Nikon D200 GPS - Version 2

I’ve had it for quite a while and love it: a new and improved of my original GPS design for my D200. This time it’s smaller, practical and easy; just mount it on the flash shoe, plug it in to the 10-pin connector and turn it on! Within no time at all GPS coordinates will be flowing into the camera.

This version eliminates the need for the expensive MC-35 and even the special 10-pin connector. I’ve opted for a quick GPS receiver and encased everything in a small black box with a flash shoe mount. Because it is powered through the camera’s power source, a switch on the side of the box turns off the GPS. Version 3 should include a battery, rechargeable through a USB connection.

Read on for directions on how to create your own GPS. » read more

Make a Call through a Bluetooth Connection

Unfortunately, I am tiring of my iPhone; mostly due to the slow network speed. Now that the iTouch has all the cool apps as the iPhone (Goole Maps being the most useful for me) I’d like to give up the phone capabilities but still want to make phone calls through Google Maps. It would be great to have an iTouch application (or any platform in general) that could place a call through a bluetooth-connected cell phone. This would give me most of the same functionality of the iPhone without the headaches of the AT&T network.

Getting Plogger to Work with Gallery Remote

I use Plogger as my image gallery and enjoy it’s simplicity. I also use iView MediaPro to manage my images and have a simple script (contact me for details) that uploads selected images to my gallery on this blog. It’s been quite a while since I’ve tried to run the script and tonight, when I did, it failed.

The failing portion was galleryadd.pl and it was giving me:

Error: incorrect username/password

The resolution is simple: plog-remote.php makes a reference to a $config global that has not been defined. By including plog-load_config.php the gallery remote functionality works!

To fix, add:
require_once("plog-load_config.php");

after the require statements in plog-remote.php.

Social Networking 3.0

I’m amazed at the tie-in between entertainment and social networking. A recent episode of my favorite podcast (Standford University’s Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders) had a group of notable entrepreneurs talking about the future of social networking. Of course their thinking is aligned with their company direction as of course my thinking is greatly influenced by the current events in my life.

Being a new father to twins and often pondering the potential cost of education has guided my thoughts on this podcast. We desperately need a shift in the education paradigm; I’m not sure I’ll be able to offer a decent education for my children considering the current college trends. I imagine removing the walls of the learning institutions and replacing them with social networks. And as technology removes the language and distance barriers, social networking can be the driving force behind sharing knowledge - there are so many bright people all over the world.

I also thought about the Borg (Star Trek’s Next Generation version of a highly functional social network) and how a primary goal is to get smarter though collective thinking. Social networking can be used as the medium to add brainpower to solve problems. I would hope in the years to come that the focus of social networking is to share information allowing us all to get smarter.

Converting activeCollab to Trac

I selected activeCollab with the hope that the 1.0 release would be sufficient to manage the development of a series of software projects. Part of the requirement was bug tracking: we used tasks and task lists to track bugs with the hope of migrating them to the 1.0 version of activeCollab. Key to enabling activeCollab for bug tracking was the ability to attach comments to tasks. It was not an ideal solution but believed 1.0 would be worth the wait. Unfortunately, the wait was too long and we decided to transition to trac.

I wasn’t able to find any utility to move the tasks to trac so I decided to write my own, mostly as a collection of SQL code and offer them for those in a similar predicament. » read more