A couple of days ago, I ran a mile long track with my puppy through a neighborhood under construction. I kept a GPS tracklog, took photos and wore a wearable camera system. Actually, the video footage is incredibly helpful for tracking. I’m working on creating a widget so that you can see the footage from laying the track side-by-side with footage from running the track. But in the meanwhile, I have photos and the track. So I decided to upload them to magnalox.
Magnalox stands for “magnificent logs”. It is a web service that lets you upload tracks, photos and create text, links, etc. that play as an unfolding narrative the track proceeds. It turned out not to be quite as easy as I’d hoped. I had to reduce photo sizes before uploading. Then, I had to adjust the time on the track since 5 hours were subtracted for UTC offset — so the photo and track times did not match. Then I struggled with getting the right behaviors to occur along the track. Lots of editing, deleting and starting over again. There are code-like statements you need to enter if you want the track to pause or specific behaviors to trigger. It would be far nicer if there were a wysiwyg or drag-n-drop for inserting these along the track! So I ended up not making very many comments about the track. Finally, I gave up trying to edit the stories in the browser and I edited them in a script file offline. This worked fine, though there were some things I never quite got working (e.g., pause between photos taken very closely in time… one of them flies by so fast you never see it.)
Magnalox is a new tool which does produce a very attractive output. I’m sure there will be much improvement in the user interface. It’s a unique tool that has a lot of promise.
<br /> Your browser must support iframes to display magnalogs!<br />
The google earth track was also equally interesting. Here’s a screen grab.
I used an image overlay to get more detail than Google Earth afforded for my location. However, it’s greatly out-of-date since there are now neighborhoods where farms once stood. The photos capture some of that.
By the way, there is the possibility of showing playback in Google Earth, but you either need the Enterprise client or a network link to show progress in time… and the latter way is not a very usable way of doing this. It’s a great feature I hope they include in the free version some day! I’ll upload a movie demonstrating this feature in a later post.
Zooey is 8 1/2 months. She’ training for search and rescue. The discipline she’s training for right now is trailing. But to be good at that, I also have to work on her play drive. Right now she likes to play with balls. Particularly, soccer balls. So until her play drive is strong enough to play other sorts of games, this is the game that we are working on. It’s also important that she play with other people besides me. Fortunately, Benjamin and his friend agreed to play with her.
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