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GIS

making of the Canada Day post

Making the My Neighbourhood, Canada Day 2010 post took a bit of planning.

Hardware

I attached an Ultrapod to the stem of my bike, and added another velcro wrap for security. The GPSMAP 60CSx fitted quite nicely under the bungees on the rear rack. The Ultrapod didn’t quite have enough stability to stay in place without drooping sometimes. I bought (but haven’t tried) the KODAK Adventure Mount, which might be more stable.

The Camera

… is a fairly basic Canon PowerShot SD790IS. What’s important is that it can run CHDK. I’d set it to take a 6MP picture approximately every 20s using the Ultra Intervalometer script.

Synching the camera to the GPS for geotagging

At the end of the trip, I took a picture of my GPS clock screen:


and then compared the time to the camera’s timestamp using jhead:

$ jhead IMG_0316.JPG
 ...
Date/Time    : 2010:07:01 16:59:50

So if the GPS time is 16:58:55, we need to subtract 55s from the camera time to make them match:

$ jhead -ta-0:00:55 IMG*JPG

And let’s check the result:

$ jhead IMG_0316.JPG
 ...
Date/Time    : 2010:07:01 16:58:55

Perfect.

Geotagging the pictures

I used ExifTool. You could also use Prune if you prefer something more graphical. Exiftool does this with minimal fuss:

$ exiftool -geotag canadaday2010-0.gpx IMG_0*JPG

(I realize I could have used exiftool instead of jhead for the timestamp check, but I’ve been using jhead for about a decade, so I know it well and like its compact output.)

You probably want to make use of a WordPress plugin like Add From Server to speed the upload process.

Adding the OpenStreetMap map

The www.Fotomobil.at » wordpress openstreetmap plugin is very flexible, but rather complex to work with. Here I’m calling the map with both markers (and lots of them) and a GPX trace:

[ osm_map lat="43.729" long="-79.275" zoom="14" width="640" height="480" marker_file="https://glaikit.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/canadaday2010marker.txt" gpx_file="https://glaikit.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/canadaday2010.gpx" ]

(Note that in the example, in order to stop WordPress from interpreting the shortcode, I’ve had to introduce a space after the [ and before the ]; in real life, they’re not there.)

The gpx file is just plain vanilla (canadaday2010.gpx) but the marker file (canadaday2010marker.txt) is a bit special. I must admit to have slightly misused the format, as I discovered that the fourth column, the description, is free-form HTML. As the default is to popup a small image thumbnail, I wedged in code to link to the full-sized image when the thumbnail was clicked. This required me to work out what attachment ID WordPress thought each picture would be. If you’re careful to upload sequentially to a single-user blog installation, you should be okay hitting the right links.

Each line of the marker file was made with a (loooong) shell one liner, an unholy mess of backticks and awk. I’m glad I can’t find it. It really wasn’t pretty at all.

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Mac OS X killed my Garmin!

My GPSMAP 60CSx had started to become unreliable: crashing after startup, randomly locking up in mid route, and just generally being an aggravating piece of kit. I was really close to replacing it.

The problem seemed to appear after I’d used USB Mass Storage to transfer archived track logs to the computer. As a last resort, I tried removing the hidden files that OS X creates on every removable disk, and now all is well. It’s annoying and inexcusable that Apple chooses to do this, but we work around.

To delete these files from the terminal and eject the device safely, enter these commands:

pushd /Volumes/GARMIN/
rm -rf .Spotlight-V100 .Trashes ._.Trashes .fseventsd
popd
disktool -e disk1

Your device might not be called /Volumes/GARMIN/, so check and change appropriately. If you have multiple drives on your machine, your GPS is probably not the disk1 device. You can find out which it is by entering disktool -l.

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probably wouldn’t recommend the Blackberry Tour as a GPS logger

I walked a local footpath carrying my (mostly) trusty Garmin GPSMap 60Csx, and a Blackberry Tour running bbTracker. Both had had a good satellite fix for about 10 minutes beforehand, and both were logging trackpoints every second. The smooth turquoise track from the Garmin is much more useful than the wibbly one from the Blackberry.

