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Never one to be afraid of being the last on a bandwagon, I’ve started Geotagging some Flickr photos.

To get an idea what it’s about, look at this photo and click on ‘geotagged’ under the photo. Be prepared to wait a while, and you should get a map from www.geobloggers.com and Google maps with the photo’s location marked on it. Then click on ‘Find newest photos within current map area’ to see other photos from the same area.

I don’t have any GPS gizmos, so to Geotag pictures I use Google maps. I go to http://maps.google.co.uk, find the spot I took the photo, centre it and zoom in as far as I can.

You can then extract the latitude and longitude by clicking on ‘Link to this page’ and looking at the resulting URL (web address).

For example, from an URL of
http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?ll=51.397887,
-2.459253&spn=0.003752,0.007318&hl=en
you can extract a latitude of 51.397887 and a longitude of -2.459253.

Now, back in Flickr add some tags to your picture:
geo:lat=51.397887
geo:lon=-2.459253
geotagged

Then add a hyperlink to the photo’s description:
<a href=”http://www.geobloggers
.com/”>geotagged</a>

The key thing – and this wasn’t made very clear on various web sites I read – is that you must follow this link for Geobloggers to log the photo. And you probably need to log out of Flickr (or right-click or apple-click on the link) first, or Flickr will just assume you want to edit the description.

Find your neighbourhood or favourite place on www.geobloggers.com and have a look around – it’s quite addictive!

Cooling off on a summer’s day eating sweet, cold watermelon, my mind drifts.

I usually think of John Cougar Mellencamp and try to figure out some bizarre rebus that would involve and American toilet, a member of the cat family, and a melon singing show tunes.

Then my mind wanders to Richard Brautigan and his novel In Watermelon Sugar.

“Our lives we have carefully constructed from watermelon sugar and then travelled to the length of our dreams, along roads lined with pines and stones.”

It is a strange, poetical book. Baffling but beautiful. There’s a place in the book, published in 1968, called iDEATH. If Apple made guns…

I gave up trying to get my Motorola C350 to work with iSync in Tiger – I thought I could do a different version of the same hack I’d done in Panther, but it just wouldn’t work. This was quite annoying, considering that Apple list the C350 as iSync compatible on their web site.

But what the hey – got me a secondhand Motorola V600. Now don’t get me wrong, I still hate Motorola phones, I still think their head of human interface design looks like this. (It’s the way that the menu buttons work when sending a message, the way that even though this is a clamshell, the buttons on the side turn the ringtone silent in your pocket…)

But this phone has Bluetooth. Hey, my new PowerBook has Bluetooth. I wonder if…

And they talk to each other beautifully! So easy to get wallpaper on and off. And, so so easy to add my own MP3 ring tones (edited in Audacity) and so easy to get free MIDI ring tones off the web.

And I discovered that Smiths songs played in MIDI format on a mobile phone invariably sound like New Order.

Westy’s quite right. The Polaroid-o-nizer is really neat!

Fancy a chill? This puts the willies up me.