A Greene Man’s Blog

Library –>

Originally uploaded by Daniel Greene

Why buy books when you can borrow? I love my public library!

I took this photo on my new T-Mobile G1 with Google. It automatically geotagged it before I emailed it to Flickr. For those who are wondering how to geotag photos with the G1, I’ll explain– and then you’ll see how easy it is!

When you go to the Camera app, hit the Menu button before you take a shot. Select Settings, and then select “Store location in pictures.” This setting will stick until you change it again.

For even greater accuracy; i.e. to pin your location down to Street level, go to the Home screen and pull up Apps; then select the Settings icon. Then select Security & location. Then select Enable GPS satellites and make sure it’s checked. Deselecting it will conserve battery power, but only when you’re using Maps or an app that uses Maps, such as Camera if you selected “Store location in pictures.” You can always deselect it if you want to save battery power and/or don’t care for pinpoint accuracy.

I love how effortless it is to take and share geotagged photos with the G1, and I am fully satisfied with its accuracy. My husband and I are going to the Mediterranean for two weeks, and while we’re there, I will take geotagged photos with the G1 in Airplane mode (because the GPS works even when wireless services are turned off), and when I find free WiFi hotspots, I’ll moblog them to our family website, smithersgreene.net

And when we get back home, I can’t wait to borrow another great book from the library!

Los Olivos Finishing Tent

Originally uploaded by Daniel Greene.

This permanent tent has shade, a misting system, and blowers that they use to blow the water out of the crevices of your car so the water doesn’t come out of the crevices while you’re driving and leave water spots. Interestingly, you can see the tent in the satellite image of this geo-location if you click the map link. I’d say my GPS data logger captured my location almost perfectly for this photo.

To explain my workflow on this public, geotagged photo:

I bought a GPS data logger called the AMOD Photo Tracker AGL3080 for $69. All it does is record location from second to second. I synchronized the clock on my camera to the clock on my computer (which is automatically synchronized to an atomic clock). When I got ready to start shooting, I clipped my Photo Tracker on my belt with the carabiner that came with it, and turned it on. I took all the photos I wanted to take, and when I was finished, I turned off the Photo Tracker. When I got home, I hooked up the GPS unit to my computer via USB and dragged and dropped the log onto my desktop (the device shows up on my Mac as an external drive). Then I put my camera’s SD card into a card reader and connected it to my Mac via USB (it shows up on my Mac as an external drive as well). I dragged and dropped all my photos from the shoot into a folder on my desktop.

Now that I had the photos and the tracklog in my computer, I launched a freeware app called GPS Babel+ and opened the NMEA log and converted it to a GPX XML file. Then I launched another freeware app called GPSPhotoLinker and I loaded the GPX file and the .CR2 (Canon Raw) photo into the app, and I had the app insert the geodata into the EXIF of all the RAW photos.

I then imported the geotagged RAW photos into Aperture, where I added keywords, version names, and captions– which show up on Flickr as tags, titles, and descriptions respectively (GPSPhotoLinker automatically added the tags Phoenix, Arizona, and United States). I made whatever images adjustments I wanted to. Finally, I used the Aperture FlickrExport plug-in to upload this photo to Flickr and the photo automatically showed up on the map.

I’ve been manually geotagging for months now by using the Flickr Organizr to drag my photos onto the map, and as complicated as the above process might sound to you, I assure you that this new process is much less time consuming and much more accurate.

Hyperlinks Weave the Web

Originally uploaded by Daniel Greene.

There would be no World Wide Web without hyperlinks. Hyperlinks are what allow us to add photos to web pages, link from one page to another, etc. These days, much of this hyperlinking is done for us automatically on sites such as Flickr. But Flickr also allows you to create hyperlinks yourself in many areas of the site, including photo descriptions, comments, and group threads. I create links between photos and members all the time, and it’s easy for me to do so because I’ve memorized the HTML. Once you learn the HTML for a hyperlink, you can be a hyperlinker yourself!

An HTML tag begins with a less-than sign, created by holding down the shift key while you tap the comma key. Then you type “a” for “anchor” and “href” for “hypertext reference”. Then you type the equals sign (=) followed by a quotation mark. This quotation mark is the beginning of a “container” for the URL, or “uniform resource locator.” The URL is the “web address” for the object to which you are linking. As a mnemonic device, I think of this opening tag as the English phrase, “Anchor hypertext reference is…”

Recently, I posted a photo I took of a fellow Flickrite at a FlickrMeet. I wanted to link to her photostream so that other people could appreciate her photos. This is a way of showing respect and giving credit, similar to the citations used by academic writers. So, what did I do? Well, first, I wrote the text, “katdavis kindly posed for a portrait.” Then, I decided to make “katdavis” (her username) into a hyperlink. In order to do so, I found her photostream and copied and pasted the URL from my browser’s address bar above the first page of her photostream (the URL being www.flickr.com/photos/katdavis/ ). Then, I returned to my photostream— specifically, the photo page containing the portrait of her (the URL being flickr.com/photos/danielgreene/2100926688/ ). I clicked in the description text so that I could edit it, and I placed my cursor just in front of her username. There, I inserted the magic of the Web: I typed <a href= and I pasted the URL I had copied from the first page of her photostream. The “aitch tee tee pee colon slash slash” is absolutely essential to the HTML expression. Immediately following that URL, I typed a closing quotation mark (a.k.a. “close quote” — same as an open quote in this case, since HTML uses only the “inch mark” type quote, not “curly quotes” or “typographer’s quotes”). I then completed my opening HTML tag by typing a greater-than sign. The greater-than sign signifies the end of an HTML tag.

But the tag would not be complete without the link text being bracketed by the closing HTML tag. So, after I typed the opening HTML tag and typed the link text “katdavis” I enclosed the link text with the closing HTML “anchor” tag which is a less-than sign, slash, a, and a greater-than sign. As you can see, enclosing HTML tags are bracket by less-than and greater-than signs. The slash mark represents a closing HTML tag which marks the end of an HTML expression. You can think of the end of the anchor tag in English as “end of anchor.”

The resulting hyperlink looked like so when I finished editing it:

What the visitor to my pages sees is a hyperlink they can follow to jump to katdavis’s photostream, like so: katdavis

Hyperlinking creates virtual connections that can lead to or supplement the actual connections we have with each other in the real world. Hyperlinks are the sine qua non of the World Wide Web, and are even more important in the social, democratic "Web 2.0." Learning the HTML for creating hyperlinks is one of the steps to joining the ranks of the digerati and harnessing the power of the Web for yourself.

Have fun, and weave on!