Getting Things Done with Tracks

It’s been a while since previous posts to the blog, because we have been busy getting things done (GTD), amongst a couple of other things.

Getting Things Done can be carried out with lo-tech tools like pen and paper as in the case of the Hipster PDA, however yours sincerely has an inkling for trying out new software, and thus after trying out a range of different implemetations of GTD (everything from working with plain text files to dedicated productivity software), the current choice of application is Tracks. Tracks is a very pleasant application for GTD built in Ruby on Rails and was installed on my webhost without too much hassle.

Tracks is quite fast to work with; everything from adding new projects and next actions to navigating the projects and context pages for the weekly review is fast enough for me. For faster performance the installation on a local server is probably recommended.

A nice detail is that all next actions are available as text and RSS feeds for creating nice overviews of what the next action should be. Tracks is at the time of writing in version 1.043, and we are expecting and anticipating lots of improvements to a already great piece of Free and Open Source Software.

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GeoPress

Installed GeoPress a plugin for WordPress for easy geocoding of blog posts including the display of maps. GeoPress is free/open source software and uses Google Maps as its data source. In its current version (v2.2) GeoPress only supports a single location to be associated to a blog post—but in the future multiple locations, lines, polygons, and further customization of the map should be possible.

To show an example of the capabilities of GeoPress here is a map of Barcelona, a place I was pleased to visit recently.

Via O’Reilly Radar.

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Strange images

Q: What do the following images have in common?

A: They were all shown on the front page of the WFMU website — still our favorite free-form radio station. Every day a new image is featured and they most often relate in some way to music, sound, hearing, art, and technology. Sometimes the images are strange and weird, but always amusing in some way.

One day, I came across a post on the Make Blog on listening devices from the 1930s used in the pre-radar era for detection of airplanes. The photos of the acoustic equipment and the people using them are fascinating and quite ideal, I thought, for a place on the WFMU website. I recommended the images as candidates for the WFMU homepage to the WFMU webhamster — and thus you can now occasionally see photos of people wearing acoustic ‘radars’ when you go to the frontpage of WFMU (see the screen dump to the left).

UPDATE (2006-09-09): See all the WFMU images in the WFMU Picture of the Day Gallery.

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Fred Frith solo concert

The concert of this summer is probably going to be the solo concert with Fred Frith, Saturday July 8, 2006 here in Copenhagen.

Fred Frith has been performing and composing music in the space between rock and jazz, avantgarde and modern composition for more than 30 years; First in the UK in the late 1960s and 1970s in the bands Henry Cow and Art Bears, and later, in the 1980s as part of the New York experimental music scene together with e.g. John Zorn, Tom Cora and Arto Lindsay.

Fred Frith’s music might be challenging to people not familiar with improvised music — and music which doesn’t easily fit into conventional musical genres — but everyone on board the MS Stubnitz, an old transport ship from East Germany now used for concerts, seemed to be astonished by the many colors of sound that came from Frith’s solo guitar performance.

It’s not conventional guitar playing: Frith uses many objects and effects to create music: drumsticks, a violin bow, a walkie talkie, various pieces of cloth, a metal chain, little metal bowls and two hands full of rice were amongst the items used to make music. It’s improvised music, music performed without a net (an approach we appreciate here at Without a Map, of course).

If you care to give the music of Fred Frith a listen, here’s a small playlist.

Supporting act for Fred Frith was Cockpit Music, a Danish free form saxophone-guitar-drum trio playing both old and new songs — all together an excellent evening of improvised music.

UPDATE (2006-08-14): Audio and video is now available for download from the MS Stubnitz webpage (direct link to media file page).

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Google Earth for Linux

Finally, after months of waiting, almost giving up on the thought of a Linux version of the application that brought maps, satellite images and aerial photographs to the masses, it’s here: Google Earth (Release 4 – BETA), now also available for GNU/Linux!

Still in beta version, it’s a bliss to see Google Earth running on my SUSE Linux 9.2 laptop. No longer does one have to consider installing Microsoft Windows just for running Google Earth. All good things come to those who wait.

Besides now being available on all major platforms, the new beta version implements an improved and simplified user interface.

Anyways, gotta go. I have lots of catching up to do in exploring the vast universe of geoinformation in Google Earth.

Via Ogle Earth and Google Earth Blog straight from the Google Geo Developer Day in Mountain View, California.

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New maps for your world clock

For most operating systems an application exists which displays a world map showing where it’s day and night. A quick glimpse on the map lets you know approximately what time of day it is in different places on the Earth, which can be quite useful—especially if you have family or friends in other parts of the world.

Quite often you can select the background image from a suite of maps and satellite images, for example elevation maps, satellite images or bathymetric maps (see figure to the right). In this post I will describe how to obtain, preprocess and install a new satellite image for a world clock application. In this example I will use kworldclock on SUSE Linux 9.2, but the principles apply to similar world clock programs.

