Mischievous Ramblings II

New Blue Marble

A ‘Blue Marble’ image of the Earth taken from the VIIRS instrument aboard
NASA’s Suomi NPP. (NASA/NOAA/GSFC/Suomi NPP/VIIRS/Norman Kuring)

 

From the Washington Post:

Feast your eyes on it: NASA released one of the sharpest, most stunning true-color images of our planet the world has seen Wednesday.

SCOTUS on GPS trackers used by law enforcement

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously Monday that police must get a search warrant before using GPS technology to track criminal suspects.

via www.msnbc.msn.com

What the Supreme Court Really Said About GPS Trackers

via WSJ Law Blog

 

IANAL, but I like the idea that SCOTUS seems to have decided that GPS trackers are not business as usual, that they are "a trespass", and they seem to require a warrant.

Good news.

"It's fine to be proud of it."

(Manny Serratos, posted on Facebook)

Hilarious: Microsoft keeps it old-school with a pricey text adventure game

Microsoft keeps it old-school with a pricey text adventure game, Visual Studio 2010

Microsoft has jumped onto the free-to-play bandwagon with its latest game, a text-driven adventure called Visual Studio 2010. The innovative new game marries the traditional interactive fiction text adventure with its arcane commands and exploration with the free-form, open-ended gaming pioneered by the likes of SimCity.

There are two major modes to the game, a textual spell-casting game, and a more complex interactive puzzle mode.

Play starts with the spell game. The game has three difficulty modes. In the two easiest modes Visual Studio questers must cast spells to appease a malevolent gatekeeper known only as "the compiler," combining the text adventuring of Zork with the wizardy and magic of Loom. If the player's spell contains even a single faulty incantation, the compiler will respond with a torrent of abuse and spells of its own; the player must piece together clues contained within compiler's response to determine how they went wrong.

Daily Kos: WA-01 Do you want a solid Progressive or a self financed millionaire New Dem?

What else has she done since 2008.  Well, after her loss Darcy went to DC and worked for 3 years as the Executive Director of ProgressiveCongress.org where she set about helping to build the progressive infrastructure we Kossacks like to complain we don't have.  She joined the boards of several progressive organizations like Netroots Nation Foundation, ActBlue, Progressive Ideas Network and NARAL.  

via www.dailykos.com

Let's be clear.  Either of these ladies would be better than a lot of other choices.  But there's no reason for us to settle.  Settling gets us Blue Dogs who fight for things we don't believe in.  We should be backing the best electable candidate who matches our values.

And that's Darcy.  No question.

Send a geek to Congress!

"River of Meat Blood"

From Gizmodo:

Drone Pilot Discovers River of Meat Blood

Seems like a "Dallas drone hobbyist" was flying his camera equipped drone around when he "...discovered a huge stream of blood emptying into the Trinity River..."

Seems like the meat packing plant (aka slaughterhouse?) he was flying near was (probably) illegally discharging, um, waste material into the local watershed.

As more and more drones get into private hands, this is an example of the way that we, the people, can turn the tables on the wholesale surveillance state -- by turning the cameras on them.  Turn the cameras on the police, the corporations, the politicians... on The Man!

Apropos of, well, everything about this: Eye3; Engadget; TechCrunch

A Personal Landmark

My training lineage:
T-shirt of Mr. Simpson's lineage: Ed Parker's American Kenpo (top of triangle);
Skip Hancock's Kenpo 2000 (left); Mr. Simpson's Pacific Northwest Karate Center.
T-Shirt of Alpha Martial Arts' logo. Black belt including my name and Alpha
Martial Arts' logo.  Photograph by Evan Robinson.  Click to embiggen.

Sara wrote to an email list we're on:

Evan's been doing Kenpo karate for as long as I've known him. Longer, actually: when I met him, he was a 25-year-old four-night-a-week dojo rat with six-pac abs and an appetite for esoteric books on management of violent conflict. Kenpo is a big guy's art, a very technical kind of karate that's favored by bouncers, bodyguards, and other people for whom self-defense is a serious business. In fact, Kenpo was founded by Elvis's Hawaiian bodyguard, Ed Parker; and Elvis himself had a Kenpo black belt. Evan took some workshops with Ed Parker back in the day, and has always sought out teachers who were directly Parker-trained.

