Panoramio – See your photos in Google Earth

Panoramia overlay in Google Earth

Something I came across recently was the ability to share your own photos of places around the globe using Google Earth. A Spanish company called Panoramio have created a very easy way of selecting locations on the globe and adding your own pictures. Other users of Google Earth can then see these photos by clicking on the camera symbols that get overlaid onto the map.

At first sight Panoramio looks just like yet another website that hosts online galleries. You can store upto 2Gb of pictures for free. Other users of the site can browse your pictures. But the big difference here is that you can do this by clicking on a Google Map window, and have the images appear to other people via Google Earth. A two way link between an image browser list and the map window means selecting an image in either window will select it in the other so you can see in a very dynamic way where pictures were taken. It is much easier to try than describe – go to the Panoramio Map and have a play.

And then the really smart thing is link into 3D with Google Earth. Read on…
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Blog title change

I’ve changed the title from the rather inane “Greg’s Techie Stuff” to the snappier “Bytes & Pixels”. No particular reason, other than it is better than “Bits and Pieces”, and I have a rubbish imagination for things like titles. Any suggestions welcome – not that anyone actually reads this site…

It also reflects what I want to concentrate my writing on – computing, digital imaging, and computer graphics.

I also aim to find a snazzier template, rather than the default WordPress one. Not that there’s anything wrong with it – just that for a site talking about imagery there is a remarkable lack of any pictures here! Of course, you could always click on the Gallery link on one of the widgets at the side of the page.

Update 19th July – Changed to “Feather” theme for a while. Looks quite nice, but the heading styles don’t go deep enough for me so I’ll probably change again soon.
Update 5th April – Or not!

Another Update – Inspired by Parny, blog name changed to “Pushing Pixels”. Thanks Steve!

A simple Perforce backup script for the home

I use the free license of Perforce on my home network just to ensure version control and management of home coding projects, university thesis stuff, and general files that I just want to ensure I have previous versions of. It’s a really nice part of the Perforce licensing model that I can get two users and five clients for free. My network has my main PC (with Perforce depot), my personal laptop, my wife’s laptop, and my work laptop all connected. It’ll get worse when my four-year old starts wanting to source control things from his PC!

Having been responsible for some pretty heavyweight Perforce installations in my working life, I did not want to forget the golden rule of checkpointing and backing up. While it would not be a disaster if my Perforce data got lost or messed up, it would be an inconvenience. The scripts published on Perforce user forums, however, tend to be focussed on industrial installations and can be quite complex. For the home it is nice to have something more simple.
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