So lets get the good news out of the way first, Tania said yes. Well actually she said “absolutely”, but in legal terms that counts as a yes and we’re getting married at Christmas next year. I had planned it to happen while hiking the Kepler Track but since we’d reached a major mile-stone in our renovations I was in a good mood and decided to pop the question right then. Which was good because she’d already guessed something was going to happen while hiking and I hate to be predictable. Anyway, I buried the ring in a geode in the wall of our recently finished hole and made her dig it out. It looked a little something like this:

So we’ve now got 12 months of planning and then the rest of our lives to reminisce about it. In other news we’re still working on the foundations. The builder is building a wall and the supports, all we have to do is to paint the back of it with a heavy duty waterproof paint, no more digging out tonnes of clay! We bought a nice safe family station wagon, used it to carry one set of bricks across town and then it got hit & run by a drunk driver. Thankfully there were no serious injuries, others stopped to help and through the power of MotoWeb the WhitePages and FaceBook I was able to track him down and hand the details over to our insurance company and the police. I look forward to the day I can stand in court and point my finger at that bastard.

Apart from that I’m busy trying to write iPhone apps, Tania is busy working and we’re both looking forward to a long lazy Christmas break. All the best to all of you, and once again I promise to update more often.

Good weather and no builder on site meant Tania and I spent the weekend in the garden. The task for this weekend was to get the fruit trees that have been sitting on our front steps into the soil. My parents have apple and lemon trees in the their garden but they are so short and squat that mowing under them is a real pain. To avoid that I built three pretty simple boxes that cost just $40 NZD all up.

Materials:
Six 15×62.5cm Radiata planks (for the fronts)
Six 15×57.5cm Radiata planks (for the sides)
Twelve x 30cm Radiata steaks: H3 treated
pack of galvanized nails (at least 72)
big tub of black acrylic paint.

The planks were purposefully cut to have a difference of 5cm between the front and side pieces. They are 2.5cm thick so the over lap at the corners makes them square.

Nail the steaks to the shorter planks, then the longer planks. It is best to nail to the steaks rather than each other so that if one ever comes off it doesn’t take the others with it.

You’ll want to remove the grass from beneath the boxes so it doesn’t grow up and smother what ever you’re planting there. Just place the box where you want it and then dig around the edge to mark the square, remove the box and cut lines across the area a couple of inches deep. Slide the spade under neath and you’ll be able to life the turf right off. Of course you can dig it however you want but we needed to transplant the grass to cover and area where I removed a tree stump.

Be careful when pushing the boxes into the ground, you wouldn’t want one side to get ahead of the others incase it twists the wood. You could knock each corner one by one, but if you’ve got a lovely assistant *waves hands and Tania enters stage left* you could do it like we did and use four feet to push all corners in simultaneously.

The end result
So we now have lemon, lime and mandarin trees in the front garden. We’ve got plans for another four. Perhaps nectarine, apple, pear and plum. A veritable orchard I tell you

It’s been over two months since Tania and I moved in to our first home, and as expected it is taking up a lot of our time. Due to the previous owner’s expansionist tendencies quite a few of our weekends have been spent under the house digging a trench into which new foundations can be poured. Together with a bit of help from my brother we shifted 9 cubic meters of dirt and now the builder has set out the boxing to shape the concrete. It’s a long process, only working on weekends, but we’re planning to be in this house for a long time so we want to do it right so we can live in it, not just palm it off to the next person.
Along side that we’ve each taken on little tasks around the house to make it more our own. Tania has got the vegetable patch started, I’ve removed some tree stumps. Tania made a pin board and hotwater bottle covers, I’ve made some shelves and installed network cables to my hidden backup harddrive. Together we made a photo wall. All in all it’s been a very productive time, but I’m still looking forward to summer. Due to my northern hemisphere trips over the last two years I’ve managed to miss winter since the beginning of 2007 so the constant rain and cold that has been hitting Auckland shocked me. If I wasn’t kept busy with little projects I’d have gone stir crazy. At gathering of people just made redundant from my previous employer I was asked about my next adventure. I’ve got some things I’m interested in doing but so long as I have this mortgage I won’t be taking six months off to walk across another country, or the Okavango Delta . In the meantime I do intend to update this blog more often with some little things we’re doing to personalise our house. Starting with the floating shelves I made.

In just over 24 hours I expect to be picking up the keys to my first house. I expect it will be my only house for the next couple of decades. Not only is selling/buying houses expensive, it can also be extremely frustrating when solicitors forget to tell you things or print out vital documents that means taking the afternoon off work was a complete waste of time.
But come tomorrow that’ll all be over and Tania and I will be moving our belongings to the suburb of Birkdale where a number of friends have already bought houses. While we’ve been living in Point Chevalier with our friends Peter and Andy, Tania has been doing a lot of gardening. So it was by happy coincidence that while looking at a cardboard laptop stand I stumbled upon an excellent system for growing plants in reclaimed gutters along the side of a house devised by Suzanne Forsling. I’ve come up with an addition that’ll save some water and time. A bit of old piping laid along behind the gutter with holes drilled down the length of it would disperse water better than just watering one end of the plants, and if that pipe were fed from the downpipe of the roof-top guttering then it’d mean the system pretty much takes care of itself.
I’ve continued browsing the web for DIY projects and found lots onLifeHacker.com and GreenUpgrader.com.

