GPS Tracker on iPhone

In preparation for the Thailand trip I traded in my HTC P4000 for an iPhone so that I can stay in touch with the family and work. I have to say it is a very cool device and the App Store has some fantastic apps.

I was looking for a way of periodically showing where I was in realtime and came across GPS Tracker from instamapper.com. Its free and seems to do what I want. If the app is left running on the iPhone it will update the site at user set intervals. Refresh the page to get my last know location.

GPS tracking powered by InstaMapper.com

Going to Thailand

I heard from an old friend in the second half of last year who moved to Thailand about 13 or 14 years ago. I've maintained contact with him over the years but never had the opportunity to go visit him.

After he got in touch I decided to cash in some airmiles and get out to see him (he lives in Nan, in northern Thailand). Everything is booked now for 3 weeks in March.

As well as spending some time in Bangkok, I will also be doing a 3 day sea kayak trip in Phuket and spending 3 days training to be an elephant mahout at the Elephant Conservation Center. Other than that I am also hoping to do some hikes in the hills around Nan and if time allows get to Ankor Wat in Cambodia.

I am going to be travelling light weight as March is the start of summer in Thailand so it will be very hot. I'm debating whether to take the Hennessey Hammock with me or not.

How to Rename Virtual Disk files

I ran into an issue while evaluating esXpress, a utility for imaging virtual machines (excellent program, check it out!). It looks like early versions of ESX 3.0 created identical virtual disk file names if the virtual machine used multiple datastores. This causes some snapshot operations to fail which is an issue with esXpress as it uses snapshots during the backup process. This problem has been fixed in later versions of ESX.

The solution was found in this VMWare document which gives the details on how to rename the virtual disk files.

Autocreated Printers in Citrix not Autocreating

We have had a Citrix 4.5 issue for a while now where users connecting from home through the Secure Gateway did not get their local printers autocreated in their Citrix session. For some reason it was worse for users that had USB printers. Network printers and LPT printers would connect occasionally but USB printers almost never worked. I tried mapping the local printer driver to the Citrix Universal Printer driver using the Presentation Server Console but that made no difference. The only clue was an application log when the user logged in with an Event ID of 1116.

Googling this turned up a Citrix document on the permissions needed by the Ctx_CpsvcUser account on each server. None of the suggested steps worked until I added the user account to the local Administrators group and gave the account Full Admin rights in the Citrix Access Management console.

UPDATE: This worked for awhile and then stopped again. I had to change the login account that the Citrix Print Manager service uses to Local System to get it to work again.

Geotagging Photos with a Canon SD850 IS

I've been looking into how to geotag pictures taken with my Canon SD850 using my Garmin 60 CSx GPS. My first thought was to link the two together with a USB cable and see if CHDK would add GPS support to the Canon. Unfortunately, at this time, it doesn't look like it does. It is still worth checking out though to add other cool features to your camera.

I did come across a method that has you time sync the camera and the GPS and turn on the tracking on the GPS. You go out and take your photos with the GPS on the whole time. When you get home you download the GPS track info and the photos and then use PhotoMapper to add the geotag metadata from the track to the pictures.

For extended trips, you would need to make sure that the track info was being written to the memory card in the GPS as the internal memory in the 60 CSx can only hold 1000 points.

I will try this soon and see how it works.

More details can be found here.

Blue Mountains Photos and Trip Report

Well, that was a bit of a long hiatus! Things got busy at work and home after my trip to Australia and I never found time to post an update. Time to rectify that now!

The flight to Australia was pretty uneventful. Flew from Victoria to Vancouver, Vancouver to San Francisco, San Francisco to Sydney. The flight was about 13 hours long and I managed to catch a few hours sleep thanks to the Sony NC22B noise canceling headphones I picked up before leaving.

Arrived in Sydney at about 6am and got through customs in about an hour. Picked up the car and set out to the office that I was going to using the Garmin 60CSx GPS that I had loaded with the Australia maps. Managed to get where I needed to go without too many problems. One thing I hate about driving in a new city using the GPS is that you become totally reliant on it. I could not tell you how I got from the airport to North Sydney, I just followed the prompts on the screen. I read somewhere once that the current generation of kids will never know what it is like to be lost as everything will have a GPS and location awareness built in to it. All I can say is, I hope they have plenty of batteries, as once you become dependent on a device to tell you where you are and where to go, I think that spatial processing part of your brain starts to atrophy.

Be aware when driving in Sydney that lots of stretches of the motorways and some tunnels and bridges are toll roads that use an electronic payment system. If you don't have an epass then you have to pay cash if you can. Some toll roads have no toll booths and if you don't have an epass then you have 3 days to go to a website and pay the fee. I wasn't sure if the rental car had one or not (it didn't) and just drove on. If there is a toll booth it may only be in one lane or you may have to come off at a junction, pay at the booth and then get back on the motorway. If you don't pay on the website, the rental car agency will charge you about $30 AUSD for each toll.

The drive out to the Blue Mountains was pretty uninteresting. It takes about 2 hours from Sydney to Katoomba but I stopped at the Featherdale Wildlife Park along the way to see some kangaroos, wallabies, kookaburras and other Australian animals. The Mountains aren't really mountains as we know them in Western Canada. They are more of a gradual increase in elevation until you get to a plateau and then come to these amazing sheer-sided cliff mega valleys. I stopped at Wentworth Falls and did a geocache on the path to the Empress Falls viewpoint. I continued on to Katoomba, got some lunch and then checked in at the Red Leaf Resort in Blackheath.

After dropping my bags off in the hotel room, I drove back in to Katoomba and followed a gravel road to the top of the Golden Stairs. This is a path that follows the cliff face a couple of hundred meters down in to the valley. I was hoping to follow the trail out to Mt. Solitary but I only had about 2.5 hours of daylight left at this point so I only got about 1KM past Ruined Castle. Camping is allowed in the valley and I went past some nice camping spots as well as lots of trees that would be good for hanging a camping hammock. Despite having my headlight and rain gear with me, I turned around after about 1.5 hours and got back to the car after a 20 minute climb back up the Golden Stairs.

The next morning I did a short drive out to the start of the Grand Canyon loop at Evan's Lookout. This was a fantastic hike down the canyon along the narrow canyon bottom following a stream.It was very cool seeing the plants change from the dry top of the canyon to the much cooler and wetter bottom. It took just over 2 hours to do the 11KM loop.

After checking out of the hotel, I spent the rest of the day geocaching in the area and then drove back to Sydney along the Bells Line of Road. This was a great drive with lots of twisties and fantastic scenery.

Unfortunately, the rest of the drip was spent working so I was stuck in Sydney for most of the time other than a day trip to the Royal National Park but this was a little disappointing in the Winter. I'm sure it would much more interesting during the summer when there should be lots of animals around.

The rest of the trip photos are here.