In a little over 10 days I, along with 3 guys I hardly know (one of which I haven’t even met yet) will start the Oxfam Trailwalker. We’ll have 36 hours to complete the 100km course on foot but we’re hoping to do it in less than 30. The track itself is not particularly grueling, consisting mostly of rolling farmland and a few forest roads, its the time on the feet that causes the most problems. The last time I was in 2008 after training 12 hours per day every day for nearly three months whilst walking across Japan. I’ve not done much on that scale since getting back to New Zealand but I did try to do the Round The Mountain in one day, and only managed 60 of the 74km. Still, not bad for what is pitched as a “4-6 day hike”.

Simon, Kirk, mystery man and I are the last of what has been a constantly shifting team landscape. Just last week our last remaining female member had to withdraw after serious warnings from her doctor about the need for toe surgery if she continued. Hence the last minute ring-in. Still, everyone’s heart is in the right place. The whole reason for the hike is to raise money for the good people at Oxfam. We’ve already stumped up the entrance fee so every cent we raise via sponsorship goes straight towards Oxfam’s fight against poverty around the world. If you’re not away of what Oxfam do then check out their website and if you are aware, or are just prepared to take my word for it, head over to our sponsorship page and make a donation. During the event I’ll be keep you up to date via dedicated site which will feature photos and tweets as well as a little figure tracking our progress along the course profile. I’ll try to get some form of comment system attached to the website, because you can be sure by 4am on day 2 we’re really going to need some encouragement, but if you’re a Twitter user the easiest way to get through to us is by following us @teamhappyfeet.

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

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.

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.

After releasing Geotagger 2 I’ve taken a break from Mac programming and branched out into making apps for iPhones. I’ve been officially accepted into the programme and I’ve got most of the logic sorted on my first game. What’s missing now is the real spit an polish to make it a seller, something that people will show off to the friends and earn me another sale. Yes I’m now charging for my apps.

There will be more about that in a coming post, about sustainability, about my coding projects and about the cool new geotagging in iPhoto.

I’ve been at my new job for two weeks now and I think my brain is finally starting to warm up after seven months of thinking of pretty much everything other than software development. So now I am pleased to announce Geotagger 2 is just around the corner. I’ve moved pretty much all the code into Objective-C rather than Applescript and thus been able to add a progress indicator to show how many images it has left to process. Personally I don’t want to see hundreds of photos of a city all tagged at a single point within in, but some people have good reasons for tagging lots at the same time and now they’ll know when it’s finished.

Before I start uploading it to bigger sites I’m inviting anyone checking this site to download version 2 and tell me how it goes. I only have one Mac here to test on, so I while I know it works on an Intel running OS X 10.5 I can’t be sure about anything else. So pleeeeease send me feedback.

I’ve also included the latest build of exiftool so it should work with any file type that exiftool can write GPS data to.

It’s been brought to my attention that Google Earth 4.3 only shows the first image that is viewed in a the KMZ files produced by iPhotoToGoogleEarth. After that all images in that file are shown as just question marks. This is not a bug in iPhotoToGoogleEarth, it complies with the KML specification and has not changed in a while. Google Earth however has changed and other people have noticed it too. According to this bug report you can view the images if you decompress the file first (rename the output to have a “.zip” extension and double-click it), or use the PC version of Google Earth. Other than that it’s just a matter of waiting for Google to fix the bug.

 

UPDATE: Now that Google Earth 5 is out the issue has been resolved. Please upgrade your software to see all the photos that iPhotoToGoogleEarth produces.

I got an email last week from “an aspiring traveller” and it’s a question I’ve been asked a few times so I thought I’d share it.

Dear sir,
I am just curios as to how do you continue your travels and have ample budgets for your expeditions. I aspire to do just what you are doing now. I would like to know how do you earn your expenses along your journey.

and my response

Hi James,

If there’s a secret to my travels it’s being careful with my money and being prepared to be very uncomfortable. I take it you’ve seen both my American and Japanese walking sites. For those adventures I had almost no accommodation costs by sleeping in a tent, in temples in the occasional abandoned tunnel. The last 6 weeks of OneManWalking was traveling in a different style. Having a girlfriend along changes things because I wouldn’t want to put her in the position of sleeping in public toilets (a big fancy disabled one with my tent’s ground sheet below). So expenses went up dramatically. When I’m back home I try not to spend too much on things I can do free. I eat in as much as possible and rarely see movies at the cinema. I was really lucky to get cheap rent about 4km from my job so I walked that every day. It was good exercise and it saved me money.

In neither case did I deliberately earn expenses along the way. Once in America I was given a free room for helping spread wood chips at an inn-keeper’s prayer park and in Japan the locals were incredibly generous. Some people stopped and gave me fruit, some bought food from convenience stores and handed it straight to me and some even handed me cash. I never asked for it but they felt like doing a good thing for someone taking the time to see their country in a different way. There’s a similar phenomenon on the PCT called “trail magic”, people leaving chilli-bins (coolers) in the forest full of drinks and snacks, or doing other good deeds just because they like to. You should never get to a point where you rely on these things, be self sufficient, but be open to the idea that things usually work out pretty well.

If you do go traveling and write about it, let me know, I’ll be needing some good travelblogs for next year.

~Craig

I’m settling back in pretty well. On the job/house hunting circuits. I haven’t yet dug back into my code, I haven’t even gotten the latest version of Google Earth. But I will, and I’ll post updates to both projects when I can.