I like to watch TV.  My computer is setup in front of my big screen so that when I’m editing photos or otherwise geeking out (which happens a lot) I can have the TV on in front of me.  I watch a lot of live sports, especially NFL in the fall, the Tour de France in July, and the Olympics ever second year.  And of course I watch NHL hockey.  I’m Canadian…

But other than watching live sports, I live a very busy life and I normally can’t find the time to sit down to watch TV at the same time my favorite shows are on (prime time is an imaginary thing in my world).  And I don’t like to watch most of the garbage that’s on outside of prime time which is generally when I do finally get to sit down to watch TV.  So that’s why I like to watch pre-recorded shows such as those available for download from many, many resources on the internet.  (I’ll leave it to you to Google “download TV” to find some of those sources.)

One major problem with downloadable media (including movies, music, TV shows, and even other web distributed content such as video feeds from YouTube, Vimeo, and Viddler) is that it comes in a wide variety of formats, qualities, and aspect ratios. And most people have no way of getting that content to their television without going through major hurdles.

There are many ways to get that content onto the TV, but until recently none of them were very easy.  Over the years I’ve gradaully migrated from being forced to watch the content on my computer, to being able to burn VCD’s (video CD’s) or eventually DVD’s to watch on my DVD player attached to the TV.   Burning discs has never been fast, and for most people it involves converting the downloadable AVI files (also known as DivX or Xvid files) into a DVD format that the DVD player and the TV could recognize.  This can take hours even for a typical episode of a TV show.  This got better when DVD players started to be able to play DivX and Xvid files without conversion (even now those players are pretty rare), and better yet when you could plug in a USB thumb drive containing your content (extremely rare).  Unfortunately these players are only as good as the firmware they come with, and they typically don’t keep up with the newer media codecs.  That results in media files that can’t be played on the player or that pop and skip and lose synchronization between the audio and the video.  Not to mention that it can still take significant time to copy the files from the computer to the device.

What I’ve really wanted for a long time is to be able to directly connect my computer to my Home Theatre AV system using my local area network.  I really don’twant to have a separate computer in my living room (ie. a media center PC), and I don’t want to be limited to the codecs that Apple Supports on the AppleTV.

There didn’t seem to be an ideal solution until I recently heard about the Popcorn Hour products, which belong to a class of devices known as “Networked Media Tanks” (NMT). These are uber gadgets for the uber geek, and they do exactly what I want:  they play almost any visual media format I want to display on my TV; they connect to my network, wired or wirelessly; they are very small and very quiet; they work.  As a bonus they are basically small computers (running an OS variant of Linux), so they are infinitely customizeable and they can be seen and controlled by the other computers on your network, and even from over the internet.  They are UPnP and DLNA compatible (if you don’t know what that means, don’t worry about it; it’s a good thing) and they can stream media to AND from your other network devices.  In short, they are awesome!

I recently picked up a Popcorn Hour PCH-A-110.  It came in a nice box with everything I needed to hook it up to my TV, including an HDMI cable (it works fine with standard def TV’s too).  I added an old laptop hard drive that I had lying around (it will accept most 2.5″ or 3.5″ SATA HDD’s, but you don’t even need to install one if you don’t need it), and I plugged it in to my network with an ethernet cable.  I’m still working on getting it connected wirelessly, but that’s not a big deal for me right away.  In a very short time I had it up and running on my network and I was able to watch TV shows and movies directly from the other computers on the network.  I was even able to watch some episodes of MASH that I have in Matroska (.mkv) format that up until now I’ve only been able to watch on my computer using the VideoLan VLC media player.

The audio and video quality is amazing and I’m extremely happy.  My favorite part is that I was able to copy all my TV shows and movies over to the internal HDD for instant access, I’ve got utorrent setup to automatically download new episodes of my favorite TV shows onto it, and I’ve programmed my Logitech Harmony Remote to control it.  It fits seamlessly into my existing Home Theatre setup and my life just got a little bit easier.  I’m a very happy Popcorn Hour owner.

