JDPFu.com 2025

Stop Poaching our Whales. You’ve been warned.

About a month ago, I tried my first curry chicken in a crock pot. Eh. However, by changing the chicken broth for coconut milk, the whole flavor changed. It is good, really good, especially for the effort involved.

• 3-5 lbs of chicken
• 1 can of coconut milk
• 2 cans of chickpeas
• 1 med onion (sliced)
• Golden Curry paste (3 chunks, crushed)

Throw everything into the crock pot, heat on high for 4 hours, service over rice. The coconut milk and curry turn into a wonderful sauce. A little pepper and/or chili may be good to spice up the flavor some. Hum, perhaps next time.

How to GPS Tag photos with your Nokia N800 and GPSbabel … The instructions here are not really specific to a Nokia N800, so other GPS units should use very similar steps. Only the GPSBabel part will probably change options based on your GPS device.

I’ve been taking my N800 and bluetooth GPS receiver on my hikes. Really just as a way to track approximate mileage. After doing that a few months, it seemed there had to be a way to put the GPS lat/lon into my photos. There is. A few other uses for GPS data, beyond the obvious:

1. Retain your track data
2. Estimate distance covered
3. GPS tag your photos
4. Share your track as a route for other hikers
5. Post a track on Google Maps for others – nice visualization with all the zoom and pan that you expect from google.
6. Mark the actual location of a landmark – waterfall, lookout point, or geocache

So far I’ve retained many of my tracks, but not been able to view them except on the N800. That’s useful, to a point. I’d really like to record them and create a database of visual tracks that is viewable on google maps for my friends to view. The real idea is to create a database of local hikes with trailheads, distances and difficulty ratings to help select future hikes.

Enter gpsbabel

Gpsbabel is a tool converts GPS data between many, many different devices and formats that runs on any platform – win32, unix, linux, N800. It supports conversion between … I guess about 50 different formats. My need is to convert N800/Maemo-Mapper GPX data into something GoogleMaps can use, KML. Originally, I thought gmaps supported GPX too, but that never worked well enough and had limited waypoint support. Yes, KML is the best answer for this.

Conversion steps for maemo-mapper gpx files into kml files that google-maps can display.

1. Get the GPX file off your N800 … somehow (scp, ftp, pull the memory card and copy the data, whatever)
2. Use gpsbabel to convert the file to KML.

   gpsbabel -t -i gpx -f “$1” -o kml,points=0 -F “$1.kml”

   points=0 option drops some data, so the resulting track isn’t exact.
3. Move the .KML file to a web server that googlemaps can access, anywhere really, on your desktop probably isn’t gonna work.
4. Have google maps display the data – a sample Laughing Falls, NC by fashioning a URL like the link here. Basically, you use http://maps.google.com/maps?q={full-URL-to-file.kml} The file can be waypoints, traces or routes as far as I can tell.

The result isn’t a nice track until you uncheck the Points on the resulting page. Also, I’ve tried to get gpsbabel to reduce the track to a radius around the importance locations, but that isn’t working. Loading gpsbabel was trivial on my Ubuntu laptop and desktop –

sudo apt-get install gpsbabel

, if memory serves.

No Google API key needed for this method either, which is nice.

Another helpful tool for geocaching and the N800 is gpsview. It connects to the GPS receiver and performs bearing math for you. It also helps calm the GPS data and average it out so you know where you are with a higher degree of accuracy after a few minutes, GPS data floats about 50 feet, IME. This tool is very helpful with some geocache hints. So, you have a location and need a bearing for the next cache location or you have a bearing and need a new lat/lon. gpsview does those calculations. I’d post a link, but I can’t find it now. Perhaps it was in the OS2008 depot and just loaded when I selected it.

Get out there and find some fun caches or just hike and know how close you are to roads and streams and where you’ve already been. There’s something fun about searching for a hidden location/waterfall, finding it, then taking an almost direct path back to your car.

Enter gpsPhoto.pl to tag your photos with GPS data

Tagging your photos with GPS coordinates:

gpsPhoto.pl —gpsfile HT-File.gpx \


	
Camera & GPS times match

            —timeoffset 0 \
	
Find closest GPS point (2 minutes)

            —maxtimediff 180 —dir ./ 

I came across a CSV list of waterfalls, converted it into KML and here’s the resulting googlemaps link. I know it is missing many water falls. I’ve been to some that are fairly large and they aren’t in the list. I have no idea how accurate any of these GPS points are either. YMMV.

Now that we have placed our GPS data into the photos, many of the photo hosting sites will display that either on a map or as part of the extra data. I’ve hacked together some GPS code for MyPhotoGallery that will link to google map locations for any photos that contain GPS data. Here’s an example of the EXIF data and Google Maps link that is added to every image displayed in the gallery.

Embedded EXIF data
Camera: SONY DSC-W55
Exposure: 1/160 sec.
Aperture: f/7.1
Focal length: 6.3 mm
ISO: 100
Flash: No
Date taken: Feb 21, 2009 at 3:17:21 PM
GPS: 34.135167,-84.704180

I’ve also hacked search into the perl and provided the search updates back to the original developer. He elected to remove search from his code many years ago. If you are interested in my changes photo gallery, they are hacks, let me know. If there is enough interest, I’ll post them for all.

President Obama calls Kanye a Jackass. Up to this point, I haven’t been very impressed with his administration. Perhaps I’ve been too hard on the man?

Good call, Mr. President

now about that health care plan.

According the this article, most of what President Obama desires in a health care plan, seems reasonable. I think he is missing a few major things.

I’m curious about my blog readers.

1. How often do you read an article here? Daily? Weekly? Monthly?
2. Do you use an RSS reader to read this blog? I do, BTW.
3. I’m planning a migration to a new blog system. Any feature or content requests? More virtualbox or more cooking?

Please either leave a comment or drop me an email.

I love curry dishes. It wasn’t always the case, but then I found a restaurant that did an excellent red curry chicken and got hooked. I’ve had curry perhaps 3 times that last 2 years – not nearly enough to get my fix as it were.

Most of us love google and most of the services they provide to us for free, but just like Heinlein said, TNSTAAFL. There is always a cost that we are paying, just not with cash being exchanged. Think about the television programming model. That appears free too, until you notice that 8 minutes of every 30 is advertising.

Here’s a transcript from NBR about Free Services that sheds a little light on the cost of free.

I’ve been using Google Voice, GV, and the prior GrandCentral for almost 3 years. The main thing that GV added was free transcriptions for calls and voice mail. This is great, when it works well, but not so great when the transcription is, shall we say, inaccurate.

Seems that vitamin D

1. isn’t really a vitamin (it’s a hormone)
2. could reduce cancer risks 77%