Live from Austin!

In a few years, cameras will all have single chip GPS units in them. They’ll tag their photos with the location where you took them as a matter of course, like they already tag the time and date.

Some of us are unwilling to wait a few years. I’m sure you, like me, have sat down with a map and a stack of holiday photos and thought “OK, where on earth was that building?”. My current project of scanning and annotating hundreds of old family photos would be so much easier if I could have some clue as to at least the location and the year.

Which is probably why Sony have just launched a rather neat keychain GPS. No display, not many controls, you just clip it to your bag and forget about it. At the end of the day you connect it to the computer, run some software, and your photos are annotated with location information.

However, you don’t need a special Sony GPS for that. There’s a handy Mac application called GPSPhotoLinker that will download the automatic track data from a Garmin or Magellan GPS, cross-reference it with the timestamps on a bunch of photos, and re-write their EXIF information to add longitude, latitude, city, state and country.

We tried it out in Austin on Wednesday. It seems to work quite well, so we’ll take the GPS with us when we go to Germany.

As well as embedded EXIF tags, known as geocoding, there’s also the cruder hack of geotagging, where you add the latitude and longitude as Flickr tags. While this avoids the problem of dumb software stripping EXIF information, it messes up your Flickr tags page and relies on Flickr, so I’m not keen on it. I want my metadata in the file with the image, where it belongs.

Two more PC construction projects written up: My parents are now running Linux, and Mark is happy with his new PC (or at least, he was last I heard).

If anyone knows of a Linux program that’ll resize JPEG images to e-mailable size when you drag-drop them onto it, I’d appreciate pointers.

Oh yeah, and I’m back from England. More to follow on that subject.

So I get some spam with the subject line “An IE 6 patch” and a file attachment. I’m thinking stupid Windows virus, but I’m a bit curious, as I thought I had my filters set up to remove anything containing Windows executable code. So I open it, and it’s a picture of a naked woman lying in an empty bathtub. Her legs are dangling over the side of the bathtub, and she’s wearing nipple clamps.

No message, no ad, no URL, no phone number, nothing but a small JPEG.

Is there some Windows virus out there that picks random porn off people’s hard drives and e-mails it out to everyone in their address book?

I’m lying in bed beneath a soft flannel-covered duvet, with the ThinkPad from work. I’m using it as a VNC terminal to operate the iMac in the other room. It’s not as good as actually having an iBook, but it’ll have to do.

I notice Quartz/Aqua compresses pretty badly… JPEG artifacts everywhere. It’s usable, though, and it beats Windows.