Jeffzilla

I recently took a vacation to Alaska. It was a great escape from the city, and an awesome return to the backcountry for my Brother and I, who have both spend time backpacking there. There are a few photos in this blog post, and the rest of them, including captions describing most of the trip, can be found over on flickr. Check out all the Alaska photos.

The view from our kitchen in the backcountry of Denali State Park

During the trip, I took about 700 pictures, along with a few videos. My father also took a couple hundred, as did my brother. I actually uploaded all the photos to flickr, but I think for the sake of time and giving you a good overview of the trip, I’m only making the top 50 or so publicly accessable. If you would like to see more photos from a particular section of the trip, or if you’re planning a trip to the AK and want to know more about any particular section of it, just let me know. I’d be happy to open up more photos and videos.

Throughout the trip, I carried my Garmin eTrex Vista HCx GPS with me, with rechargeable batteries and a 1gb micro SD Card. It was set to record a track log every 30 seconds, and was on for most of the trip. Additionally, for road navigation, I as using Garmin’s US Road Atlas 2008. The whole system worked very well. I made sure to synchronize the clock in my camera, as well as my fathers and brothers cameras to the clock in the gps, so that all time stamps line up.

We took a flight with Talkeetna Air Taxi around the mountains in Denali National Park. The maximum altitude for the plane was 10,000 feet, but Denali tops out around 20,000 feet. The whole flight we were flying very very close to the steep walls of the mountains.

When I got home, I successfully merged the GPS track log with the EXIF data on the photos, and Geotagged each photos. If you go to the flickr photo set, you’ll see a map link on each photo, which will show you on a map approx where the photo was taken. The gps is typically accurate to about 7 feet, and since it takes a track log recording every 30 seconds, if i was moving while shooting, depending on how fast i was moving (500+ mph in the air, 2mph hiking, etc), the location could be off a bit.

Extending the geocoding of the pictures a little further, I used Jet Photo studio to create this interactive photo gallery, with the Google Maps API. Each photo is placed on the map at around where it was taken. Additionally, all the (public) photos have map links, which will place them on the map.

These flowers were blooming in a recently burned down forest. Regrowth and renewal.

Media Links:

Flickr photoset of Alaska 2008. If you’re a friend of mine on flickr, you should be able to see slightly more pictures than what I’ve made public.

RSS Feed of photo set

Geofeed

Geotagged photo map (Flickr)

Geotagged photo map (Google)

During the backcountry portion of the trip, my brother and I found a crashed NOAA Weather Balloon with an attached Radiosonde. I’m writing about that in a separate post.

We made a bunch of friends in Alaska. Here’s the blurbs on a few of them…

Andy Morrision runs Alaska Backcountry Access, his own outdoor guide company. Andy is a great guide, and does a ton of trips. We went jet boating up the river, and kayaking with him

Rachel Drinkard lives in Girdwood, and works as a reporter and writer. Her blog, Anarchy in the AK, covers all sorts of Alaskan issues and stories. She came boating and kayaking with us.

Ron Tenny and his wife Michelle run the Hidden Creek Bed and Breakfast, and were very hospitable to us. We had a great time staying there, an awesome breakfast, and fun discussing the area, and the industry with Ron and his son and daughter.

In Girdwood, we grabbed a relaxing dinner and felt like locals at Chair 5.

In Anchorage, we had pizza at the Moose’s Tooth Brewpub.

The marina in Seward, Alaska. The Chugatch mountains are jutting out in the background.

And for the videos - I’m posting up two videos to this post, but there are many more - including the full footage from the weather balloon. Those will go up in a bit, after I’m done editing them together etc.

Ermine Hill, Denali State Park, Alaska

Taking a break on after hiking to the top of Ermine Hill, a small peak within the Kesugi Ridge, in Denali State Park, Alaska. The view up there was incredible, and the terrain made us feel like we were on another planet. After finding a weather balloon crashed, I kept on expecting to find a lunar rover or something.

Flying Next To Denali

During our flight with Talkeetna Air Taxi, we flew right next to Denali, making sharp turns to weave in and out of the peaks, and through the clouds.

Wordle is a service that takes any text or rss feed, and parses the content down into the most important and most used words. It generates all sorts of nifty tag cloud-like graphics. Next step, I wish, would be to get a Wordle wordpress plugin that dynamically generates a real blog tagcloud, but with the cool, randomized Wordle stylings.

Found over on Current.com, an intense look at the Irtokte gun market in Mogadishu, Somolia, and how easy it is to buy an ak-47 Machine gun, or American m16. Apparently, this is the first time a foreign camera has every been allowed to film this gun market, and likely the last. Kaj Larsen and Christof Putzel are ushered away in the middle of the shoot, as the large crowd around them finally gets out of hand.

Why make software for an increasingly dwindling market - the 1st generation (EDGE) iPhone. Instinctiv is a new company that’s making iPhone software that purports to predict what you want to listen to based on a number of factors, and the smartly shuffles your songs accordingly. But it only shuffles your own songs. Only the music you have on your phone at that moment. No network listening.