Let me start off by making it clear this this is a mini-review of the Mobile Action i-gotU GT-200 specifically for use by photographers.   There are many other uses for the device, but my review specifically relates to using it for geotagging images with the GPS coordinates for the location in which the image was made.

I say mini review because I didn’t subject it to rigorous tests or comparisons.  I didn’t beat it up, flush it down the toilet, or drive over it with my truck.  Rather, I simply used it.  I’ve had it for about 6 weeks and in that time I’ve made almost 3000 images (yes, that’s three thousand); I’ve used it every day while driving to work; I took it on a relaxing vacation at a cottage; I took it with me on a 3 day canoe trip into Algonquin Provincial Park in northern Ontario; and I took it to Banff National Park for a weekend of camping and photowalking.

Note that the real purpose of this device is to track the route that you take.  The bundled software then has the ability to display that route on a map, and it will also allow you to import photos to link from the map.  It really wasn’t designed as a device to embed GPS coordinates into the metadata of a photo; however, by combining the hardware with some after-market software it provides everything required to do so.  It is also relatively cheap (less than $100 vs. upwards of $200 for most photography specific GPS devices) and I had seen a positive recommendation of it for this purpose, so I went ahead and bought one.

There may be better gadgets out there to do the job, but this is the one that I have and I wanted to talk about a few of its good points and also about a few areas where it needs some improvement.  But first I’m going to talk a little bit about the options available to get started with geotagging  (feel free to jump straight to the review if you already know all about these devices).

Hardware Only Options: Canon vs. Nikon

This is one of those areas where Nikon has it right and Canon has it all wrong.  Users of most of the newer Nikon DSLR models have their choice of a couple of simple GPS device that plugs directly into the camera, which then automagically embeds the GPS location directly into the metadata for the photo.  A quick search on Amazon.com reveals several devices that will do the job from $120 (the Geometr) up to $200 (the Nikon GP-1). These gadgets work with the D90, D200, D300, D700, D3, D3X, and even the older D2Hs, D2X, and D2Xs models.  Plug it into the camera and you’re done.  Start taking pictures and every image will be tagged with the location.

UPDATE – if you’re a Nikon shooter then go over and see Matt Ballard’s article Geotagging Photos & Nikon DSLR GPS Options…

Canon on the other hand only provides the ability to directly tag images after you buy the add on wireless transmitter specific to your camera model.  The Canon WFT-E2A for the Canon 1D Mark III lists for $675 at Amazon.com, while the Canon WFT-E3A that works with my Canon 40D goes for about $700.  Similar hardware is available for the 20D, 30D, 50D, 5D, 5D Mark II, and all the professional grade 1D cameras.

But you’re not done there!!!  After buying the transmitter you must still purchase a GPS device to plug into the transmitter, and these are priced similarily to the devices made for the Nikons (in fact many of the after-market options will work with either Canon or Nikon if you have the correct adapter plug).  So Canon owners are looking at an initial outlay of $700-$800 just to get started if they want to go with the hardware only option.  Ouch.

Hardware + Software Options

If you don’t have a compatible Nikon DSLR, or if you simply can’t afford (or won’t pay) the price to get into the Canon hardware, then you have to go old-school and use software to do your geotagging in the computer after capture.  Software has been available to do so for several years, but it’s really only been in widespread use for the last year or so.  And you aren’t limited to Canon or Nikon, and for that matter this works with almost any image file.

If you use the right software then you don’t even actually need to purchase a GPS data logging device; you can skip straight into the software and add the GPS cooredinates for known locations manually. This can be pretty time consuming, but if you are a Lightroom user than you should check out Jeffrey Friedl’s Geoencoding plugin for Lightroom.  It is a very poweral option that works with or without a GPS data logging device.  You can enter the GPS data manually, or you can even pull it directly from a map location using Google Earth.

