Last week I received a new device, the AMOD AGL3080, that I think will really enhance our travel photo galleries. It is a GPS Photo Tracker that assist you with geotagging your pictures so that you can show exactly "where" you took a picture by recording the GPS coordinates or longitude and latitude of the location of where the picture was taken.
The device is relatively inexpensive considering what it does. It costs about $70 from Amazon. Not only is it one of the cheapest trackers, it is one of the few that is Mac compatible. It is the size of mobile pager, if you remember what those are. It takes three AAA batteries, has three LED lights on it and two buttons, a power button and a flag button.
To use it, you simply power it on, wait for the satellite icon to blink, clip it to your belt and then start taking pictures. Make sure that the clock on your camera is set correctly. You then come back to your computer and download your photos. In addition to iPhoto I like to use a free photo management application called JetPhoto. I use JetPhoto for all of the Alumnae Association photo galleries and use it to upload pictures to Fickr as well. There are versions of JetPhoto for Windows and Macs and it supports geotagging manually or with a device such as the AMOD AGL3080. After your pictures are imported into JetPhoto, you then connect the AMOD to your USB port and import the GPS file, which is a text file that contains line after line of time stamps and coordinates. No drivers are required and if you are using JetPhoto, you do not need to install any additional software.
JetPhoto synchronizes the location data with the time stamps on the pictures. You can view the photos on a map and easily tweak the locations which are for the most part accurate within a few feet or yards. You can press the flag button to flag a location where you shot a picture, but you do not have to and just let the software match the photos with the locations.
Jetphoto can export your geotagged photos to a Google map photo gallery or to KMZ or KML files which can then be imported into Google Earth. I took a walk around campus on Thursday and shot photos of various dorms, academic buildings and some buildings just off campus in South Hadley. Within minutes I had the images in a Google map photo gallery. The satellite photos are out of date. Since the images were taken, the new dorm has been constructed, the soccer fields and track have been rebuilt and the tennis courts by the lower pond no longer exist.
The purpose of buying the device is to use it during some of the Alumnae Association travel programs. In the past I have tried to get staff to manually map where photos were taken, but they could usually only generalize where they had been, whereas the AMOD will be able to pinpoint thier location down to the street corner they were standing on. By being able to map the photos, it will make them more interesting. I would anticipate that once camera manufacturers reach the practical limit of th enumber of megapixels they can squeeze into a photo sensor, they will start including GPS into their cameras, along with WiFi and Bluetooth. There are a couple examples, one from Ricoh and another from Navman, which is a combination GPS navigator and camera.
I have recently purchased a Maxtor OneTouch 4 Plus and a LaCie Big Disk Extreme +. Both are external drives and support USB 2.0 and Firewire 400 connections. The LaCie also supports Firewire 800. If you are on a Mac, use Firewire. It offers you a faster sustained data transfer that is less CPU intensive than USB.
However, if you have some extra money the ideal solution is the
I usually prefer function over flash and just wanted the basics, so I was browsing through the watches at my local Target and was drawn to the Casios. They have proven functional, durable and reasonably priced. Plus, what geek can resist a company that sells solar, calculator or television remote control wristwatches. But as I said earlier, I really just wanted the basics, but I was attracted to a watch with a large face with easy to read digits, date, day of the week, stopwatch, multiple alarms, water resistance and world time. But the big selling feature of the
We have a G4 and a couple G5 PowerMac towers in use by the Quarterly and communications staff of the Alumnae Association. The Macs are still running strong. I recently upgraded them to Leopard and installed Microsoft Office 2008 without a hitch. Unfortunately , the offices are up on the third floor of Mary Woolley Hall where they still have a 10 Mbps network. Because we are located in a College owned building and share the network with the Development offices the 10 Mbps switch or hub is beyond my control.


The ideal setup would be a second internal hard drive that I could configure as a mirror to the first drive and then an external terabyte firewire drive that I could use for
Amazon has just released a new product of their own called the
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