Last night I went to Baguette in Ascot, for dinner with Michelle.  Baguette is an award winning restaurant / lounge bar with stellar service and pretty awesome food.  We went for a three course meal, as they have a $39 special running over January / February on mediterranean platters.

We had a French platter which consisted of

• Duck and Pork Terrine, Cornichons and Toast
• Crusted Loin of Veal with French Peas
• Pear and Almond Tart with Sauce Anglaise

The service was outstanding and the meals were excellent.  Definitely worthy of a few return visits.

My housemate Michael is Scottish, so he cooked a Haggis for Burns Supper day (January 25th).  We had a few guests over, he recited the (very funny) poem by Robert Burns, and we partook of Haggis and Tatties!

I am taking a month-long trip to Tasmania, beginning on the 1st February, and as part of that I intend to take quite a few photos.

In addition to some new lens acquisitions I picked up a Gisteq Phototrackr Lite GPS dongle, which pings GPS satellites every 10 seconds and keeps a log of my geographic position throughout the day.

Because the bundled software for the Phototrackr is absolute rubbish, I decided to investigate ways in which I can extract and convert the raw data directly.  As it turns out, there is a perl script available to do this – I Track You for Linux (iTU4l for short).

Because the script is geared toward a linux environment and takes advantage of a few standard linux applications that aren’t available under windows, I figured – because the majority of my photo apps run under windows – I may have to set up a linux / windows dual boot of my eeepc 701.  So, I spent a bit of time nlite-ing a Windows XP SP3 iso down to a manageable size (480mb install) and tried installing and dual booting with various flavours of linux.  This, while successful, was kind of unwieldy.  Dual booting can be tedious at the best of times.  So, I resolved to try ditching windows entirely and find a linux-only solution.

In the end I went with the old faithful Ubuntu Netbook Remix.  Installation was simple, as is the case with Ubuntu by default.  The default install is a little bulky as it comes with a few productivity applications that I don’t really need.  Openoffice was the major one, and removing it ( sudo apt-get remove openoffice.org-base ) freed up 300mb right away.

I then installed Google’s Chromium (the base project for Chrome) via its Launchpad PPA, as Chromium is very snappy on the eeepc – much faster than Firefox – and takes up less screen real estate.

For RAW processing, the Ubuntu Netbook Remix comes with F-Spot by default, which is okay for managing, cataloging and organising images, but not good for batch conversion (in fact it has no batch conversion ability at all), so I installed ufraw (this stands for Unidentified Flying RAW! – somewhat random) via aptitude for this purpose.  ufraw is bundled with an automatic batch conversion application – named ufraw-batch, funnily enough – which converts Canon RAW into a variety of useful formats including jpg and 16 bit tiff.  One bonus of ufraw is that it comes with a very nice gui for finely tuned conversion of individual RAW images.  I haven’t played with this much, but I assume you can save a profile from it and use it as the basis of a batch conversion as well.

I downloaded iTU4l and its counterpart log conversion program sr2x, copied them to /usr/bin and chmodded them to 755 (making the scripts executable).  This worked pretty much out of the box for me – plugged in the dongle, ran the script with the detection parameter and then the extract + clear memory parameters, and then converted the resulting file to GPX.  It will also export to KML for import into Google Maps or Google Earth, various flavours of csv, and other formats.

To correlate the GPS log to my images, I installed gpscorrelate and also gpscorrelate-gui via aptitude.  The premise of this application is that you point it to a series of images, and also a GPS log, and it will check your photos’ timestamps and correlate them to GPS records in the log from the relevant times.  One caveat here is that it will not write geotagging data to RAW files – in fact it will crash – so it’s important to convert your images before correlating them via this app.

After correlation on some sample images, I tried uploading to both Flickr and Panoramio, which quite happily geotagged the uploads based on the EXIF data.  Mission accomplished.

To conclude, Ubuntu Netbook Remix, plus a few choice Linux applications, provided me with a basic suite to catalog my images, extract gps data from my dongle, correlate the gps data with my image timestamps, and upload the images to several online image websites.  Note that I have 2gb RAM on my eeepc 701 rather than the default 512mb, so if you try similar and haven’t swapped out your RAM yet, your mileage may vary.

Decided to take a new bike route last night as part of the gym / ride routine. It works out to be about 13.6km, which is close to what I was doing every day in Cairns before my bike was stolen. It’s not particularly long at all as far as bike circuits go but it’s something. My goal at the moment is to be able to ride up Ivory Lane between the riverside walk and the Story Bridge. It’s quite steep and difficult enough to push the bike up, esp after riding from Coorparoo, doing weights at Wooloongabba on the way.

View Gym Bike Route in a larger map

So, seems to be heating up again, but that’s alright.  We came 6th of 21 in Trivia last night, which is better than I expected we would with our score, but last night seems to have been a particularly difficult one.  Copped some Snow on A+C’s car stereo thanks to Christie on the ride home, what a riot.

Looking forward to the weekend – driving lesson #2, some bike riding and might go see a movie.

Going to do the ride to gym thing again tonight, it’s nice riding just after the sun has set when it cools down – and there’s always plenty of light on the streets too.

Spent the early hours of last night in a haze of rumination, not really achieving much.

Discovered (or more rightly, was pointed toward by jeze) an awesome mexican industrial group Hocico (Ugliness), and was enjoying a bit of them yesterday while running query after query after query. Been rediscovering some older loved music of late too, it’s funny the things you forget, and then look upon with renewed fondness, almost as if they are new, once you remember them and look them up again.

Checked out Jetts on Lang Parade (Milton), did a nice rounded half hour treadmill session and weights before taking the bus home in a sweaty mess. I forgot a towel – was all good though. Stopped at subway and chowed down.

Trivia tonight. Should be ok!

Went for a nice ride tonight and checked out Jetts Wooloongabba on the way, doing a couple of sets of weights, before heading down to South Bank and chilling for a bit and riding home.  Was nice to go for a ride in the cool breeze with the heat the way it’s been lately.  We’re overdue for a storm!

View Ride to Wooloongabba Jets in a larger map

Starting to warm to l4d2 now after having a pretty fun multiplayer vs. last night.  It’s so much better playing with friends than randoms.  I am liking the originality and thought that has gone into some of the achievements too.

Started running at the gym again last night.  Managed 2.5km with no real effort, 1.5km of that on a 6 degree incline and 1km on flat.  Ankle was fine.  Did most of the walking between 6 and 16 degrees.  Burned 315 calories in half an hour – I can smash that I’m sure!  Just need to watch the ankle.

Keen on starting to ride to work again once we move office.  Indications are the shower facilities there are much better than here!

Day thus far: Waking up at an ungodly hour then rolling over and denying consciousness for an hour or so, then getting up, internetting on my eeepc til the bus was due, then bussing into the city and enjoying french toast with strawberries and a macchiato, then bussing again to Dave’s at Red Hill, before going to Virginia BCF to pick up a nice light tent, a sleeping bag rated to -5 degrees, and a camping chair.  Incidentally I’m now a member of the BCF club so I guess I’m really Australian now or something.  Then we stopped off at Treacle for lunch, where I had a rather nice chicken & vegetable pie with salad, and a decaf iced mocha.  Bloody lovely.  Finally home, attempting to bask in a breeze after a tepid shower.