Results of the last few weeks! USA Road Trip book

http://www.blurb.com/assets/embed.swf?book_id=3007549&locale=en_US

Postcards From America by Tim Minter | Make Your Own Book

My one and only book

My new old book....

The Physics of Outdoor Bean Cookery and Other Icelandic Images by Tim Minter | Make Your Own Book

One picture is better than none

Just emerged from behind the great firewall of china in full force around Tibet. Such an amazing place even with the gazillion checkpoints, spies, CCTV and men/boys with guns. Here’s a taster picture (can only upload pics from this iPhone at the mo), Mt Everest, 4k from base camp at altitude of about 5200m. I spent two days here in the crystal clear air, finally realising a dream!

Tibet…. here we don’t come

Well right now we should be in China heading for Tibet, probably somewhere around the Terracotta Warriors about to get on the world’s highest train to Lhasa. Unfortunately we’re stuck in the UK like a few million gazillion others. Our STA flight to Beijing was booked for last Friday but by Thursday morning we all know what had happened. Iceland used to be my favourite place in the whole wide world .

We phoned STA on Friday and rebooked for this morning, and engaged smug mode as, by then, we thought it must all be over and we had a confirmed flight ahead of the hoards of people there must be in the backlog. We’d even (via STA) managed to potentially book two tricky internal flights from Beijing to Xi’an (Terracotta Warriors) and Xi’an to Lhasa (a flight you just can’t book yourself on the internet it would seem) so we could catch up on our expedition. We held off actually booking though just in case, and that was just as well. It would appear our five star, ”Defaqto” rated travel insurance from American Express is anything but “Remarkably Good” as it says on their website, and is actually rather poor and very similar to not having any insurance at all or just buying anyone else’s out there. Basically they wont cover anything not related to industrial action, adverse whether or public transport breakdown. So we wont be using them anymore.

Just had a call from STA though asking when we’d like to re-book to (quite impressed, that was right out of the blue). Looking like a few weeks off now to fit in with our hectic schedule. Just emailed our travel co in Tibet (www.TibetanExpeditions.com) though to see what the damage would be if that old volcano keeps going and we needed to cancel. We’ve been really impressed with them so far. They’ve changed dates, shipped tourist permits accross the country, cancelled trains and generally replied to a million emails over these last few months very very well. Lets see what happens now!

I made a book!

I made a book! It’s real and everything!

Just for me and family, but if anyone wants to take a look here it is (it’s a big’un though so might take a while to load). You can even buy it, but I wouldn’t suggest it unless you want to buy pics of me for some strange reason! Oh yeh, it’s a book of our travels around Iceland. Better say that too.

http://timminter.com/resources/public/icelandbigbookwebedition.pdf

To view it properly you have to select “Two-Up” and “Show Cover Page During Two-Up” as shown below.

Tibet Here We Come

Tibet here we come! Not entirely content with missing Tibet off our trip earlier this year it’s time to start planing to put that right with my lovely Kath. After much research and feverish checking of weather patterns (read “looked it up in Lonely Planet”) we’ve plumped for March\April next year. Hopefully far enough away we might have some spare money by then too!
 
Now just need to decide on a transportation and route. Hitching, biking, bussing, 4×4, trekking? One thing I do know is, I really want to go via Everest, and if possible up to Everest basecamp. Do we go in via China and catch some terracotta warriors and great wall? Straight in to Lhasa? In over Nepal border and see Everest first? So many things to think about!

I made a map!

Well this is old news now, but one last map post! Courtesy of Microsoft (silly name) Bing Maps 3D here’s the full world tour route working out at around 65,000 miles by foot, flippers, rubber ring, canoe, kayak, zorb, segway, bike, motorbike, moped, car, tuk tuk, cyclo, bus, train, sail boat, motor boat, catamaran, rowing boat, ferry, truck, yute, Tsong Tao, Russian 4×4, and plane (no helicopter, due to bad weather).

This is going to be first two pages in my little book project (a personal combination of diary and photo album) of our travels, I might well add some more historical posts here as I get going. Some people seem to still take a look at this site now and then! Just looking at the search stats and there’s no way you’d guess what people are searching for to get to this bog. People are strange! Right up there is “around the world itineraries” which is predictable maybe but ”Abandoned Theme Parks” and “Dog Meat Market”, “Rucksac Injury” and “Leg Irons” are right up there too, also “Pictures of Boobies”, my personal favourite!

