Animations in iPod

A sequence of photos + iPod = awesome little animations!

Do you have a sequence of photos? Do you want to make them move in a really quick and fun way? Do you have an iPod (onto which you can load photos)? Well, then you have your own portable animation machine!

You need:

• a sequence of photos

• a program for resizing those photos

• an iPod

1. Resize your photos, otherwise they’ll eat lots of space on the iPod (use Picasa or something similar).

2. Upload resized photos to your iPod.

3. Open the first photo and use the scrolling wheel to make the animation.

4. You’ve just made your own mini animation!  And you can play it backwards too.

Note to self # 02: importing GPS tracks and points into gis

If you, after changing the projection of GPS tracks and importing them into arcgis, think that not all points have been exported, try zooming to the full extent of the layer. The waypoints haven’t “miraculously disappeared, I swear”, they are just outside of your current view extent.

Future self, remember this:

a) There’s a difference between trackpoints and waypoints. They were not recorded with two different GPS receivers, they are different.

b) Use the Zoom to full extent button, don’t blame missing points on little GIS elves (wearing yellow pointy hats with an antenna). It will save your ass. And most people don’t believe in elves, anyway.

Note to self #01: Removing the black background from a georeferenced image

If you have a black & white image which you georeferenced in arcgis and there’s a nasty black square/background that you don’t like, don’t think that changing black to transparent helps. It doesn’t. Even if it looks like it does when you click OK.

Me, trying to get rid of the black background:

Hey, where did my image go?! Gwaaaah!

After trying the same thing for the 5th time:

*headdesk* Why?

Future self, remember this: If you change black to transparent the whole image is practically transparent, since it’s a black and white image. Saving the georeferenced image as a GRID (and not as a tif) solves the annoying problem.

I think this Note to self category has potential on this blog …

This internet thing …

Internet still amazes me. I first went online in 1995. You couldn’t do much on the internet then. I didn’t really understand it (I was young and knew only really basic english), there was no Google at that point, it was slow and expensive.

Forward 14 years. I remember watching the 1998 winter olympics opening ceremony in Nagano. There were some children dancing and singing. And now I want to watch that again. Not a problem really, just go to Youtube, type Nagano opening ceremony children song and here you go. Wish granted.

This is a totally normal thing now but isn’t it amazing? You just imagine anything, (almost) any random video clip that you saw once, and here it is, a few keywords away.

Google Reader shared items graph

Dear Google Reader,

I’m pretty sure that the colors used in this nice graph that shows reading/posting trends of my Google Reader shared items are mixed. The orange bar should be “items posted” and the blue one “items read”. See pictures for explanation.

Picture 1: List of my shared items. 8 items were shared on May 28th.

Picture 2: Graph of my shared items. It shows that on 28th May 8 items were read and 23 posted.

If we compare these two pictures we can clearly see that the numbers don’t match. Yes? Yes.

Where exactly does that number of “read items” come from? Me reading my own shared items? Or me reading shared items from everyone that share with me? It’s confusing.

standards

I was reading a tutorial about SQL a few days ago. Right in the beginning there was a short paragraph about SQL being a standard. And then I read a wonderful quote:

The wonderful thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from.

Nice way to make me laugh. :-)

You wish, they deliver

I’ve been pretty amused by floods in my previous post. About a month later what do I get? A sea flood! A huge sea flood. The biggest one in the last 50 years. (Well, Venice got it too, as we conveniently share the same sea). I got some pretty pictures and wet shoes.

You don’t walk in the sea every December, right? :)

Venice

signs of ebb and flow on some stairs in Venice

Venice has lots of water everywhere. You can’t miss it, really. But it’s fun. Especially between mid September and April. That’s always the fun part of the year if you live really close to the sea. Sea floods! Yay!

With so much water everywhere this is kind of a problem if you have to move from one part of town to the other and you don’t own a boat. GIS to the rescue! Enter the start, the end and the sea level. Magic! :-) (when the error pops out, I guess*, the sea level is too high to walk from specified points)

*because I don’t live there …

mnemonic for roman numerals

I’ve always had problems with remembering the correct order of roman numerals. L, D M, C they just didn’t make any sense. But now I have a nice mnemonic. All you have to do is remember (you’ll soon see that you already know it) the order of these 4 letters:

• L=50
• C=100
• D=500
• M=1000

What’s the secret formula: LCD Monitor :-) See? Really easy.

5 quotes

Selected with a very scientific method: open your huge quote file, click somewhere, close your eyes, *scroll, scroll, scroll*, click, open your eyes. Amazing.

The secret of greatness is simple: do better work than any other man in your field – and keep on doing it. – Wilfred A. Peterson

When love and skill work together expect a masterpiece.
- John Ruskin

“[...] there is one inexorable law of technology, and it is this: when revolutionary inventions become widely accessible, they cease to be accessible. Technology is inherently democratic, because it promises the same services to all; but it works only if the rich are alone using it. When the poor also adopt technology, it stops working. A train used to take two hours to go from A to B; then the motor car arrived, which could cover the same distance in one hour. For this reason cars were very expensive. But as soon as the masses could afford to buy them, the roads became jammed, and the trains started to move faster. Consider how absurd it is for the authorities constantly to urge people to use public transport, in the age of the automobile; but with public transport, by consenting not to belong to the elite, you get where you’re going before members of the elite do.”
- Umberto Eco, How to travel with a salmon

A leader takes people where they want to go. A great leader takes people where they don’t necessarily want to go but ought to be.
- Rosalynn Carter

Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work. You don’t give up.
- Anne Lamott