Status-Q

A quick hint: If you tag your photos with their GPS location (in the EXIF data), Flickr can put them on a map for you.

But it doesn't do it automatically.

You need to enable it using the option on this page: http://www.flickr.com/account/geo/exif/

Even then, it only does it for photos you upload from that point forward. I haven't found a way yet to get it to make use of the lat and long I've been including in most of my photos for the last few months.

Still, this is a good start. I've re-uploaded my last batch and you can see the map here.

Taken on the same walk, last weekend.

More information in this Times article, and more pictures on the expedition's website.

Now, it seems to me that, as an expeditionary vehicle, this isn't quite complete until you put some floats on the side and make it amphibious. That must be the ultimate - when you combine it with one of these. Then I might have to remortgage the house...

Using paintballs to illustrate the difference between sequential and parallel processing.

Is this the world's biggest inkjet printing head?

A hint for photographers...

One of the things that encouraged me to switch to digital photography in the early days was the simple fact that all my photos were time-stamped. Now I can always sort images into the order in which they were taken - often the easiest way to find something - but I also have a rough chronological record of my life which can sometimes be very useful. If I want to remember when I was last in Paris, for example, I'll almost certainly go and browse my photos to find out.

Usually, the timestamp doesn't need to be very exact. I always have the camera set to GMT, wherever I am - changing timezones is too much trouble - but a few minutes of clock drift is not important. Recently, however, I've been geotagging my photos - a big post coming about that sometime soon - and precise timing can then be much more useful.

So if I'm about to upload photos from a camera on which I haven't recently set the time, I'll sometimes take a photo of the clock on my screen. This is synchronised with Apple's NTP servers and so is one of the most accurate clocks in the house, and will be nicely in sync with the timestamps on my GPS receiver. Once the batch of photos is uploaded, I can use the difference between the camera's timestamp and the time shown in the image to fix the timestamps on all the photos in the batch.

What's more, once I've done the batch adjustment, I can refer back to the new timestamp on this image to make sure that it matches what's on the screen and so confirm that I didn't make a mistake.

Regularly setting the time on the camera is even better, but this is a fix for when you take the photos before remembering it!

When I bought my MacBook Pro - two or three years ago, now, just after they first came out - I thought that a 100G drive equalled lots of space. Since then, I have gradually moved my video-editing stuff onto external drives, then my music, then my photos, and then quite a few of the larger applications.

But, despite regular cleanups, I kept finding myself running out of space. It's never really a good idea to run a filesystem with less than about 5-10% free, and I was regularly hovering around the 1% mark. So this week I called up the local Apple dealer, handed over a couple of hundred quid, and I now have 320GB to play with!

That doesn't give me enough space to put everything back on the internal drive, but it's a lot better than it was, and I can stop worrying about data corruption as my applications run out of swap space!

Aaaaah.

A tip, though - I has the OS installed on the new drive and used Apple's excellent Migration Assistant to copy stuff from the old drive to the new system - this brings across your user accounts and data, applications, network settings etc - all very smoothly.

However, it's really intended for those setting up a new machine and copying their data from an old one. As such, it doesn't assume that you have a licence on the new machine for any Apple pro apps - Final Cut, Aperture, Logic Pro etc. It copies the apps, but not the licences. So if you use this system to migrate to a new drive, remember that you'll need those serial numbers handy afterwards!

A quadrotor, or quadrocopter, seems to be the cool new thing at the moment for remote-control enthusiasts.

They look a bit like this:

They seem to be very stable, so are a popular camera platform:

I must find an affordable one of these somewhere! And they're wonderful things if you want to fake a UFO sighting:

Lots more videos out there if you search YouTube - or have a look here.

You can make one yourself, of course, if you have the time, or you can buy them from someone like Draganfly if you have the money. Me, I don't have either :-(

I liked the Matt cartoon in the Telegraph this morning!

But since the British media, whenever it comes to America, almost invariably spout... well... the price of everything and the value of nothing, I was pleased also to see Anne Applebaum's piece, which quoted the most brilliant use of a hundred or so bytes that I've seen in a long time:

Early yesterday morning, black Americans were sending a short text message to one another:
"Rosa sat so Martin could walk. Martin walked so Barack could run. Barack is running so our children can fly."

It's easy to say that the honeymoon won't last, that things may not look so rosy in 4 years' time, etc. But it's been a very long time since America has had any good news. Now it's got some, and it has every right to be proud of it.

Exactly what you'd expect, of course, but I was surprised to see quite such a clear trend.