My Method of collecting GPS tracks (to improve – this post and the method)

Posted on 2011-01-06 by Daniel Belasco Rogers

Answering an email today from William Heath about how to collect GPS data, I thought it a good idea to once and for all, write out what I do, as much for my own reference as for anyone else who comes across this dusty corner of the Internet, so here goes.

Equipment

GPS on a van window in Brazil

GPS on a van window in Brazil


The GPSs that Soph and I carry around every day are both old Garmin Etrex. These are NOT the modern ones, called Garmin Etrex H (for High sensitivity?) These have a newer chip in and the track wanders about (must post about this more) so we prefer the old, low-sensitivity ones but you can’t get them any more. Lord knows what we’ll do when they break.

Serial cable – I bought this for too much money for a piece of wire (about £30 I think) when I didn’t know anything and then I bought a usb-serial adapter as well. There are great DIY versions here.

Software

Open/Free/Linux
GPSBabel
gebabbel
QGIS

Proprietary / Windoze
Gartrip (shareware)
AutoCAD Map 3D

Method:
Download the tracks from the GPSs regularly (how often?) using GPSBabel through a gui (gebabbel), which saves me remembering the terminal commands
Save these as GPX (verbose but transferable)
tbc

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Emacs heaven

Posted on 2011-01-06 by Daniel Belasco Rogers

Peter Vasil just revolutionised my life (again) when he took me through the Emacs starter kit and showed me his copy of the PeepCode Meet Emacs screencast. So much works out of the box, I don’t now remember what the ‘kit’ fixed. Peter also shared his {username}.el file in the .emacs.d folder so that things start up in a great way.

There’s a problem with YAsnippet though, seems to work (I think) but an error flashes past the minibuffer every time Emacs starts. Need to solve this one day…

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Learning Emacs in Brazil

Posted on 2010-11-29 by Daniel Belasco Rogers

I’m here in Brazil at the arte.mov festival which is probably the best festival I’ve ever been to in terms of hospitality. We were in Belo Horizonte last week and now we’re in São Paulo with a fantastic group of artists, writers, activists and programmers, my old friend from Bristol, Duncan Speakman among them.

One of the new people I’ve met (although I’d seen his Wifi Camera work with Adam Somlai-Fisher and Usman Haque in Berlin before), Bengt Sjölén has convinced me to try Emacs and it appeals to my desire for arcane nerdy knowledge and keyboard combinations – something that takes time to learn but eventually enables you to edit faster.

So now, I’m happily struggling with buffers and keyboard combinations that remind me of John Gielgud’s line in ‘Shine’ about the Rachmaninov Piano Concerto Number 3: “Don’t you just love those fat chords?”

One thing that stumped me a bit this morning was code completion, which I think I will use a lot when I’m editing Python. The normal way to get code completion is to start typing the word and then press Meta (seems to be another word for ‘Alt’) and Tab. The problem with this in Linux is that this key combination is mapped to switching programmes and so you find yourself out of your Emacs session and into whatever else you’re running. A way round this is to substitute ‘Alt’ or ‘Meta’ with ‘Esc’. Now, code completion works on my box with ‘Esc-Tab’. Happy.

Now all I have to do is work out how to get snippets working!

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List of programmes I re-install after a linux OS new install

Posted on 2010-11-02 by Daniel Belasco Rogers
  • Mercurial – repositories (install through Synaptic)
  • glc – see this post
  • vlc – repositories
  • Audacity – repositories
  • Gnome do – repositories
  • pyRenamer – repositories
  • Unison – repositories BUT make sure you install the same version on both computers you’re syncing (had to install an older version on desktop because latest version not available for the laptop OS
  • Gimp – repositories (don’t know why this dropped out of the default install
  • pd-extended – get it here
  • gFTP – repositories
  • Quanta Plus – repositories (puts a lot of extra stuff on your machine but don’t worry about it
  • Jack Control (QjackCtl) – repositories
  • Viking – repositories
  • Mencoder – repositories
  • Cinelerra – here actually, I’m waiting for someone to make a maverick package so I haven’t re-installed this yet
Posted in Code, Diary, Linux, Software, Ubuntu | Tagged | Comments Off on List of programmes I re-install after a linux OS new install

glc is not the greater london council any more

Posted on 2010-11-02 by Daniel Belasco Rogers

Aah those were the days, the height of Thatcherism and Red Ken still ruling a socialist London (she put a stop to that of course) Story here

Anyway, I digress, glc (https://github.com/nullkey/glc/ [Updated 2012 because of move]) is actually a fantastic way of getting video out of stuff that you’re rendering to screen.
The gamers love it because it means they can make videos of their games but I use it to make videos out of the Open Frameworks application that Peter Vasil and friends have written for me and Soph.

To install it on Ubuntu, you download the build script here, install the dependencies as per on this page which is a fantastic apt-get one-liner for Ubuntu:
sudo apt-get install build-essential cmake libx11-dev libxxf86vm-dev libgl1-mesa-dev libasound2-dev libpng12-dev

Then you make sure glc-build.sh is executable and execute it!

This is what it prints to the terminal:
Welcome to glc install script!
Enter path where glc will be installed.
(leave blank to install to root directory)
> [left this blank]
Enter compiler optimizations.
(-O2 -msse -mmmx -fomit-frame-pointer -mtune=pentium3)
> [also left this blank]
Use git (y/n)
(git contains latest unstable development version)
> n [decided on no to make sure I was installing the latest stable version]

Then you can start playing (more later)…

Posted in Bash scripting, Code, Diary, Linux, Software | Comments Off on glc is not the greater london council any more