I can see how this would appeal to iPod Touch and 1st generation (slow EDGE) owners, but, since the 1st Gen iPhone is no longer on sale, that group is starting to dwindle. On the new iPhone 3g, with speedy fast 3G network connectivity, is Instinctiv really necessary? (Or, does it have a viable future?) Why not just listen to real, genuine Pandora radio, if that’s the experience you’re going for? Although it’s not out yet, I’m almost positive a real, native Pandora radio application will be released for the new iPhone 3G, which will (or, should…) use not only the iPhone’s wifi connection, but the 3G cell data connection as well.

Better yet - ever shared with a friend a Pandora station you’ve made? Cool to be able to listen to the same batch of songs, no? How about allowing iPhones running the Pandora radio application to synchronize their stations, so two iPhone listeners can listen to a synchronized Pandora station? Why not push this feature to the standard browser based web player too? It might get dicey for the music licensing, but would be cool nonetheless.

(Seen on TechCrunch)

I’m back in NYC, after a great trip through Alaska. Writing a blog post about the trip is no simple task, though - in addition to the description, here’s what I’m working on:

Collecting photos from my camera (3 sd cards, 4gb total, about 650 photos), my brothers camera (200 or so photos), and my father’s camera (300 or so photos)

Download continuous (30 second interval) tracklog from GPS.

Geocode all photos - update photo EXIF data with lat/long info, as well as nearest city info

Integrate with Google Maps API to generate custom google map showing trip track log, as well as selected photos

Generate similar Google Earth KMZ File, with slightly more data, including USGS topographic data from backcountry portion of trip.

Upload all photos and videos (I didn’t mention all the videos yet, did I…) to Flickr, arrange in album, assign permissions - most will be private, many will be “friends/family only”, a representative few will be public - make descriptions for public pictures.

Edit video clips from associated sections of trip (river riding, bush plane, crashed weather balloon discovery) into watchable videos. - Upload to YouTube, tag, etc.

Collect links/info for Alaskan friends and their websites.

Finally, write blog post, and post up links to various media items - embed some.

How’s that sound? Stay tuned!

Macbeth @ St. Ann’s Warehouse

Originally uploaded by jamfan2

Sitting outside under the Brooklyn Bridge, at the old tobacco factory, to see the St. Ann’s Warehouse production of Macbeth. Presented in Polish with English supertitles.

Its nice to be outside for theater, fresh air etc. We all get headphones to wear so we can hear whatever special sounds they have, and there are weird green lights all over the place…

The trailer:

Kenai River

Originally uploaded by jamfan2

Kenai River, Alaska
Sent via BlackBerry.

Alaska….

Originally uploaded by jamfan2

On my way to AK for the week….
Sent via BlackBerry.

The possibilities for the more open, developer-friendly iPhone 2.0 software just keep getting better, especially on the speedier iPhone 3G. TechCrunch reports that Qik just announced that they are coming out with an iPhone application, to allow users to stream live video direct from their iPhone. Pretty cool feature, and that will also mean that the iPhone will now be able to capture and record video, since Qik records your video streams.

They’re not the only ones doing live streaming, and I hope sites like Ustream.tv and Mogulus.com get on the bandwagon for over-the-air streaming too. Especially considering Mogulus’ capabilities for real-time mixing of multiple video sources, it could make an intensely robust control studio for remixing and re-broadcasting multiple live remote video streams. Live-mixing/streaming the next Tumblr Rock Band jam from multiple roaming cell-connected audio/video sources? Sure.

**Update - Max Haot, of Mogulus, just informed me via comments that Mogulus is actually already integrated with Qik, so users can do live mixes of multiple remote video streams - awesome!

How about “Geo-tweeting”? Automatically posting geo-tagged updates to Twitter via iPhone 3G’s GPS chip, cell data coverage and wifi coverage? Maybe a Google Maps geotweet maps mashup?

Needless to say, I’m very excited about the new iPhone 3g, and can’t wait to get my hands on one and try out the GPS, high speed data, and new applications. Regarding iPhone 3G’s features - I’m dissapointed that there is still no native picture messaging, iChat AV integration or video capture. However, I’m hopeful that 3rd party software developers will be able to fill this gap - an all network IM client that could get on AIM, Yahoo, MSN, Jabber, GMAIL, IRC, Skype, Facebook and Myspace instant messenger networks (who sometimes share the same protocols…) would be fantastic.

Would it be possible to get super accurate gps reading via multiple gps readings? Use iPhone 3G’s internal GPS and Bluetooth connection to connect to a secondary, external GPS, maybe even one with WAAS land-based location accuracy augmentation? That, coupled with data network access could make for some nifty scientific, surveying, research and field applications…

Finally, the obvious application for a phone paired with gps paired with camera - automatic photo geotagging and upload. Flickr already supports geotagging and uploading via email (as well as third party apps). I’m almost certain this will be coming out of the gates soon after iPhone 3G launch, and almost certain I’ll be using it immediately!