Last rays of summer

What a difference a day makes. Saturday morning, and I was up with the lark to soak up some unseasonal sunshine at the Sunderland Parkrun. 

Jogging around the park before the 9AM start it's easy to forget that you're in the middle of a city. The Parkrun is a great, friendly, low-key, all-inclusive run that anyone can do, and do it as slow or as fast or as competitively as they please.

From Sunderland Parkrun

What I like about the Parkrun is that it gets me out of my bed at a decent time on a Saturday morning whereas without that prod I'd probably fritter away the day without achieving much or getting of my backside and getting some exercise. With the Parkrun in my diary I'm home soon after 10 and the rest of the day is waiting.

The forecast for Saturday is good. The forecast for Sunday is not quite so good. So flasks filled and we're off to Blanchland for lunch at the White Monk Tea Room before a walk beside the Derwent.

From Blanchland Walk

One of the nice things about living in County Durham is that it's not busy. It might look busy. You might park and look at all the cars and think the fells are going to be mobbed. But they're not. I've never understood why but I'm certainly not complaining.

We headed NW up the lane and out of Blanchland, passing a mixture of old broadleaved and deciduous trees. Some of the conifers seem to think they're broadleaves and a few had me looking twice to make sure I wasn't mistaken. One conifer, a spruce, had such a broad fissured trunk I had to stare up into the canopy to convince myself I was actually looking at a conifer.

Over to the left I saw an intriguing formation of tree guards. The tell-tale green mesh shelters were arranged in a circular fashion. But why? Or around what? An old pit-shaft perhaps? Investigation would have involved a dry-stone wall and probably a lot of trespassing so it will have to remain a mystery.

We turned at Pennypie House, crossed the beck, and walked alongside the dry-stone wall beside Birkside Fell. Between the track and the wall is a grassy verge. On the other side of the track is heather moorland. On the grassy verge there were many small fungi and I can't decide what they are. (For someone studying Arboriculture, this is a rather depressing admission. But identifying fungi causes me problems!)

From Blanchland Walk

The mushrooms have a conical shiny looking cap with no sign of a ring underneath. When I got home and checked my fungi book I realised there are so many other things I should be looking for that hadn't occurred to me; e.g texture and smell.

Looking underneath the cap the gills are quite distinctively deep-grooved.

From Blanchland Walk

If I had to guess I'd say it was a waxcap. I've just found a key at the University of Aberystwyth. It's a pity I didn't note the things it mentions (wet/dry/sticky etc) that would've helped aid identification. I'll know next time!

As we walk down the lane towards the river I notice some very confused trees. There's an ash that can't decide whether it's spring or autumn. I feel sorry for it. It seems to have put out a flush of young new growth up at the top of the crown. Ash, famous for being 'lazy', is one of the latest to come into leaf, and earliest to go to bed for the winter. So this expensive leaf production is interesting. Quite a young tree. A bit of a rebel perhaps.

From Blanchland Walk

Soon we're beside the River Derwent on a riverside walk that always surprises me (pleasantly) on how quiet it is given how handy and scenic it is. Almost safely back at Blanchland but not before some more fungi.

From Blanchland Walk

An untidy bracket fungus on Silver Birch (Betula pendula) that looks a bit like Beefsteak Fungus (Fistunlina hepatica) although it isn't as reddish as I might expect.

There's also a blackened cluster around the base of the tree (which is very old) that I assume is just an older version of the same fungi.

From Blanchland Walk

Back to Blanchland and the last few hours of summer before the November rain arrived.

Blanchland Stroll at EveryTrail

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Upgrading Ubuntu 9.04 to 9.10

ouch. I hadn't realised quite how reliant I'd become on using the Lightning add-on to Thunderbird for managing my calendar. Lightning is great as it allows cross-platform synchronisation with itself and with google calendar.

