Dirkus Maximus

I took the kids and Wes up to Fun Junktion today. It’s E-city’s version of Mt Trashmore. While the girls were playing on the playground, Wes and Andy and I went looking for geocaches.

Geocaches are hidden containers that are listed online by nothing more than the latitude and longitude of the cache. Think of it as a global-scale game of hide-n-seek. Most caches are just a waterproof container with a log book inside, but others have stickers and stuff. We only found one of the two geocaches we looked for, but it was still fun. I left my name in the log, and left a pen behind since there wasn’t one in there. The title of this geocache was “ChiaCache Lives!” I’d log onto geocaching.com and log my find, but they seem to have some issues with account creation at the moment.

I think the full version of the geocaching.com app may end up being the first paid app on my iPhone!

AWESOME SMILEY GUY APPROVES!

I finaly picked up another i415 from someone here at CITS (Thanks Kendra!) and got it all worked over today. The firmware had to be updated to get the GPS working right, but after that it’s been smooth sailing. I’ve thrown a few custom wallpapers and ringtones on it, along with the Mologogo app. It’s awesome.

Moto i415, 3/12/2007 - 7/19/2008, RIP

My “indestructible” Motorola i415 cell phone got killed by a rouge wave that almost took off with my shoes and my car keys today at the beach. The image you see above is the very last GPS waypoint it recorded before it bit the big one. We had the blanket with all of our stuff at least a good 30 feet back from the average wave high along the beach, but a couple of HUGE rogue waves right down behind each other both A) rocked my ass like a hurricane and B) made it about 40 feet up the beach.

No worries though, after I get paid this week I’ll be picking up Boost’s current cheap-ass phone, the i425.

I just hacked up my own geotagging software based on my mologogo data from my web site. Not too shabby.

This is how it works.
I have a cheap-@$$ Boost Mobile Phone with the mologogo client software on it.
That client software “phones home” to my blog and saves waypoints to a database there about once a minute.
I take pictures with my camera.
I come home and download my pictures.
I copy the “selects”, the pictures I really like and want to upload somewhere, and copy them to a “postpics” directory on my desktop. This is more for my convenience than anything else.
I run a script I wrote called geotag.sh. It does the following things for me, with no intervention required:

• Grabs a list of all the pictures in the directory. For each picture in the directory, it does the following:
• Use exiftool to extract the shooting date and time.
• Query the database on my blog for the lat and long of the waypoint at that time, or the last known position before that time.
• Take that info, and jam it back into the image’s EXIF data using exiftool again.
• Repeat for each image in the list of images in that directory.

Once it’s done chewing on that, I upload my pictures to Flickr, and boom – pre-mapped for my convenience.

Note that you MUST turn on EXIF GPS data in your account security settings for this to work.

Also note that this is absolutely NOT for the faint of heart, and that I’m doing this with Mac OS and it’s lovely UNIX underbelly, with some seriously not-so-great and completely custom PHP/MySQL programming on the server end. This project was hacked up in a matter of a couple hours or so, starting from me needing to refresh myself on PHP and SQL because I hadn’t programmed them in a bit. No, I’m not ready to release any of this code, and I’m not sure I ever will be. Sorry.