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fallout from last night’s OSM 6th birthday Mappy Hour in Toronto

It was fun – there were geo-aware cupcakes!

In a moment of geek worlds colliding, Emma showed up, and now I have people clamouring for tablet at Mappy Hour. Sigh, those old ecommons links just don’t fade …

Categories
GIS

proj.4 init annoyances: it’s all apple’s fault

I was going to write a rant about how Ubuntu sets up proj.4 init files incorrectly, then I found that the problem actually lies with OS X. OS X is unusual for a Unix variant, as it uses a case-insensitive file system; flarp.txt is the same as FLARP.TXT. Under more traditional Unices, they’d be different files.

Most of the examples on this blog were written under OS X, and I was concerned when they didn’t work under Ubuntu. It seems that proj.4 uses a very simple way of defining initialization files. If you specify, say, “+init=EPSG:2958”, proj digs around in its configuration files for a file called EPSG, then searches for an identifier in that file which matches the ID 2958. Under OS X, you can specify EPSG, epsg, or even EpSg – they all work. Under Ubuntu, using anything other that epsg fails with this message:

<proj>:
projection initialization failure
cause: no system list, errno: 2

In short, use lower case init specifications, and it’ll work everywhere.

It seems that there are some other applications (mapserver?) that have problems calling proj, so if you’re seeing this error and it’s not something you can correct from the command line:

  1. Find out where your installation keeps its initialization files. You can do this by setting PROJ_DEBUG=1:
    PROJ_DEBUG=1 proj +init=epsg:2958
    and you should get a message like:
    pj_open_lib(epsg): call fopen(/usr/share/proj/epsg) - succeeded
  2. cd /usr/share/proj (or wherever the last command said the epsg file was located)
  3. sudo ln -s epsg EPSG

Now your installation should work no matter which case you use. Camel case, unfortunately, excluded.

Categories
GIS

in which I discover OpenStreetMap editing

While I’ve used OpenStreetMap data before, I’ve never added anything to it. That changed after going to Mappy Hour last night, and meeting Richard Weait. He has a bunch of useful tutorials on his website.

Categories
GIS

toronto data updated

Hey, they’ve updated most of the data sets on toronto.ca | Open!

Categories
GIS

More on iPhoto GPS weirdness

Okay, following on from my last post I geek out a lot here, so here’s a summary: In a test of 1600 images, iPhoto moved the recorded GPS location of a picture an average of 6.17m, and in one case moved the image 11.25m from its correct position.

I created a 40×40 array of points approximately 5m (okay, 5 UTM units apart, precisely) and assigned the locations to JPEG files using ExifTool. These files were imported into iPhoto, then exported. The before and after coordinates were plotted and compared:

  • The green crosses are the original coordinates
  • The red crosses are the coordinates assigned by iPhoto
  • The dashed lines map the before coordinates to the after.

In real life, I realise it’s difficult with most consumer GPS units to resolve points 5m apart. It’s pretty egregious of Apple, however, who appear to take great pains to retain all the camera’s metadata, to mash the stored coordinates so badly.

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My Neighbourhood, Canada Day 2010

I went for a bike ride on Canada Day. Click on a bicycle icon to see what I saw.

Categories
GIS

Don’t trust iPhoto’s exported GPS coordinates

John the new jersey geographer put this better than me, but it appears that iPhoto rounds exported GPS coordinates to the nearest integer second of arc. There’s really no reason for them to do this, and it’s caused me to waste several hours tracking down why my tagged and exported photos didn’t match up.

Looking at the output data, I’m not sure if it’s to a second of arc – it appears to be rounding to the nearest hundredth minute, or approximately 0.000167°. Since GPS location uncertainty is in the fifth decimal place, this aliasing of the data is annoying.