But Evan quit Kenpo at 28,  just a few months shy of getting his black belt...though he's never stopped training on his own through all the years that followed.

Fast forward to four years ago. We're in Vancouver, and Evan's been piddling around with a local dojo that (ahem) lacks the rigor of the far more serious one he'd trained with in Santa Clara. But he finds a really great one over the border in Bellingham, which is closely affiliated with Parker's most respected remaining student. We're making weekly trips there anyway, so he joins up, digs out his brown belt, and gets back into training.

When he moved to Seattle last year, he asked the Bham dojo for a referral to another school in the city. We bought our house, in part, because it's a 10-minute drive from this one.

Long story short: Tonight, Evan finally received his long-delayed black belt, after a seven-hour marathon test that started at 9 am this morning and ran until 4 pm. I was there for the last couple hours of it, and was amazed at both the rigor, and the fact that my 50-year-old guy was holding up under it. He was probably the oldest person testing -- and also the biggest, and also one of the two or three most skilled. (They call him "Po" -- the Kung Fu panda.)

One of the universal rituals of martial arts is that when you're given your black belt, your instructor gives you a ceremonial kick in the gut. Usually, one or two other instructors stand behind you to catch you if you should get knocked over. 

Evan was the last candidate kicked. When his turn came, nine instructors got off the bench to come and stand behind him to support him. Pretty sweet. When I came down to the mat to hug him afterward, his heavy canvas gi was completely drenched with sweat -- not a dry spot on him anywhere. He's resting now, after a hot shower, a steak dinner, and a stiff dose of ibuprofen....

Half a lifetime. And about time, too.

I blush :-).

I have trained at: John Sepulveda's Santa Clara Kenpo Karate in Santa Clara, CA (an IKKA school) in the late '80s and early '90s; Shayne Simpson's Pacific Northwest Karate Center in Bellingham, WA (Kenpo 2000 under Professor Hancock); with Professor Skip Hancock in Spokane, WA (Kenpo 2000); and now with Mr. Chris Herrman of Alpha Martial Arts in Seattle, WA (under Mr. Brian MacDonald of Boston, MA).  Each of them (and my individual instructors, including Jesse Guel, Marcus Buonfiglio, Jeff Buda, Howard Tabb, Master John Sepulveda, Tom Graves, Greg Moench, Penny Simpson, and Shayne Simpson) have contributed greatly to my understanding of the art and ability to perform.

Without going into details (and thus providing spoilers for other students of Mr. Herrman's), I will say that the two part blackbelt test (90+ minutes Wednesday night of conditioning and sparring and about six hours of running/biking; pad & bag work; sets; self-defense techniques; and forms on Saturday) was certainly the most difficult physical challenge I have ever faced in a non-survival situation, and possibly the most difficult physical challenge ever.

Yes, it was worse than the Grouse Grind :-).

But deeply satisfying to have completed.

My thanks for the congratulations I have received.

Peter, Paul & (the ghost of) Mary

Noel Paul Stookey (l) & Peter Yarrow (r) come on stage at
the Evergreen State Fair, Monroe, WA on 20110829;
photograph by Evan Robinson

Noel Paul Stookey (c) & Peter Yarrow (r),
Evergreen State Fair, Monroe, WA, 20110829;
video by Evan Robinson

On July 4th after my mother died, Sara dragged me out of my mother's house in Brentwood, CA, saying only "it's a surprise".  We ended up at the Hollywood Bowl, where Peter, Paul, & Mary performed a holiday concert.

It was an excellent anodyne.

Noel Paul Stookey and Peter Yarrow performed Monday night at the Evergreen State Fair in Monroe, WA.  They clearly miss Mary, both personally and professionally.  They used the crowd to sing many of her parts, and mentioned her prominently several times during the evening.

