Last year I was on a 5 weeks vacation in New Zealand and Japan. Since I am a camera freak and take a lot of pictures I thought it would be fun to use geocoding to organize the thousands of pictures. So I bought a Garmin 60Cx GPS and had it record our movements at all times.
First of all I used the tracklog to geocode all the pictures using a Ruby script I wrote. Since we brought 4 cameras and we travelled between several time zones and even had daylight savings time during the trip, we didn’t really had the right time on all the cameras at all times. So some pictures needed time correction. After a lot of tedious work I finally got that fixed.
Then it was time to run the script! It worked fine except that the tool I use to actually add the gps info to the images can’t write to RAW-files! So only the jpgs have gps coords at the moment.
I also wanted to have a complete route on a map or some sorts. I thought about doing something with Google maps until I found GPSVisualizer. That does more or less everything I wanted and more.
GPSVisualizer also outputs KML files for Google Earth. I used gpsbabel to trim down the track log which was rather large. Auckland complete with a cruise around the harbour:
We had a helicopter ride around Mt. Cook and had a quick landing on top of the glacier! Here is the trip is all its 3D glory: 
Now I just need to process the GPS logs from my Japan trip…
Yay! This monday I finally got my first arcade cabinet! I have been looking for one for some time now but I really wanted a Taito Egret II since it has a mechanism for easily rotating the screen.
So when the guys at Killercabs arranged a group order I didn’t hesitate. It is in pretty good shape only a few scratches here and there. The worst thing was some rust in the control panel but I think I can get rid of most of it.
The screen is a trisync so it will accept 15/24 and 31KHz resolutions – so I can connect basically anything. It will be a Dreamcast for starters. I bought 2 extra Dreamcast controllers I need to gut so I can hook them up to the control panel.
Next up is putting in a 220->110V transformer. Later on I probaly want to replace the buttons and balltops. Green, orange and purple don’t really go well together..
Oh and I need some cool stools!