Yesterday my laptop informed me that Karmic Koala was available. Not sure what it was, but it had a fantastic name, and I was having some of it. Upgrade done, and very cool new login screens, and into Thunderbird. Checked my calendar. gone. nowt. Annoying but I assumed I just needed to re-sync with google or re-add the calendar entry. But there was no options to do that.

What's happened is that 9.10 doesn't have libstc++5 and Lightning wants it. I grabbed it from the Jaunty repo and installed it using dpkg. Tried Thunderbird again and still no luck. What you need to do is remove Lightning as an add-on, restart Thunderbird, then re-add Lightning, then restart again. For me it worked like a dream. All my calendar entries just miraculously re-appeared.

Things aren't looking quite so rosy on another of my PCs. A power glitch during the upgrade gave my computers a bit of a headache and some rebooting later showed that not all was well. No hardware errors, I don't think, just yanking the power cable halfway through the 9.04 -> 9.10 upgrade seems to have confused the computer to bits. Sometimes these things are a blessing. I've burnt a Karmic CD and used it as a rescue disc to backup the more important looking bits and had a bit of a purge. I had 20GB of thumbnails I didn't know I had in .gqview and .thumbnails. They've gone. Currently doing a nice clean install. Maybe it's the best way anyway. Most of my important stuff (mp3s and jpegs) are on separate file systems and it's just my home directory that needs backed up. Better to feel the pain of a clean install and sweep a broom through the place.

Orienteering at Wallington

Saturday hadn't gone well. I got bored sitting in a long queue of traffic waiting to get to the Alwinton Border Shepherd Show so gave up, turned round, and went for a walk around Cragside instead. Driving a scenic route back to Durham we passed Wallington where I saw some signs saying “Caution – Runners” and I wondered what that was all about. When I got home I read Colin's email about an orienteering event at the Wallington National Trust site, checked the weather forecast, and that was Sunday sorted.

It's just over two years since I last did an orienteering event. That was a gentle 'Come and Try it' event at Chopwell Forest. The timing for me was interesting because when I did the Chopwell event I was just starting running a bit more seriously and at the time I rather simplistically thought of orienteering and running as a bit of an 'either/or'. I thought there were people who did orienteering, and people who did running, and that there was no cross-over. This is obviously nonsense. At Wallington there were all sorts of people from all sorts of backgrounds with a range of fitness and abilities.

Two years since my last event, and two differences struck me immediately. First, my eyesight. Sadly that seems to have declined noticeably. I peered curiously at the blobs and text on the map and decided just to concentrate on the obvious stuff. River, fences, walls. That's about all you need. Second, the technology. Great Fun! Gone are the incredibly low-tech punches that I used to think were so sophisticated. Now it's all things that go BEEP and apart from my initial bewilderment it's all very straightforward. This was all taken care of and explained to me when I signed in.

I decided to got for the Score 60 event. This is simplicity itself. Go to the start. Start. See how many Controls you can get round in an hour. Finish. I was intrigued that there was no pre-arranged start time. I just wandered up when I was ready, beeped the dibber in the gizmo marked START, and off I went! I started like a rocket, raced across the picnic area and through the gates, out onto the path and into the woods. Once safely out of sight I got the map out and had a look at it since I had absolutely no idea where the hell I was. Presently, and more sedately, I headed off for the controls that took my fancy.

This event turned out to be exactly what I needed one week after the Loch Ness Marathon. It has none of the conventional pressures of a road or trail race but it's still a good idea to shift it when you get the chance as it is a race against the clock. Different orienteers have different styles; some manage to map read on the run. I prefer to lean against a tree, decide where I'm going, then go as fast as I can for as long as I can before I inexplicably need to stop to look at the map again. This usually mysteriously co-incides with me needing a bit of a rest. It's a bit like interval training, or perhaps more accurately, fartlek.

Roberta decided to go for a walk that coincidentally followed the main paths that skirted much of the route. There were times that I felt like a labrador as I kept crashing out of the undergrowth and bounding along only to bump into her again as she strolled steadily around the estate. I resisted the urge to pick up a big stick in my teeth and drop it at her feet.