Back in the day:

 

Camera Buying Advice

This is one of a collection of short posts I put on the photographers email list at work.  It was in response to someone asking which camera bundle was better.  Let me add that we had already established the buyer was interested in Canon gear -- I am agnostic about brand for other people.

---

Semi-organized thoughts in response:

I don't buy bundles.  I want the gear that I want, not that someone else wants to sell me.

If you buy an APS-C sensor body (most consumer range DSLRs fall into this category), you're automatically biased toward long lenses, because you have to apply a 1.6x crop factor.  That means a 50mm lens becomes effectively an 80mm lens (I simplify, and trust that I can get away with it).  So to get a true wide angle lens you need to get way down: 18mm becomes almost 29mm, so if you want a 24mm wide angle you need to pay for a 15mm lens.

When first buying DSLR gear (a long time ago), I bought at the low end in order to learn what I would make use of.  Now I buy higher end (especially lenses) because it gives me more capability.  Camera bodies are disposable (yes, even with digital sensors in them) -- you will use good glass on multiple camera bodies.  My first price cap on lenses for a DSLR (nearly 10 years ago) was about $300.  I raised it to $700 a couple of years later.  I won't tell you what it is now, but it's more than that 60D body (which, BTW, is what I bought a couple of months ago).

My personal suggestion:
    set a price level (total kit cost) you're comfortable with;
    buy a used Canon body (you can probably get a nice one for $500) -- either from an Amazonian (there's a Rebel Xti for sale on the list right now) or a reputable camera shop (like Glazers at 8th & Republican, or B&Hphoto or Adorama online);
    buy a very wide zoom (18/28/55-250/280/300) for your walking around lens;
    buy as wide a lens (prime or zoom) as you can get for the rest of your money;
    Don't forget that you need (at least potentially):
        memory cards to match your body;
        carrying gear;
        filters;
        software;
        drive space;
        cleaning kit (even just a rubber blower)

You might end up with one or more of these lenses (examples only!  Not specific recommendations):
  Canon EF-S 55-250 f/4-5.6 ($220 @ bhphoto)
  Tokina 16.5-135 f/3.5-5.6 ($300 @ bhphoto)
  Sigma 18-300 f/3.5-6.3 ($400 @ bhphoto)
  Sigma 10-20 f/4-5.6 ($480 @ bhphoto)

That gives you a kit good enough to figure out what it is that you really want.  In a year or two, when you've got thousands of images worth of experience, you'll be able to spec a kit that matches your actual needs.

Blog post I wrote on my current gear reboot

Geotagging Photos

Image capture, Google Earth, by Evan Robinson

Because I use a Canon, I don't have an easy option for GPS equipping my SLR.  So if I want to geotag photos, I have to find a less integrated solution.

The cheapest solution is to manually tag photos using some kind of map software.  Aperture provides the Places feature to do this.  There are plug-ins (I downloaded and tested Maperture, which worked fine).  Flickr lets you put photos on a map, and I imagine that other photo hosting services provide similar services.

But geotagging thousands of images manually is a pain, and it will continue to be a pain.  In vernacular of my day job, it does not scale.  I have thousands (maybe tens of thousands) of untagged photos, and I will be generating many more.  On an ongoing basis, manual geotagging is right out.

That leaves some sort of GPS logging.  There are many devices, including many if not all smartphones and standalone GPS units, which will periodically record your GPS position for later use.  These log files can be imported and converted for use with Google Earth and other software to track your position over time.

I have an iPhone, and could well have found logging software for it.  But I have several use cases counter to that solution, especially long periods out of phone service (camping, hiking, the Big Island, etc.).  I suspect that running logging software on the iPhone would reduce battery life below my minimum needs.

