Not Your Average Geeks
Travel
Making tracks with MyTracks
Aug 27th
Me with part of the B-36's main gear
One of the neatest little apps I’ve been using on my Android phone (HTC Hero and now the EVO 4G) is MyTracks, which was developed by Google employees following Google’s 20% time philosiphy. At it’s most basic level, MyTracks is a GPS data logging app. It interfaces tightly with Google Maps, and lets you upload and view your tracks to My Maps on Google Maps.
The map screen
I’ve used MyTracks a couple times, mostly to track my position on hikes or various exploring adventures. It worked great to track Rich and my progress when we canoed the St. Croix river, and I used it a couple weeks ago to record my hike up to the spot where an Air Force B-36 bomber crashed near El Paso, TX in 1953. This hike was a great test of the app since it involved pretty extreme elevation change (about 1300 feet), a number of waypoints that I wanted to record, and since I was climbing a mountain in the desert, I had a clean line of sight to the GPS satellites the entire trip. More >
Timing is everything
Aug 23rd
I was on an 11-day, 3500 mile road trip last week, and at one point in Colorado I got the opportunity to try and capture some really amazing lightning over the San Juan Mountains. I set my Canon 7D up on the deck railing, attaching it with the 
Gorillapod Focus I bought for the trip (which I’ll be reviewing later), set a small aperture to give me a longish shutter speed to increase my chances of catching a flash, and started snapping away. After about 300 photos, I’d caught maybe 6 strikes, with this being by far the best of them.
If it had been darker, I would likely have had more success, since I’d be able to have a longer shutter speed (this was taken at 1 second or so), which would give me a better ratio of shutter open to shutter closed time. The split second timing and blind luck required to get these lightning photos reminded me of another photographic adventure I had a while ago, shooting water drops. I just used a ziploc bag with a pin hole in it, and relied on reflexes and luck to fire the lights at the right time, but after seeing work like the photo below by David Pearson (fpsurgeon on flickr), I’ve been interested in setting up a more automated solution to both increase the percentage of keepers, and to allow me to shoot more complex things like the droplet collision below.
To this end, I just went ahead and ordered up an Arduino Duemilanove
Giant Robots set to duel to determine the fate of the far East.
Jul 20th
Mat Cat
Japan’s recently constructed RX-78-2 Gundam mobile suit, which is standing guard over Shizuoka, Japan has some competition in Beijing. The Chinese have built a 6 ton, 40 foot tall Optimus Prime, taking the massive robot arms race to a new level. I’m hoping the United States will respond to this escalation by constructing a 100ft tall Mad Cat battlemech to ensure we remain the world’s foremost superpower for years to come. Listen up Congress, stop wasting our tax dollars on tanks and airplanes! They’ll be no use against towering mecha like these!
Optimus Prime
- Gundam Mobile Suit
I love the smell of jet fuel in the morning…
Jul 10th
I’m a HUGE airplane nerd. Always have been. That means that one of my favorite places to spend a Saturday or Sunday is at an air show. Air shows are held all over the US, mostly during the summer months. There is likely one within a couple hours drive of you no matter where you live.
The US Navy Blue Angels demonstration team
Almost every airshow is held at a smaller regional airport, although there are a fair few that take place over a lake or coastline instead. Larger international airports almost never host them because of the strain they would put in incoming and outgoing flights.