magrolino

A week surfing at Cape Hatteras

Wow - I just came back from 6 days at Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. Went there with 3 good friends for kiteboarding, surfing and we really did get some riding: wind every single day (15-30 mph, varying from day to day), water temperatures in the mid 80s.. huge (but ‘definitively rideable‘) waves on the ocean side, shallow water on the sound’s side (you can literally walk for miles through the water there) - it was simply great! (if you ever go to Buxton, visit the small local bakery ‘Orange Blossom’ to get an ‘Apple Ugly‘- it really looks like but it is delicious…)

Last day we went to a presentation of Cabrinha’s new 2008 kites, featured by pro rider Damien Leroy at kittyhawk kiteboarding, was fun to ride next to some really good kiters.

Now? back to work.
p.s.: there are some more shots online here.

read on

Posted at 5:51 on 7/1/08 | Filed Under: Sports, usa | 1 comment

geotagging photos with a gps tracker

I bought a gps tracker recently to geotag my photos, since it is one of the few that works on mac without additional drivers/software I got the ‘Amod AGL 3080‘. The device works amazingly well so far, the only drawback is the slightly bulky device (it uses three AAA batteries) and the batteries are drained after ~15 hours nonstop use. But besides that I really like it so far. With the newest firmware it is possible to set the interval for recording location (and altitude, speed, …) from within 1 to 10 seconds. I can’t wait to use that thingy while hiking (or skydiving :) ).

I have looked into several software programs for geotagging pictures with gps tracker logs; one of them was ‘houdahgeo‘ but it was slightly too expensive for my opinion (and I don’t need to position my pictures on maps by hand anyways, I just needed the automatic sync function). So I finally found a really nice and decent cross-platform program which does exactly the job: gPicSync is freeware, comes for mac, windows and even linux; uses GPSBabel and EXIFTools internally and does not only geotag your pictures but it also includes keywords about the city/town/area you shot the picture at/in. It can even geotag file formats different then jpeg: raw/nef files etc. - Very nice :)

Update: GPSPhotolinker seems to to a very nice job, too. Looks promising, will give it a try later today.

Went to my first baseballgame ever yesterday - Milwaukee Brewers vs. Minnesota Twins. Good game (Brewers lost, though) - and impressive stadium (Miller Park). It was packed so there were about 40 - 42.000 people, it really was a great feeling to walk in there and to enjoy the game!