Thursday, July 19, 2007

Geotagged stuff

As promised, I've geotagged almost all of my photos (mostly because I'm a dork). If you find Google Maps inordinately interesting, you might enjoy this. If not, you'll probably wonder why I bothered. Flickr has a built-in map service, but it uses Yahoo Maps, which has crap quality for places outside the US, so I'm using an alternate service called loc.alize.us that combines Flickr and Google Maps.

You can track my travels around the continent by viewing just my photos, zooming in on whatever catches your interest. I also recommend viewing all photos taken for specific locations (works better at the higher zoom levels). Click "Show All" in the top right of the control box. It's a lot of fun just to explore and see what other photos were taken in some areas. Major locations (if you don't feel like exploring, skip to the next section):
Some areas of particular interest:
  • The Opera House and Quay in Sydney. Boats! And you can see the Harbor Bridge if you scroll a bit to the northwest.
  • William Creek, strangely rendered in very high resolution. You can see the weird little park full of stuff that fell into the outback, and you can even see little planes on the landing strip.
  • You can spy on our bush camp near Mt. Conner (the mountain itself is worth checking out too).
  • Check out Mt Ohlsson Bagge to understand what I meant when I described the landscape.
  • This picture along the Heysen, where you can actually see the orange shade of the rocks in the picture on the satellite photo.
  • The gravestone structures in the Hobart park, which are visible on the map.
  • The arctic exploration boat in Hobart harbor, which seems to be on the map, plus if you scroll a bit to the east, there's an enormous battleship. That wasn't there when I visited.
  • The gorge in Cairns. Also, you can follow the scenic train tracks as they wind down the mountain, all the way to this waterfall and beyond.
  • The 'Map' mode in Farina (the ghost town) shows all the zoning that some optimistic town planner put in place - hundreds of blocks, only a couple of which were ever developed before the town died.
  • I don't know when Google's source images were taken, because it looks like the outback is very wet (speaking in relative terms here) in the photos. For example, Lake Eyre actually has water in it, which it definitely didn't when we were there.
Ok, that's that! I think we're actually wrapping up the blog finally. I've got one more post coming on some panoramas I've been stitching, and that will probably be it.