So I went looking for a standalone GPS logger.  My search was complicated by the fact that I'm a Mac user, of course.  Google and Amazon led me to a set of five possibles (prices at Amazon):

•   Amod AGL3080 ($65)
•   Qstarz BT-Q1300S ($100)
•   Holux M-241 ($66)
•   Columbus V-900 ($102)
•   Sony GPS-CS3KA ($94)

My first test was basic functionality: I turned each device on and carried it for a day or two.  The QStarz and Columbus units had a really hard time getting GPS lock in downtown Seattle, so they were out.  Next was communication with my Mac.  I got the other units (Amod, Holux, and Sony) to talk to my Mac.  Next I compared the tracks with my actual paths.  That eliminated the Amod, which apparently had trouble getting a good position even when it said it was locked on.

The Holux and the Sony passed all the basic tests.  Both these units use single AA batteries (I use Eneloop rechargeables), which is a plus because they don't require special chargers or cables.  Both connect using standard small USB connectors, which is a plus because that's the same cable I use to talk to my external USB drives.  Both have screens, which means they don't require specialized (usually Windows-only) software to configure them.  The Sony has a nicer form factor and carrying pouch and supports on-card geotagging of photos.  It also connects to the computer as an external drive, which makes acquiring log files very easy (the Holux requires a special USB driver be installed and software to pull log files off the device).  The Holux can be configured for more different logging options (log every 1, 5, 10, 15, 30 seconds; log in metric/english measurements; log based on distance moved; etc.) and seems to use less power.  It also appears, in my basic testing, to lock on faster and more reliably.  It's also about $30 cheaper.  And it has the only toggle power switch in the bunch (every other device uses a push button of some kind to turn the device off and on, sometimes holding it down for X seconds to turn on and Y seconds to turn off -- a toggle switch shows you instantly whether the device is supposed to be on or off, which helps diagnose dead batteries, among other things).

Geotagging workflow on the Mac with the Holux M-241

The first necessary activity with the Holux is to get it to talk to the Mac.  I had to install a special USB driver, the SP210x USB to UART Bridge VCP Driver.  Once that was done, the Holux talks to the Mac through a standard USB cable, and logs can be acquired using free software called HoudahGPS, which is a graphical front end to gpsbabel.

If you are only going to acquire log files, HoudahGPS will do you.  It reads data off the Holux and converts it to several standard formats.  If you want to view your track in Google Earth, for instance, this is how you do it.

If you want a standalone geotagging app, HoudahGeo ($30) is what you need.  I had a license lying around from some Mac Bundle or another I'd acquired, so I didn't actually even need to buy the software.  HoudahGeo includes HoudahGPS' functionality and can extract GPS information from the Holux directly, without using HoudahGPS as an intermediate.

How you use HoudahGeo will depend upon your existing workflow.  I use it as part of pulling photos off my cards.  I copy the files off my card to a standard location, run a couple of droplets on them to separate the images by day shot and rename them to my standard (YYYYMMDD-###, which will have to change to -#### or even -##### because of the speed of the 60D).  Then I drop the resulting folders on HoudahGeo, which imports the Canon Raw (CR2) files and associates them (by timestamp) with the positions logged on the Holux.  Getting the log into HoudahGeo can happen two ways: direct import from the device, or by using HoudahGPS to extract the log file from the device and then using HoudahGeo to import the log file (which is obviously more work, but it's the way I did it first, so I know that it works as well as direct import).  HoudahGeo can be instructed to wipe the log file from the device after import.

There is one thing which you must verify in order for all this to work properly and relatively automatically: Your camera's clock must be closely in sync with GPS time.  This is one reason why the screen on the M-241 (and the Sony) is so important: it allows you to see GPS time and set your camera time to a close match (I find that within a second or so is adequate).

HoudahGeo will automatically associate GPS position data with photos according to timestamp.  Since I've set my camera time to closely match GPS time, it's been seamless.  Without that match, it's a #@&%^@(# pain in the butt.

HoudahGeo is then happy to export the CR2 files with GPS information embedded in metadata (it's entirely possible that sidecar files are in use here, but I don't know and for now I don't need to know -- it just works).  Once the files have been tagged with the GPS information, I import them into Aperture as a Project.