After finishing I spotted Colin and Elfie and we immediately started a detailed deconstruction of the course, the controls and our route choices. After the first two controls (with just another 28 to go), Elfie's eyes began to glaze over and she left us to carry on with our post-mortem and wandered off to investigate the restaurant.

This was the first time I've done an orienteering event since I started running seriously and I was really pleased at how much I felt it helped. I often think I don't do enough cross-training or include enough variety in my training. I really want to do more of this sort of thing. This was a great event as it included cross-country, fartlek, road, trail, and optional water crossing (I took the bridges, Colin forded the river 4 times. Wish I'd thought of that!). You can pretty much customize and mix and match the whole race to suit your own tastes.

The Loch Ness Marathon 2009

"Jings", "Crivvens" and "Help Ma Boab" were just three epithets that
didn't cross my lips as I tumbled over the finish line just 3 and a bit
minutes the wrong side of 4 hours. There were times when I really
thought it was going to happen - that I was going to duck under the
elusive 4 hours, but not today.



The day started promisingly enough with orderly queues of runners
filling up the endless queue of coaches that parked neatly around the
start. Unfortunately, just as I was about to alight, they turned out
not to be endless after all. There was a lot of radio chatter and hairy
bikers flashing by on snazzy motorbikes, but no more buses. This was
looking interesting. Eventually, 50 minutes late, a queue of bulging
coaches departed Inverness. 50 minutes; remember that number.

About an hour later, somewhere in the Scottish Highlands, the inevitable happened. Not to me, because I've long since ignored the bladder-busting pre-hydration tosh that is often routinely promoted as essential pre-race preparation, but to the poor sod sat at the front of the top deck of my bus, things were getting desperate. He started
politely enough by asking the Germans packed on the stairs to pass a message to the driver, to pull over if possible. This got lost in translation. Then we passed a coach that had succumbed to its rebellious passengers, and our chap got a bit agitated, and decided to take more positive actions. He stood up decisively, leaned over, and pressed the bell! If he thought that was going to have the desired effect he was sadly mistaken. For the next 5 miles our bus was "Just Stopping" (in the middle of nowhere) according to the neon sign, then we passed another coach in a passing place, and it was all too much. This time he jumped up in a state of agitation and pressed the bell at least 5 times with a noticeable lack of interest from the driver. At this point I heard some ladies behind me say "Oh look, the poor man, he's obviously in real pain!". Laugh, I almost didn't.

Finally he cracked; our hero jumped up and, with his face a picture of pain and frustration, announced he was getting of the bus NOW. He climbed over the Germans on the stair and was lost from view, then the coach lurched drunkenly and suddenly into a passing place. A cheer exploded throughout the coach and at least 80% of the coach, clearly wishing to show solidarity, followed our bell dinging hero out to the facilities.

It was all very well behaved. The ladies went to one side, and the gents to the other. There was a grey area where, well, I'll spare you the details. But barely(!) 3 minutes later and we were all clambering back on the bus and congratulating our rather bewildered hero who clearly was unaware quite how much so many people had felt his pain. All that was missing was a sign saying "Contaminated Land - do not enter for 100 years" and you would never have know we were there. Then again ...

So much excitement and drama, and we hadn't even reached the Start! The coaches eventually arrived at the Start 10 minutes after the race was supposed to have begun. We just about had time to get off the coach get changed and put our bags on the baggage bus. The atmosphere was pleasantly peculiar. There we were, about 7500+ of us, in the middle of the Scottish Highlands, listening to a DJ pumping out music and firing us up, and all around were mountains and glens. Weird. But Cool.

Lately I've been running races badly so I'd decided to take a bit of time and do a lot more thinking and planning for this one. I'd considered a few options and talked to many old-timers before coming up with a Plan 'A' and a Plan 'B'. Both were for sub-4 targets but Plan 'A' largely focused on pace, and Plan 'B' on heartrate, although they both followed the principle of running a negative split. I used the calculator at marathonguide.com as a guide. However the route is very uppy and downy and about 2 minutes after the race started I abandoned both plans in favour of Plan 'C', a hitherto undeveloped plan that went along the lines of "Let's see how it goes without going ballistic too early".

