Sean’s House

When I heard that Sony had announced a standalone GPS logger, the GPS-CS1, I was hopeful and fearful at the same time, especially once I saw it would be bundled with software that was only “guaranteed to work with Sony Cameras”. Well, I picked one up today, and I can safely say that Sony did it right. When you plug it into your computer, it shows up as a USB flash disk, with a GPS subdirectory. Inside that directory are a series of text files that are NMEA GPS logs. Everything is logged in GMT, including the timestamps on the files. (which makes sense when you think about it).

I downloaded a demo of RoboGEO, a commercial win32 geotagging program, as it was the first program I found. After deleting the first line of the test log file I made (sony puts in a line to identify the log file came from its device) RoboGEO was able to import the resulting NMEA file with no problems and tag the quick shots I made in the parking lot. According to the manual, it will record a location every 15 seconds, and battery life is approximately 360 hours on a single AA battery. From that you should get about 86,400 time/location records.

The device itself looks pretty nice too, with a carabiner included so you can hang it off your backpack or camera bag. That having been said, it’s not anything-proof. Not waterproof, water-resistant, dustproof, hot car for extended periods of time proof, magneticproof, dog slobber proof, you name it, Sony says to keep this thing away from it. So, the bottom line is if you’re looking for a (albeit expensive at $150) simple standalone GPS logger that will work (with minor tweaking) with pretty much any geotagging software out there, I don’t think you can beat this thing.

Update: The GPS Image Tracker software that comes with it will work with any JPEG pictures. However, it doesn’t properly account for DST, but you can adjust the timezone for any gps log that’s been imported.

So I’ve been trying to keep electronic copies of all my bills and legal documents, and I’ve been using an Epson scanner I bought a few years back. But it’s a flatbed with no feeder option, so it’s hard to get motivated to scan everything in. And once you get behind, there’s no catching up. This past weekend, however, Fry’s had the Brother MFC-420CN on sale for $99. (It’s normally $129) It’s pretty much what you would expect from a low-end all-in-one (print, copy, fax, scan) except for two minor details: It has a sheet feeder, and has ethernet built in. To be honest, I don’t care about the printing, faxing or copying so much, but a sheet-fed network-based scanner for $100 is a pretty sweet deal. I’ve been using it with Acrobat 7 and its OCR capabilities with good success.

So, found this on boing boing. Cory talks about an entry on the Disney Blog about how the new fingerprint scanners could be used for Evil(tm) by Walt Disney World and that they could possibly share their data with the government. Now, I’m a huge privacy advocate, but fingerprint scanners have been at WDW since at least 1997, (the first time I was there) so I’m wondering why a big fuss is being made over it. It’s good that they mention you can still get in the park if you refuse to use them (which is what I did) but always presenting the worst case scenario (Disney and the NSA are in cahoots!) gets a little old after awhile. It’s not like people *have* to go to Walt Disney World for fun. But if you do go, make a statement and refuse to use the reader. If enough people do it, then they’ll stop utilizing it. That’s the only realistic way to stop them from doing it.