Category Archives: Mac

Moving in the Right Direction

Posted on by

A screenshot of Aperture 3.3.2 using GPS locations

For many years I’ve dreamed of having location data attached to my images so that I could see where I took my favorite pictures at my favorite places. Unfortunately none of my cameras have had GPS either built-in or as an attachment. My iPhone has the ability to do it but sadly it wasn’t until recently that I figured out how. I decided to take advantage of my recent renaissance and assigned myself the task of learning how to do it while visiting a super secret location over the Christmas break.

And so on a visit to Ridgefield (oh what a giveaway!) I fired up MotionX-GPS on the phone and had it keep a running tally of my travels around the refuge, then emailed the data file to my laptop. It took me a couple more weeks before I sat down to learn how to import that data into Aperture, and it’s a bit fussier than I hoped, so I also learned how to do it with a little command line utility called exiftool. Photo Mechanic can also do it, and did it quickly, but the locations weren’t right so I have a little more learning there.

I do wish my camera could do this natively, not just because of the extra steps required to add the data later, but because it requires that I remember to start and stop the GPS tracking. And anything that requires that I remember to do something, well …

This screenshot shows an example of how the GPS data looks when imported directly into Aperture, in this case it was my visit to Ridgefield on January 15th. The purple trace shows where I drove around the auto tour, the pins where I stopped and took pictures. Currently selected is a spot beside Rest Lake where I photographed a coyote hunting voles as the snow fell gently down.

On the map you can see the Columbia River running to the left of the refuge, and a little offshoot that comes by it on the right, plus the numerous sloughs that run through the refuge. Lewis & Clark visited Ridgefield but apparently Clark wasn’t quite as impressed with this blessed little place as I am, for he wrote,

“Opposit to our camp on a Small Sandy Island the brant & geese make Such a noise that it will be impossible for me to sleap.”

His prediction proved true, as the following morning he added,

“rained all the after part of the last night…I slept but verry little last night for the noise Kept up dureing the whole of the night by the Swans, Geese, white & Grey Brant Ducks & c. on a Small Sand Island they were emensely noumerous, and their noise horid…”

I’ve not seen brant at Ridgefield but the rain and swans and geese and ducks, those I know quite well, although in much smaller numbers it seems than William Clark once saw (and heard).

Posted in Mac

The Third Carrot

Posted on by

Our cat Sam sleeps beside my MacBook Pro

The next motivational carrot is my computer setup. Which is a bit strange because my 15″ MacBook Pro combined with my 27″ Thunderbolt display is hands down my favorite setup of all time. But the carrot isn’t upgrading the computer itself.

It’s the iPad.

I don’t have an iPad but after playing around with my wife’s iPad 2, for as much guff as he took for saying it, I side with Jobs in calling it magical. If the rumored iPad 3 launches with the rumored retina display, rumor has it I will buy one. This would motivate me to update my web site and probably the blog as I suspect they are hard to navigate with fingers. It’s a bit embarrassing but I write them largely for myself and am by far their most voracious reader, so I would adapt their design to whatever I’m reading them on. And if I’m doing a major update, I might as well add in some much needed features (for example you can search the blog but not the main site, understandable when I launched it in the 90′s but rather shameful in this day and age).

An iPad would also be useful on the MAX, where lately it has been harder and harder to get a seat where I can use a laptop, but my MAX riding is likely to falloff steeply this year. My real motivation is to try it out for home use, as I think I’d frequently use it when I’m not at my desk, freeing up the laptop to spend most of its time hooked up to the big display for photo editing but still able to tag along with me when I need it.

There’s another motivational aspect to all of this, which is that with my current office setup I can’t work on that big beautiful display and watch TV at the same time. Plus the big desks, built when dinosaurs and giant CRT’s roamed the earth, limit what furniture I can put in my little office. Currently I have a recliner that I love, but while the cats can sleep atop me, there’s no room for Ellie to get in on the snuggling. I’m hoping a smaller desk and love seat would remedy the situation, but I’m not sure I can make it work.

Regardless of what I do or don’t do, the Great Snuggler has staked his claim to his semi-permanent position on my lap.

Our cat Sam sleeps beside my MacBook Pro

A Start at Goodbye

Posted on by

A close-up view of the face of a young male elk in Yellowstone National Park

I cried when he died.

I was at work in the middle of the afternoon when I realized I had been staring absent-mindedly into my monitor for quite some time. I was worn out, stretched too thin, and suddenly I just had to get out of the office. I went home.

As I walked in the door Ellie ran up to greet me as she always does, and she brightened my mood as she always does. Grinning from ear to ear, tail wagging, dancing in joy. We played until she tired. I went into my room and opened my laptop and learned that Steve Jobs passed away.

I’ve thought about Steve frequently the past fifteen years, for a number of reasons. Almost daily the past five, because of his Stanford speech. I don’t remember when I first read it, but it has haunted and inspired me ever since.

… for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Steve Jobs in his 2005 Stanford Commencement address

It was this quote that troubled me the most. While I like my job and the people I work with (I’ve been at my company for nearly 15 years, if that’s any indication), I’ve never loved my job the way Jobs clearly loved his. But until I can find a job that will pay me to spend my days hiking and tossing hedgehogs and handing out belly rubs, I guess I never will.

But I took his advice to heart in how I spend my free time, and if you look back through my hiking journals you’ll see these are the years when I started planning at least one big hiking trip per year. When I started getting up before dawn despite my night owl nature and heading to Ridgefield over and over and over again. When I stopped worrying over the cost and bought the big lens that has delighted me so. When I learned to keep an eye on those journals and watch for when the gap to my last outing grew too large, a warning sign I had slipped into a funk, and celebrating my favorite things through photography became a way to work myself out of it.

One of the ways a man I never met changed my life. I’ll miss you Steve.

27″ of Glory

Posted on by

The Apple 27-inch Thunderbolt Display (in a box)

I had to replace a broken power supply cable for my laptop and while I was at it, picked up Apple’s 27″ Thunderbolt display. I’ve been interested in a big monitor ever since Apple launched their 30″ display years ago, but today was the day I finally realized the dream.

I’ve only just hooked it up, but wow! Wow!

This pic was a quick snap from my iPhone and I managed to get three out of the four pets in the frame. That’s Ellie’s paw sticking into the lower left corner, Emma’s tail sticking out from behind the box on the right, and of course Scout in the back on the window seat.

Ahem. Her window seat.

All three are now zonked out beside me in my office. The only one missing is little Sam, who was asleep in a chair in the basement last I saw him. Mostly asleep anyways, Emma was in a mischievous mood and was up on the table poking him from above.

Poke poke poke!

Love & Loss

Posted on by

Our cat Templeton in front of my 15 in. Powerbook

After the long writeup about workflow in the previous post, one more thought about tools. This is a picture of Templeton with the 15″ Powerbook I referenced in that post, my favorite computer of all time until my current MacBook Pro.

The picture was taken in January 2006 while Templeton was recuperating from surgery to remove the sewing needle he swallowed right before we left on Christmas vacation. He had to be kept from running and jumping, and isolated from Scout, so one of us stayed with him in the guest room while the other stayed with Scout. He had to wear a plastic cone to keep him from pulling out his stitches, but we gave him supervised time with it off so he could relax and clean his fur away from the incision.

I left the room for a brief moment and came back to find him sitting at my laptop, paws on the trackpad as though he was settled in for work. What he had really done was an old Templeton standby, though.

He stole my spot.

Templeton and my 15″ Powerbook. I loved them both. I miss one. Important as they are, tools are just tools.