For Striders thinking of doing this Marathon don't be fooled by the
course profile. True, it has an overall drop, but it has lots of nippy little hills that the profile sketchers decided weren't worth making a fuss over. I'd say it's a fair bit harder than Edinburgh (Phil?). One thing I think I did right was 'allowing myself to run faster' on the descents. A lot of runners seem to hold back on the downhills when in fact you can gain quite a bit of time just by letting yourself go without increasing your energy expenditure very much. I passed the half-way point in 2.02 and for at times I thought I would pull back the time to sub-4 then another cheeky little hill would suddenly appear. Then I hit a biggie at mile 18 and I knew it wasn't going to happen. I heard my name shouted around this point and looked round to see Phil who was hobbling cheerfully along 'not really racing'. For Phil this race could be classified as a 'quarter of a Hardmoors' (and a little less hilly), so just a little bit of warm down really. Given that this is only a week later, Phil finished in an indecently respectable 4.16. Some people have no shame. A mention too for Anna Seeley who ran a blistering sub-3.30.

I ran all the way and was doing 8-9 min/miles towards the finish. I judged it about right. I'd been worried that by running a negative split I'd feel that I could've gone faster earlier but there was little danger of that. I was pretty much done in by the finish and my mile pace kept slipping as I tried to pull it back down. It was a good race plan and I simply wasn't fit and strong enough on the day to run it. Next time! Oh, And it was bit hot. Scotland. Loch Ness. October. Off course it's going to be hot!

The Loch Ness Marathon

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The Harrier League

Not long now until the Harrier League starts. Locations below:


View Harrier League in a larger map

Everytrail

Wow! Just had a look at the embedded slideshow in the last post. I like it. Let's try a side by side with Picasaweb for the Grisedale Horseshoe ...

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Here's the Picasaweb embedded slideshow:

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and now the Everytrail:

Grisedale Horseshoe Fell Race

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Everytrail offers a map option. Let's see what that does:

Grisedale Horseshoe Fell Race at EveryTrail

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Everytrail

I have an account on everytrail and for a time was quite excited about its potential for geotagged trails. But I was finding it a bit slow and the geotagging that picasaweb offered seemed more elegant and faster. True, it lacked the, er, 'trail', but I'm not sure that it was any great loss.

Everytrail has had a facelift so it's time to have another look. I've often thought something like this would be useful for storing common routes for club runs. So much tinkering to do, so little time!

Everytrail Slideshow embedding test:

Simonside Cairns at EveryTrail

Map created by EveryTrail: Geotagging Community

I wonder how that looks ...

anki and mnemosyne

Hmmm ... an interesting thing is happening.

Having decided to move to anki from mnemsyone, I'm now thinking of moving back. There are loads of comparisons of the various Spaced Repetition Scheme learning tools and many of them come out strongly in favour of anki ... but ... but ...

I prefer mnemosyne.

I've tried to rationalise it but given up. Some people prefer Microsoft, some MACs, some Linux, some GUIs, some command line, some etc. Anki is very very good and has great features, but I'm more at home with mnemosyne. This review sums it up pretty well.

My Botanical Digital Ident Toolkit

Botanical Idents, trees, flowers and stuff, are going to be an important thing for me, so I've been investing a fair bit of time putting together the tools that I'll use to learn and reference the plants I encounter.

Here's the toolkit:

• f-spot
• gthumb
• exiv2
• gpscorrelate
• anki
• sporttracks
• geosetter
  

Sporttracks and geosetter are Microsoft Windows programs and so far I've had no or limited success getting them running under wine.

f-spot is the photo manager that I use. It allows hierarchical management of tags, which is just dandy for the binomial naming system.

The workflow goes a bit like this.

