Some more playing with Flixwagon.
These streams are to illustrate how easily you can record some video as live of a walk and upload them one you get to a wifi hotspot to avoid paying the data rates offered by most mobile operators.Â
Whilst it has been over two years since I last had a windows laptop today I took hundreds of pictures to play with Photosynth, a photo combining piece of software that runs on your machine before being uploaded to the web.
The idea is a simple one. Take as many pictures as you can be bothered and have at least three pictures overlap the same detail. I tried this in three different locations. The first one was a shopping center. I set the n95 to photograph every ten seconds as I walked but soon realised that this was too slow. That’s when I went to burst mode and photographed the main hall where the elevators were, then the view from the parking lot, and finally in a field where the hay was ready for storage.
In each case I took a sequence of 30-150 images at once. I then sorted the pictures out by sequence before letting photosynth do all the crunching. After a while th result came out and I had a 3D environment in which to click from picture to picture to picture.
The link from image to image is usually quite good although make sure not to leave too big a gap between two images as they will be isolated. Time for you to try it out, to have some fun.
If it’s something geeky you’ll see me learn how to use it. The most recent thing I’ve played with is the n95 8gb and google maps. This time though it was from a car rather than on foot and as a result it was far quicker to correct a mistake. I took care to locate the satellites before leaving home so that when I arrived to Lausanne I could stop by the side of the road, load google maps, press 0 and the gps in the phone would automatically locate me within 30 kilometers.
I then had to type the address of where I wanted to go and confirm it was correct. Within seconds I had a track. I looked at it. Saw where I was and where I needed to go and that was that, very easy. Once or twice I overshot but within just a few seconds I knew and finding the place was a piece of cake.
Of course I didn’t use the device whilst the car was moving. I made sure to keep both eyes attentive to the road conditions and only when I was stopped did I check. It worked really well.
Wifi is something that should be ubiquitous so that our digital lifestyle may not be limited to being online at home or at work. It should include, bars, restaurants and city squares. In some cities wifi is easy to find but in others that’s not the case.
The lazy way to do wifi mapping could be with the geo loc software on the n95, a flickr account and free wifi. Everytime you find free wifi, get the GPS co-ordinates, include them in the exif and upload them to twitter. Once that’s done get the rss feed of the geo tagged images and feed them to google earth.
As Yael Naim’s live performance of Toxic plays from my phone so I’m playing with Blueapple.mobi which “brings internet video and pictures directly to mobile users”. It’s an interesting service that allows you to view videos from a number of sources. You can see some of the recommended videos which are already converted from sources such as CBS or you can search for others. When you find a video that is not converted yet the site will convert the video on the fly and within a very short amount of time you will be able to download it straight to the phone.
This is more interesting than other services where you need to download applications in order for the files to be available. Of particular interest is the feature that you don’t need anything extra on the phone. Just download the video, watch it and then discard it. No waste, no clutter.
Take a look, it could be of interest as mobile broadband prices go down and free wifi become ubiquitous.