Click the map for a full size version! and here for the itinerary.

Making a Book!

Yup, I’m making a book!  Notice I didn’t say “writing” a book, which sounds far too complicated… although it will having writing in it. Anyway, basically a fancy combined photo album and diary of my travels around the world but all nicely bound and using the most artworthy pics that can be Photoshopped out of trouble. And some pretty amazing Google Earth shots of the GPS trail we left behind us (now I’ve finally got that working brilliantly). None of this Boots photo book stuff, a nice bit of leather binding I reckon and a limited run of three so far.

No messin’ about here, hopefully it’s going to look pretty good. National Geographic is what I’m aiming for but we’ll see! Already started on the graphics though and I reckon I’ll have a host of graphic stuff for sharing by the end. Writing of which… if anyone ever wants one, I’ve created a film negative frame that you can just layer your own pics in. The full Photoshop file is here. JPG version here. Free for non-commercial use but it would be great if you could leave a comment saying where or what you’ve used it for if you do. Cheers! (commercial use: please contact via this blog)

Geotagging

Now I’ve finally got this GPS data sorted and in the absense of being able to think of anything at all sensible to do with 13,000 pictures I thought I’d try this Geotagging malarkey. I just found this, and it actualy works! Don’t be scared by the command line interface and the thousands of options, all you need to do is:

1. Get your GPS track into GPX format (other formats are supported)
2. Copy your GPX file to the folder containing your images to be tagged
3. Download and open this zip file
4. Save the single file in this zip file to your Windows directory
5. Rename this file to exiftool.exe (instead of exiftool(-k).exe)
6. Open a Command Prompt and change to the directory containing your images to be tagged
7. type “exiftool -geotag nameofgpxfile.gpx FolderContainingImages” eg. exiftool -geotag trip.gpx c:\Images\

exiftool creates duplicate files so you end up with the original file and the file with the newly added geotags just in case anything goes astray!

Finally!

OK, now I’m glad I took a GPS logger with me! It was touch and go, and battling with so much GPS data has not been fun especially as it is indeed sooo geeky. Sometimes I just want things to work like everyone else! Not too much to ask?… plug the thing in and get a lovely map of your trip out.

I’ve only tried one device of course (GlobalSat DG100) but I’d imagine they are all similar, the software you get is pretty much only good to save the data to your PC (in various formats), the main battle then is getting the data to show up on a map like Google Maps\Earth. In between collecting the data and getting it to display there’s a whole world of pain including connecting all your individual data files together, sorting out duplicates in the files (if you’ve been an idiot at least once and not cleared the memory after saving the data etc!) and figuring out what format to work in in the first place. It’s taken ages, about 5 different software downloads and tries at using on line tools too but I’ve finally found the missing link. The missing link I found is free software called GPS TrackMaker (downloadable here). This is what I used to gather and connect all my separate tracks and then export them to Google Earth. I didn’t complain about the file sizes (which seems to have been a problem with other programs) and you can even edit the tracks by dragging points around. It doesn’t have any maps built in though and doesn’t seem to be connected to Google Maps – maybe that’s the difference betwen this and the commercial version.

I tried out Google Maps, Google Earth and Everytrail.com to actually display the tracks and the only one I could get to work originally was EveryTrail which all seemed very nice but looking at it closely it seems to really reduce the track resolution right down. I kind of thought that would have to be the way it was, maybe I just had too much data. Tried Google Maps until I went slightly deranged and got nowhere. All these programs you can download\buy use Google Maps data inside them but try uploading a track direct to Google Maps and it just looks stupid. There are other sites that take your data and write them over google maps (like GPS Visualizer, that worked really well but doesn’t allow more than 3Mb files so that was no good for a worlds worth of data). Lastly I tried Google Earth and decided against it due to it being harder to share with others. Got over that now. So in the end I used the GlobalSat software to go though the files and remove duplicates (just a really horrible manual process), then save the files as GPX files. I split the trip in two (UK-Cook Islands and NZ-UK) to avoid the problem that none of these things seem to be able to deal with going over the date line, then used GPS TrackMaker to merge the GPX files for each part into two KML (Google Earth) files. I then just opened the file in Google Earth and it worked!

Here are just a few results…. making it all worthwhile and really bringing back the memories. To see the whole trip in as much detail as you like you can check out the GPS Route Tracking section

Our Route down the Amazon River, Teotihuacan Temple of the Sun and Moon (Mexico), Chichen Itza and Angkor Wat