Get the photos from the camera onto the PC. This is the job of gthumb. Usually I put the camera from the card into a reader, fire up gthumb, then copy to an 'incoming' directory on the computer.

Still in gthumb, I do a first pass of the images in full-screen, deleting anything that's obviously rubbish or duplicated. gthumb currently moves files to trash rather than deleting them, which is a minor irritation, but a fix is on its way.

Once I've got a reasonable batch of images, it's time to geotag them.  I've got a Garmin Forerunner 305 that I use for running and I've got in the habit of carrying it of any photo trip.  Using Sporttracks I read in the tracks and export a GPX file. I could just as easily do this using gpsbabel or some of the other garmin tools available on ubuntu, but I have the reader plugged into my windows PC and it's just as easy to do it there, and Sporttracks is a nice, versatile program.

Once I've got my GPX file I copy it to my ubuntu box.

Next I need to synchronize the timestamps on my images to the GPX file. I have three digital cameras in various states of repair and time. I use the well established tip of taking a picture of your gps to get a reference point.

This gives me something like this:

Now I look at the picture in ubuntu, and find out what time the camera thinks it is.

dougie@icarus:~/botanics$ exiv2 00032.jpg
File name       : 00032.jpg
File size       : 1852891 Bytes
MIME type       : image/jpeg
Image size      : 3648 x 2736
Camera make     : Canon
Camera model    : Canon DIGITAL IXUS 95 IS
Image timestamp : 2009:09:27 15:13:42
Image number    : 100-2034
Exposure time   : 1/500 s
Aperture        : F2.8
Exposure bias   : 0
Flash           : No, compulsory
Flash bias      : 0 EV
Focal length    : 6.2 mm
Subject distance: 15
ISO speed       : 160
Exposure mode   : Easy shooting (Auto)
Metering mode   : Multi-segment
Macro mode      : Off
Image quality   : Fine
Exif resolution : 3648 x 2736
White balance   : Auto
Thumbnail       : image/jpeg, 4756 Bytes
Copyright       :
Exif comment    :

i.e, the camera is 47 seconds slow. This isn't too bad and when correlated with most GPX trails is unlikely to make much difference, unless you're moving a lot, and quickly.

To align the the image time to the real GPS time, I use exiv2 again. The syntax is:

exiv2 -a00:00:47 *

to adjust the timestamps of all the files in the current directory. negative timestamps are also accepted if the camera is running fast.

Now I know that the jpegs and GPX trail are synchronized, I use gps-correlate to get the location information from the GPX file and add it to the EXIF header of the JPEGS. You can use gpscorrelate on the command line for this but I find it easier to use the GUI version, gpscorrelate-gui. I notice that gps-correlate also allows you to add an offset but I haven't worked out whether it updates the timestamp of the image. I've a feeling it doesn't. This would mean the timestamp of the original image would remain incorrect, even though the image now has geotagged data.

You can quickly check whether an image has geotagged data by using the gpscorrelate command line form:

dougie@icarus:~/botanics$ gpscorrelate -s 00032.jpg
EXIF-GPS Photo matching program.
Daniel Foote, 2005.

00032.jpg: 2009:09:27 15:13:42, Lat 54.761978, Long -1.574869, Elevation 92.149100.

This is handy done with a wildcard on a directory to quickly determine whether any images are not geotagged. e.g.

dougie@icarus:~/botanics$ gpscorrelate -s * | grep 'No GPS Data'
IMG_3542.JPG: 2009:09:27 15:13:30, No GPS Data.

Note that I still haven't looked at any of these images on a map. But I'm confident that the location is spot-on because of the picture taken of the GPS. A simple, important step.

If I want to see where the images are, I can either upload them to flickr or picasaweb, run digikam, or, my preferred option, run geosetter on a Windows PC and browse my ubuntu drive from there.

At this point I'd probably rename the files using gthumb as it has some nice rename options. Once images are imported into f-spot renaming becomes such a hassle it's not worth the effort.