But if you do have a GPS device, then it all gets even easier.  I have already been using Breeze Downloader Pro to pull all the images off my flash cards and ingest them into my custom folder hierarchy.  This program has way too many features to even begin to talk about them all here (maybe the subject for another review), but one of them is Automatic geotagging of images as they are downloaded, by reading GPS data from a device such as the and storing latitude and longitude positional information in the shooting data of the image.  It works by reading directly from some GPS devices, or from a GPX tracklog that you can export from other devices.  This is very cool software that just works.  And it works very well if the data you are feeding it is any good.

An alternative is Microsoft’s Pro Photo Tools.  I understand that it also has a very rich feature set, but I’ve never used it so I can’t comment about it directly.

i-GotU GT-200

So new we finally get to the review.  Note that while I’m specifically talking about the GT-200, from everything I’ve read the GT-100 and GT-120 are essentially the same from a photography perspective; they have some different features and capabilities, but for geotagging they are pretty much equivalent.

Some things that need to be improved on the GT-200:

1. There’s no tactile onoff switch.  There is one button on the face of the device that you hold down to turn it on, and then hold it down again to turn it off.  It’s easy to turn on and off accidentally, and there’s no way to tell what position the switch is in.  In fact I have carried it around for entire days thinking that it was recording my every step, only to find out later that there was no data for the entire day.
2. There’s no screen or indicator light constantly shows you whether the device is on or off. There are two lights, on red and one blue, underneath a piece of semi-opaque white plastic that occasionally flash when the device is on.  Depending on the pattern of the flashes you are supposed to be able to determine the status.  Unfortunately the lights are almost impossible to see in bright sunlight and it’s not always obvious what the lights are trying to say.  I’ve stared at it for up to a minute before and still didn’t know for sure what the device was doing.
3. It really needs a fixed anchor point to easily attach it to a pack or a camera strap.  It is marketed as a gadget for the active user, and as such it includes a silicone sleeve that both protects it from damage and that has a belt loop to attach it the ourside of your bag, your belt, or a camera strap.  Unfortunately the silicon is very soft and it’s extremely easy to pull the device right out of the sleeve.  I had it attached the outside of my pack for an entire canoe trip and almost lost it twice.  A D ring or something similar firmly attached to the chassis of the device (like the attachment point for a camera strap) would be much better.
4. The included software really sucks.  It is buggy and crashes all the time.  I had to download several different versions from the website before I found one that worked at all on my computer, and even then I had to find an elaborate hack to enable the USB driver on the 64-bit version of Windows Vista.  I’m not going to post a link, rather I’m going to suggest that if you are running 64-bit Vista, stop right now and go find a better device.  I hear the Sony GPS-CS1 is nice.
5. The device does not mount as a drive in Windows (I’m not sure about on a Mac, but I doubt it).  If it did then I wouldn’t even need to use the software.  I only use the software because I need to export a GPX tracklog that can be accessed by Downloader Pro or by the Geoencoding Plugin for Lightroom.  This omission would actually be a deal breaker for me if I were buying a new GPS data logger today.  While reading an article about the GT-200 prior to buying it I mistakenly interpreted the article to say that it could be accessed directly.  I was extremely dissapointed to discover that it doesn’t work that way.
6. While the device is reasonably accurate while you are moving, it goes haywire when you stop.  In fact I would even say it is very accurate while you are moving as it typically resolves my location within a few feet (as compared to Google Maps).  But as soon as you stop, it seems to think that it is still moving and it jumps all over the place.  When I look at my tracklogs for locations where I put my bag down and left it there for any period of time, the location shifts all over the place and it often shows a random path that jumps by as much as 100 meters from where the device sat.  It really doesn’t matter all that much from a geotagging perspective, but it is very odd and something that should be pretty easy to fix.
7. UPDATE – I forgot this one when I originally wrote the article, but it really annoys me!  The included cable to connect the gadget to the computer has a standard USB plug on the computer end, but a ridiculous proprietary plug on the other end.  So instead of being able to use one of about a dozen standard USB cables that ALL of my other gadgets use, I have to have the exact cable that came with this device.  And if I lose it?  It just escapes me how anyone thought this was a good idea…

The things I like about the GT-200:

1. It is very small and lightweight.
2. It is more than accurate for my needs, most of the time.  See #6 above for the rest of the story.
3. The battery life is very good.  Of course I have turned the scanning rate down so that it only records every 30 seconds, but that gives me more than 3 days of battery life.  If you need more resolution then the battery life will get proportionally worse.
4. It’s easy to use and it works.

