Geotagging Photos via my Garmin Vista HCx

 Computers, Life  No Responses »
Dec 282008
 

With half a mind on future travels around Europe, I was wondering if there was an easy way to tag photos taken with my digital camera (currently a well worn Olympus Mju 400 Digital Camera) with my location when the photos was taken.

A bit of a search via google, resulted in discovering Prune which could take a track from my GPS, and a bunch of photos, then having told the software where on the track one photos was taken, it could work out the time difference between GPS and camera, and then show where on the track all the photos should be.

But it needs a plug-in called exiftool to actually save the files with the right EXIF content in the file. I struggled momentarily to install it, before deciding the correct thing to do is download the zip file for exiftool, and then extract it to c:/WINDOWS then removing the "(-k)" from the resultant file’s name.

Prune could then save the files with the exif tags derived from the GPS track, backing up the image files as it went.

At the time of typing, there are only a couple of photos that I have put up on flicker with geocoding, but it seems to work…

 Posted by Eddie at 4:00 pm

DIY – Swapping Basin Taps

 Doing It Myself  No Responses »
Dec 282008
 

So, time off work at Christmas – its obviously time to start doing some DIY. Job No.1 was to change the taps on the basin in the bathroom.

I bought the taps from ToolStation.com as they are far cheaper than going to B&Q…. to be honest, the quality isn’t too bad, especially considering what I was replacing.

Here are the taps before I started…
Basin Taps Before Starting

First job was to shut down the water, and empty the hot water cylinder. This is achieved by closing the cold water feed to the hot water tank, and shutting off the water supply to the house. Then opening the taps in the downstairs toilet (as the lowest taps in the house) whilst opening the pressure release valve on the cylinder.

Disconnecting Tap
Next I could remove the flexible hose from the base of the tap – for this i had purchased an adjustable basin wrench. To be honest, there was no way i could have completed the job without it. Never mind changing taps under the bath….

Removing Nut Holding Tap
and then remove the retaining nut at the bottom of the tap – using a basin wrench.

Tap RemovedSo that’s a tap removed….

New Tap Ready to Install
All I had to do now was pretty much the reverse, and that’s the taps installed. I had bought some new fibre washers to fit inside the flexible hoses, but discovered that it didn’t look like the existing rubber washers would come out, so rather than try remove it, i used the existing. Fitted the cold tap first, and turned on the mains water. no leak. success. I then fitted the hot, and turned back on the cold supply to the hot water cylinder. that seemed to be ok too.

Trying to asses for leaks straight away was difficult as there was condensation, so I left the taps for a while (without *obvious* leak) and checked again periodically. It all seems to work…
Job Done!

 Posted by Eddie at 12:51 pm

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