAAAAB6s/cexe0JO7pGA/s400/gothamcupmappictures.jpg!

ING New York Marathon

Tim Haden — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 20:13:35 GMT

Some pics from the ING New York Marathon on 4th November... I struggled to get the GPS data matching with the photographs I took as this was a pretty built up area and the GPS reciever was struggling to get a signal from the satelites. Anyway here they are:

I paired these with location information manually in Google Maps - fortunately I wasn't really wandering around lots and I knew where I was:

!http://lh3.google.com/trisonygps/Rzi8djwojgI/AAAAAAAAByA/A8he2ZbFvzY/s400/ingnewyorkmarathon.jpg!

2008 U.S. Olympic Team Trials Mens Marathon in New York City

Tim Haden — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 18:09:38 GMT

I managed to get up early on Saturday morning 3rd November to take in some of the action in Central Park. These athletes even had their own individual watering stations - sweet!

!http://lh3.google.com/trisonygps/Ry8xnrSN9oI/AAAAAAAABjs/3CJPTGFzh5U/s288/DSC00127.JPG!

There they go...

And this is where I saw it...

!http://lh4.google.com/trisonygps/Rziq2zwojBI/AAAAAAAABrg/7WQt79_ok3w/s400/menstrials_03-11-2007.jpg!

The technie stuff

Tim Haden — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 16:40:50 GMT

OK so it's been a while since I posted but that's becasue I have been playing with the technology...

The Sony GPS-CS1KA records GPS data every 15s. It's not connected to the camera but the two need to travel together so that when you have finished shooting you can pair the location data from the GPS device with the photos you took; the supplied Sony software for doing this is called "GPS Image Tracker". Oh and if you left the GPS device at home then went off taking pictures it would look like you had taken all the photographs from your house so don't forget it when you leave :). The GPS data and images are paired based on time. So if you took a picture at 11:05am the Sony GPS Image Tracker software would match it with the GPS data recorded at 11:05am. Once the two pieces of data have been matched together the location information is embedded within the image file and saved. Now that the information is in the file it can be used by websites like google maps to show where the image was captured.

The Sony GPS unit only comes with Windows software for pairing the GPS data and photos. I have a Mac and prefer it to a PC so needed to find software tools/ websites out there that enable me to pair the pictures and GPS data on my Mac hardware. I trawled the web with the objective of finding other image pairing software for Mac and found lots of good stuff out there for doing it!

Background:

I am using a:

- Black Intel Macbook with 2GB memory running OS X v10.4.10.

- Sony GPS CS1KA this generates a GPS data file every time it is switched on recording it's location every 15s in NMEA format

The best piece of software I found was called GPSPhotoLinker and it can be downloaded from here:

http://oregonstate.edu/~earlyj/gpsphotolinker/

There is a user tutorial with the free download which is useful and the pairing process allows you to see the location on google maps before you commit the changes to the image file.

This is what it looks like in action:

!http://lh3.google.com/trisonygps/RziPrjwoiZI/AAAAAAAABk4/Qx1pYbbWoDE/s400/tech1.jpg!

This is a screen shot of the browser window that pops up. !http://lh4.google.com/trisonygps/RziUlzwoiaI/AAAAAAAABlA/lXFd8hOLMoQ/s288/googlemap.jpg!

GPSPhotoLinker only reads in GPX gps data files though and the Sony GPS device captures data in NMEA format. That's easy to overcome though as you can easily convert your files on this website:

http://www.gpsvisualizer.com/convert

choose the file or paste the contents into the window and change the output format to: GPX

What is also great about this piece of software is the fact that it creates weighted average locations. Why do you need this I hear you ask? Well with the GPS unit only records data every 15s so it's only going to be accurate if you stand in the same place for 15s taking your photograph which isn't always the case. Clicking the "view on map" button then pops up a browser window for you to verify the location information before you save it.

The next thing you will probably want to do is then load your images with their embedded GPS data into iPhoto and this is where things can go a bit screwy as iPhoto rounds the GPS co-ordinates incorrectly so the location is off. You can read more about that and getting GPS data in iPhoto here. So at least for the moment, until this gets fixed or someone shows me another solution I am holding off on loading my GPS images to iPhoto.

The first outing...

Tim Haden — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 00:16:24 GMT

Ok so the batteries are charged, work is over for the day!

It was time to give this kit a go so I took the camera and gps to Central Park to see if I could snap a few evening landscape shots of the Manhattan skyline from The Jackie O'Nassis Reservoir. It's a pretty cool view on the city and the instruction manual said I had to be in an open space to recieve a decent gps signal... http://picasaweb.google.com/trisonygps/November/photo#map

The pictures came out pretty well but the gps unit had me standing in the water not next to it???

The Goodies Arrive!

Tim Haden — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 03:35:40 GMT

I came home to find the box of Sony goodies at my front door tonight. Sure beats anything I ever got trick or treating on Halloween

My job now is to capture as much stuff on film as possible during my travels. So over the next few months I will be traveling from New York to Toronto, Washington DC, Hong Kong, London, Chile and Whislter! Is there anything you have you ever wanted to see in any of those places? Let me know I will do my best to snap the shots and video and post them right here! And even better you will know exactly where I took the pics because the nifty gps unit will record it on a map!

In an attempt to push the boundries I will also be attempting to train a carrier pigeon to fly about with this stuff and take aerial pictures too. Not sure how it's going to turn out but here's to trying...