A few of my favourites are:

• Carboard laptop stand
• Gutter Garden
• Make your own gummies
• The Enter Key
• Business card iPod stand
• Floating book case

The latest incarnation of Apple’s iMovie has many cool new features and I’m coming around to using it rather than iMovie HD 6 that I’ve kept hold of all these years. Among them is an animated globe that draws a line Indiana Jones style.
As great as that seems you’re stuck with the 1600 or so locations that Apple chose. You can rename them but not change the coordinates. That’s where iMovieLocationEditor comes in. It simply adds new locations along with the names you’ve chosen (can be changes within iMovie just like the originals). You can type in the coordinates in you know them but it’s much easier to find it in Google Earth and then press the big button to import it into iMovieLocationEditor.

Update
Apple changed something in iMovie 8.0.1. If you’re not seeing the changes appear in iMovie download version 1.03 and give that a try. If you think you’ve corrupted your location list you can download my backup.

Anyone who would be interested has probably already heard about the Places feature of iPhoto ‘09. Using embedded Google Maps. Once you’ve done that you can browse photos by location and make some very nifty photo albums with maps. There’s more to it than that but I’d be about the millionth person to review the new features of iPhoto ‘09 if I did so, so I won’t. Instead I’m going to tell you about a feature that is missing, but one that Apple have clearly been playing with.
My Geotagger program has been out for a few years now and people have been happily (and least I think so) geotagging their photos. If this is done before importing them to iPhoto everything is fine, but doing it once they are already in iPhoto’s database means that iPhoto doesn’t know about the change and consequentially won’t draw these photos on the nice new maps Apple have added. So to find a solution for this I’ve been digging around in iPhoto’s database file. It’s a simple SQLite database but I haven’t fully solved it that part of the equation yet.
The interesting thing I found, and the reason I’m telling you about this before I have finished an update to Geotagger, is that in the database I found two unused tables. For those of you that don’t know about database and tables pretend I said I just found two very interesting lists. The tables are called SqGpsTracks and GpsTracksEventsJoin. What this tells me is that Apple were working on the ability to link a GPS track with an iPhoto event for people that may have a GPS Datalogger and a camera as separate devices. iPhoto would then be able to match up the time a photo was taken with the GPS log and work out where the photo was taken. This process is pretty well documented already and I’ve been doing it for ages using Jeffrey Early’s excellent GPSPhotoLinker. It could also mean the display of routes on the embedded maps, but that can’t be proven at this stage.

Though I welcome this feature for the masses I have never fully trusted iPhoto to do any editing of my pictures. I”m quite happy doing all the editing and geotagging before hand and just using iPhoto to store and display pictures, but for those that want an integrated solution this would definitely be a step forward.

UPDATE: Others have been discovering similar things, Adam looked in the nib files and found more proof that Apple is working on interpolation.

My video has been up on the site for a little while now but those of us not lucky enough to every get listed as the most-recent applicants are struggling to get anywhere near the number of views those lucky few are receiving. Two days on the front page can bring in thousands of votes. So, I’m putting out a second post to encourage you to watch my video and give me a vote. I’ve heard that one New Zealander is guaranteed through to the next round and if you’re here to thank me for my software or after follwoing any of my travel blogs, the best thing you can do for me right now is a 5 star rating, and telling your friends about it too.

To try to drum up publicity I’ve created a page here on my site that I’ll keep up to date and voting progresses and a Facebook group that you’re welcome to join.

Here are those links again
Video: http://islandreefjob.com/applicants/watch/dF_InB2rFvY
Facebook group: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=48534483691

I don’t generally forward on chain emails, let alone post them on my site, but I really like this one.

 

I work, they pay me. I pay my taxes and the government distributes my taxes as it sees fit.

In order to earn that pay cheque, I work on a rig for a drilling contractor.
I am required to pass a random urine test, with which I have no problem.

What I do have a problem with is the distribution of my taxes to people who don’t have to pass a urine test. Shouldn’t one have to pass a urine test to get a welfare cheque because I have to pass one to earn it for them?

Please understand that I have no problem with helping people get back on their feet. I do on the other hand have a problem with helping someone sit on their ass drinking beer and smoking dope.

 

 

Could you imagine how much money the government would save if people had to pass a urine test to get a welfare cheque?

My first iPhone app has been published. It’s pretty simple, as most iPhone apps are, and I’m definitely catering for the current fad in entertainment. StrokeMe is $0.99 USD and was written in part to amuse my girlfriend. It shows a photo then plays a sound and vibrates when you stroke the screen. The idea was it’d be a way for her to pretend to play with her cat called Woods while she was at work. Of course, not many people will want to play with Woods (though he is nice enough) they’d want to take their own photos and record their own sound, which is exactly what StrokeMe is all about. Taking from the built in camera or the photo library users can configure the app to show what ever photo they want and record their own sound to play. I had thought it be good to keep a picture of your children and a recording of them where ever you go, but I’m getting the impression what people are taking photos of each other. What ever you want, StrokeMe is there to play with. So please give it a try, and tell your friends.

 

 

I’ve got a proper game in the works too, but the UI needs a lot of work. More on that soon.

Google Earth 5 has just been released and it includes some interesting features. Top of my list is that they have fixed the problem of only drawing the first image in a KMZ files (like those produced by my iPhotoToGoogleEarth plugin). There are other things like being able to look at historic data and under the (animated) sea, but I think you’ll agree seeing your own photos on the map is far more important.