All posts by Jack Kozik

Motorola-DROID-RAZR-MAXX-HD

Geotag images from Droid Razr Maxx camera. Exiftool fixes DateTimeoriginal timestamp

Photography, , , , ,

I was visiting South America, and I took pictures with my new Droid Razr Maxx.  To help me geotag the images, I also took along my GPS device; I know the camera has a GPS, but when you are traveling, Android data plans are too much, so I shut off the data service and only use voice+text. You can use voip phones melbourne for your business.

My usual photo work flow is to take the track file from my GPS device and  apply geotags to the jpg’s from my camera.  I have done this with my old phones, point and shoot, and fancy DSLR camera.  I love geotagging photos. Geotags remind me where the picture taken so that I can do a better job of putting captions on photos.

There are several opensource or commercial programs that can do the tagging function.  My favorite is the tool is Geosetter.  You load a track file (*.gpx) into Geosetter, you point the program at a directory of photos, and it matches the photo’s time stamp to the closest timestamp in the track file — that’s where it finds the lat/long coordinates.  Those are then inserted into the EXIF text of the image.

Just one problem:

the Droid Razr’s jpg files don’t have the DateTimeoriginal timestamp field populated.  Geosetter depends on that timestamp to be there.  “All” other camera use this timestamp to record the time the picture was taken (vs record that time the file was created).    Geosetter won’t work with these jpgs.

But, I found a geotag fix!!

You need to run a magic tool called exiftool.  The tool runs from a command prompt.  I know it is kinda of a hassle to run, but it will save you a bunch of hassle.  You need to change to the folder that is holding the jpgs that need to be fixed and you need to run the following command:

exiftool "-DateTimeoriginal<ModifyDate" *.jpg

After the tool is run, and you refresh the Geosetter (F5), then you see the Date Taken column filled-in.  (and the tool is now happy).

When this column is filled in, then you can run the “Sync with GPS” command and get the geotag information written into the jpg files.

It seems like a picky thing, but when you take 30 or more pictures on a trip, it is much easier to run a Geosetter tool than setting the geotags manually.

Just so you know, the installation of the exiftool is tricky.  Since I run Geosetter, exiftool is already installed, but hidden in the Geosetter Profile FIles directory.  To make exiftool work, you need to find the path it sitting in and update the system path environment varilable.  Kinda of a hassle.  Also, you will notice that before I ran exiftool, I created a backup directory and copied all the original jpgs, there, just in case exiftool hoses things up.

Engineering Mall

Visited Purdue ECE. I was a guest lecturer at EE400 and EE694A

Jack's Travel, , ,

Centennial MarkerWas a guest lecturer at the Purdue ECE senior seminar class, ECE400 and the graduate student seminar, ECE694A. I gave a presentation on the problems engineers were solving to build the 4G-LTE mobile network.  I surveyed issues of spectrum, user experience, macro-cells, metro cells, mobile application design and some examples of engineering issues meeting public ethics.

I had two very lively classes.  I got lots of questions and was very impressed with the students.  Further I was delighted with the ECE department team who hosted me along with two student ambassadors.

Tips for travelers.  The Purdue  EE building is located on Northwestern Ave.  The Purdue Visitor Information Center is across the street.  Park there.  My hosts reserved an “A” parking sticker for me; for past visits, I was able to buy a parking pass for $5.  Next to the EE building is the MSEE building; it has a nice snack shop area; it’s a good place for visitors who are early, to hang-out.  I visited the HKN lounge in the basement of the EE building; it was hopping!  Good to visit but maybe not the place for an out of town visitor.

 

I attach to this posting some photos from the nice campus.

Racespace Cloud Instance Stuck, Tips for rebooting using console

Weather Station, Web Programming, ,

My self hosted website, running in a Rackspace Cloud instance, got stuck and I figured out how to unstuck it.

NapervilleWeather.net

My weather website, NapervilleWeather.net, is hosted on Rackspace Cloud.  Last night it went down.  I couldn’t ping, ssh, or retrieve the website.  I really had no idea what was going on, so I did what I would have done if the server was in my basement, I rebooted.

Rackspace Cloud Instance — console.

The Rackspace Cloud portal has a reboot button.  I tried first the soft reboot (that didn’t work), then I did a hard reboot.  It still didn’t work.  So I went to the Rackspace chat line.  A couple of nice people told me about the console.   Since I hadn’t ever had a problem before, I didn’t know about it.

Rackspace Console

The console told me that my instance was stuck in single user mode because of file system check errors.  I called up a couple of my friends and they recommended I exit and let the reboot continue. The most likely source of fsck errors were from me doing a hard reboot.  /tmp and /var/log might have been hosed up.

That I did and now everything is ok.  But, I had trouble figuring this out because I was running the portal from my work.  The console works through VNC and apparently uses ports that are blocked by my company firewall.  I had to go home and access the console from my VNC friendly NAT / Router .  At work, the console was just a blank screen.

 

#IVotedToday About 20 minutes at 5th Ave Station in #Naperville. #Election2012 #Vote

Photography,

#IVotedToday About 20 minutes at 5th Ave Station in #Naperville. #Election2012 #Vote, a photo by jkozik on Flickr.

#Naperville #Election2012

 Naperville Election 2012.

Here’s the sticker I got after I voted today. The polling place, 5th Ave Station in Naperville Election 2012 , was crowded, but not too bad. About a 20 minute wait.. Even though it’s a train station, there was a big block of parking spots.

The ballots was a large legal sized page of paper.  I was given a black felt tip marker.  When done, a slid the ballot into a xerox machine sized vote reader.  I was delighted to get the “I voted today” sticker.