The final steps, assuming that I want to learn some idents from the images, is to export the selected images (usually at 800x600 resolution or therabouts) and then import them into anki.

digikam

I had another play with digiKam last night. Having pretty much decided not to persevere with it because of problems with the installation I persevered and finally got it working. The steps are a bit ragged and I've no idea what bit finally did the trick. I had installed version 1.0.0-beta4 from the sources on the digikam website but was hitting the no thumbnails/images displayed problem that is reported by many people. I'd tried quite a few things with no success and just before giving up I thought I'd try uninstalling the source and installing version 0.10 from the Ubuntu repos. Perhaps it was the:

apt-get install digikam

that did the trick, as it pulled in and pulled in something else that was required, but suddenly digikam was running 1.0.0-beta4 and the images and thumbnails were being displayed. My apt install log show:

 Selecting previously deselected package digikam.
(Reading database ... 234735 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking digikam (from .../digikam_2%3a0.10.0-1ubuntu3_i386.deb) ...
Selecting previously deselected package kipi-plugins.
Unpacking kipi-plugins (from .../kipi-plugins_0.2.0-1ubuntu3_i386.deb) ...
Processing triggers for man-db ...
Setting up digikam (2:0.10.0-1ubuntu3) ...

Setting up kipi-plugins (0.2.0-1ubuntu3) ...

Processing triggers for libc6 ...
ldconfig deferred processing now taking place

that something called kipi-plugins was dragged in. Perhaps that was it.

The feature that was prompting my interest in digikam was geotagging. Plus digikam gets some pretty rave reviews on the web. The other feature that is important to me is tagging itself. It has to be quick and easy.

Geotagging first. I haven't tried geotagging an image itself from within digikam as I already have a sample of geotagged photos. What I wanted was to see if it would display the location of these images on a map. It does, but not quite how I expected it. digikam offers a selection of maps including OSM. Your photo is pinpointed on a global map and you can zoom in. As far as I can tell you can only zoom in to a certain level, then if you want more detail you can click on the globe ('see more ino on the internet') and this opens up a browser window with a more zoomed in view. It's fine but you quickly end up with lots of browser windows and I really want to be able to scroll through the images, slideshow style, seeing the location of each image in detail in a small window. This is how geosetter works, and the slideshow in picasaweb. geosetter does it very nicely and currently I run it in Vista and point it over the LAN at my Ubuntu drive. I've tried a couple of times to install geosetter in wine but that has been pretty unsuccessful. That would be nifty it it worked and I will revisit that sometime.

Next I looked at how digikam handles tagging. I'm used to, and like, f-spot tagging, where you can do a lot with hot-keys and keystrokes. So, say, I have selected a batch of image thumbnails and want to tag them all as Acer pseudoplatanus, in f-spot I'd press t, then start typing Acer pseudoplatanus. If the tag is in the database, it will auto-complete as soon as unique match is made, I can press , (comma) and then enter more tags. Tagging in digikam is pretty easy with mousy wousie click wicky stuff, but I wanted to try keystrokes. As far as I could tell (I could be wrong), there is no obvious keystroke shortcut to entering tags. I think Alt-G is the starting point. Once the list of tags appears (I imported all mine and they appear in 'My Tags' - that might be relevant), I looked at the list and noticed that they have underlined characters that could be used as shortcut-keys. I'm not sure how it's been done but I guess that the first unused letter in the tag name is used as the shortcut, leading to some quite funky choices. I didn't find it very intuitive. For example, I have lots of tags beginning with A, and as soon as I type A the image is tagged with the first tag that begins with A. I'd assumed I'd be able to continue typing until I had a unique tag match.

So I'm putting digikam on the back burner for the time being. It looks very nice I have to say and has lots of yummy features but it's not really my workflow. I like prodding keys and leaving the mouse alone. f-spot, even though it often feels clunky, slow and limited functionality, suits the way my brain works, and I think I'm sticking there for the forseeable future.