1. Data: First we need to acquire some new satellite image. Most software applications displaying global maps use images in the plate carrée projection, which is also the case for kworldclock. Luckily many satellite images and maps in plate carrée projection are freely available on the Internet

I found a recent satellite mosaic made by the European Space Agency ESA based on hundreds of images from the MERIS sensor on board the satellite ENVISAT. The image has a very high spatial resolution and is ideal for for our purpose. Download the image (4.9M jpg).

2. Preprocessing: The image is larger (3002×1501 pixles) than our screen resolution so firstly we resize the image. Here I use image magick’s convert command (my screen is 1400 pixles wide):

convert -scale 1400 globcover_MOSAIC_H.png globcover.jpg

3. Scripting: Now we need to let kworldclock know about out new image. In the kworldclock maps directory (/kde3/share/apps/kworldclock/maps located various places depending on your system (on my box is was under /opt/)) create a new directory for your new theme (You probably need to be root to do this):

mkdir /opt/kde3/share/apps/kworldclock/maps/globcover

Copy your image to this directory and rename it 1400.jpg:

cp globcover.jpg \
/opt/kde3/share/apps/kworldclock/maps/globcover/1400.jpg

Create a theme file globcover.desktop and put it the maps directory:

[Theme]
Name=MERIS Global Cover
Theme=globcover


  

4. Testing: Run kworldclock and your new theme MERIS Global Cover should now be available in the Map Theme menu when right-clicking the map. Shown above to the left is the MERIS Global Cover. To the right is shown a different new map (405K jpg) for kworldclock made using GMT – The Generic Mapping Tools and a simple script.

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Nothin but da P-Funk

Exploring the vast archives of free form radiostation WFMU broadcasting on the FM band from the US East Coast and live on the Interweb, I came across two three hour long programs on the “History of P-Funk“.

P-Funk has its roots in late 1950s doo-wop, but over the 1960s and 1970s morphed into funk, funk rock, and psychedelic rock. The leading figure in P-Funk through the years has been George Clinton, and a long list of bands are categorized under the label P-Funk: Parliament, Funkadelic, Bootsy’s Rubber Band, Maceo Parker, Fred Wesley and The Horny Horns, to name a few. From the late 1980s and until today, P-Funk has had major influence on modern music from hip hop to rock and mainstream pop music. It was through the sampling of funk music by bands like Digital Underground and De La Soul that I got aware of the P-Funk and started using all my pocket money on old 1970s P-Funk records. In 1996 George Clinton and the P-Funk All Stars played live in Copenhagen–What a show!! I think the concert was 6 or 7 hours long.

Hosted by the friendly host, The Good Doctor, the first show covers the period 1959 to 1974 and the second 1974 onwards. There’s not a whole lot of talking in the programs, just lots of nice P-Funk.

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New noise and surreal monsters

This weeks music acquisition was Thurston Moore/Cotton Museum: Split 12″ LP (Yes, we still play vinyl :-) released on Tasty Soil Records). Side one (a very nice noise feedback/effects-piece by Thurston Moore) is playable at both 33 and 45 rpm providing two very different pieces of music. The 33 rpm version was maybe the better of the two. It’s not easy listening – but who says music has to be easy?

Not only the music of this numbered limited edition of 500 LP is great. The cover art work (shown above) was made by Chris Pottinger who is also the person behind Cotton Museum and the label Tasty Soil. I have never seen the artwork of Chris Pottinger before – but his drawings are great if you are into surreal monsters, weird creatures, and such.

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Hello World

First post. “Hello World!” is maybe an appropriate exclamation – and what better way to get started than to display some nice maps?

These four maps show the four hemispheres mapped using the Lambert projection. Upper left: the Northern hemisphere, upper right: the Western hemisphere, lower right: the Southern hemisphere, lower left: the Eastern hemisphere.

The maps were generated using GMT — The Generic Mapping Tools, an open source collection of more than 60 tools for generating high quality maps. Being a command line tool, the learning curve of GMT is quite steep, but once conquered, GMT is more flexible than most GUI based map making software. The above maps were made using the following four lines of code:


pscoast -Rg -JA90/0/5c -B5 -W0.25p -G -P -K > world.ps
pscoast -Rg -JA0/-89/5c -B5 -W0.25p-G -X5.2c \
-P -O -K >> world.ps
pscoast -Rg -JA270/0/5c -B5 -W0.25p -G -Y5.2c \
-P -O -K >> world.ps
pscoast -Rg -JA0/89/5c -B5 -W0.25p -G -X-5.2c \
-P -O >> world.ps


R indicates the Region of interest (here: global), J indicates the projection (A for Lambert, then the projection center and map width), B is the border, W is the coastline, G indicates filling of land areas. If you want to know what the rest means, then go have look at the GMT — The Generic Mapping Tools, and maybe install it on your computer. It runs on Linux, Mac, as well as Windows. There are some very illustrative tutorials as well as cook books available to get you started—but do expect a somewhat uphill learning curve.

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