As you can see, my list of likes is quite a bit shorter than my list of desired improvements.  Unfortunately the things I like about it are basic requirements for me, and I assume that any other similar device will also be good enough.

The Final Word

While the i-GotU GT-200 GPS data logger does what it says it will do, and it does it well enough, I want a better, more reliable device.  The fact that this device does not mount as a drive to allow direct access to the logged data would be a deal breaker for me if I were looking for a new device.  The fact that there is no tactile on/off switch, and that there is no immediate and obvious way to determine the status of the device is equally annoying for me.

I would not recommend this device as a data logger for anyone that is serious about embedding their GPS location into the metadata of all of their photos.   It would be fine for occasional use, or for somebody who simply wants a pretty map showing where they’ve been.  But there are lots of other gadgets out there that do that pretty well too.

I don’t normally get excited about this kind of thing, but this one hit my internal geek hard!  Today shortly after lunch we all pass through a very interesting quirk in the space/time continuum (well the date/time continuum anyway).  (Is continuum really a word or is that just a Star-Trek thing?)

Anyway, the clock and calendar join forces today to count to 9.  Check it out and do whatever you want with it:

12:34:56 7/8/9

I’m the type of guy that uses keyboard shortcuts all the time. It’s simply faster and more efficient, and it works for me. So back in the Windows XP days I got very used to using Win+L to change users (ie. to log into a different account) when working on a computer with multiple user accounts. This is a very common situation in common areas in offices or more likely around the home. This nifty little key combination automatically took the user from the current application or the desktop directly to the welcome screen where you could select the account you wanted to use.

Along came Windows Vista and they added an intermediate step to the process. Hitting Win+L now locks current user account rather than going to the welcome screen. The user is presented with the option to enter their password to access the recently active user account, or to hit the Switch Users button to bring up the welcome screen. Aside from adding a step (which is often time-consuming as Vista has to think about who-knows-what after each selection is made), this change is also pointless and is definitely not an improvement over going directly to the welcome screen. Chalk this one up to the massive list of “what-were-they-thinking” developments that arrived with Vista.

(If you hadn’t figured it out already, in Vista the term “Fast User Switching” really only means that more than one user can be logged in at the same time; however, only one user can actually be connected at any one time. Switching between those users is not necessarily very fast. This is not intuitive and what most users really want is a way to switch between users quickly, or even instantly!)

There a couple of options to getting around the Locked screen:

1. The first option is free, and it comes courtesy of Quinn Lewis: Quinn pointed me to a hack using a utility that comes with Vista called TsDiscon.exe. Creating a shortcut to this utility and adding a custom keyboard shortcut will allow you to automatically jump to the welcome screen. Apparently this trick doesn’t work for everyone, but it worked perfectly for me. If you want to give it a try there is a tutorial on how to do it over at The Winhelponline Blog.
2. The second option is to buy an app called DUST (Direct User Switching Task). This app gives you the option to cycle through the currently logged on users, or to disconnect your session, by hitting Win+S. The beauty of this app is that it takes you directly to any other user accounts that are already logged in, bypassing both the Locked screen AND the Welcome Screen. The only negative is that it is not free. At only $15 it’s not all that expensive, but the $15 only entitles you to use it on one computer. If you have several shared computers then you will need to purchase a license for each machine.

If anyone has any new or better (eg. free) ways to make this work, I’d love to hear about. Please leave a note in the comments. Let’s all hope that this process is streamlined in Windows 7…