Brett on Stuff

The morning sun is shining sparkles off the fresh snow and the clouds are starting to lift. It’s very pretty on my desktop today.

If you haven’t already, download Mountain Desktop here.

OK… first of all I have to introduce the man behind this amazing creation.

None other than Mr. Bill Snead. I was fortunate enough to get to hike (and double-turtle) with Bill on our WCT trip last year.

Bill currently works at Microsoft and is a very talented developer. While he may blow off his creation as “no big deal”, I’m blown away every time I use it and am excited to see it stable enough that he’s willing to share it with others.

So what is this “creation” I speak of?

Bill took the Windows Live mapping engine and overlayed on it, USGS trail maps.

Yeah yeah, big deal… Google has been doing this for a while, right?

Bill one-upped them.

The Windows Live guys didn’t just stop at building a simple GPS satellite view mapping service, they integrated with the Microsoft Flight Simulator Engine which allows you to get very detailed 3-D style views of supported terrain.

Bill’s mapping data has altitude information that allows for an incredible 3-D experience when viewing hiking trails and terrain.

Remember the topo-style pictures in my recent post about Little Annapurna? This is the tool I used to take those snapshots.

It now supports both FireFox and Internet Explorer (Windows Only, no Mac), and you can check it out for yourself at:

http://www.midstation.com/topo/ 

Usage Hints:

- Make sure you put the map in “3D mode” and download the necessary plugins.

- Hold down the CTRL key and LEFT mouse button and move the mouse around the rotate the image.

- Use the mouse-wheel to zoom in/out.

- Hold down the SHIFT key and LEFT mouse button and move the mouse around the pan the image.

- Depending on how “Zoomed-in” you are, different scale maps will load, over the topography.

IMHO - the results are staggering. Find your favourite trail and zoom right in and follow the contours and enjoy.

Great job Bill!

Inspired by a recent post by Sarah on the new High-Def Mt. St. Helens web camera,

I jimmied up a little windows application that downloads the camera feed image every half hour and sets your desktop background.

Announcing "Mountain Desktop 1.0".

I will say, after running it for a week where you could actually see the mountain (it’s pretty socked in these days), it kind of made me happy.

Hour by hour, I got to see shifts in the clouds, and watch the sunset over St. Helens, and what I was watching on my desktop was consistent with the weather outside my window in downtown Seattle.

It’s a pretty simple application right now, but if anyone other than me ends up using it I’m happy to add support for more camera feed etc. Although it really works best with high-def images.

Download Mountain Desktop here.

You need the .NET 2.0 Runtime installed in order to run it.

Google just recently launched their "Terrain" overlay. Microsoft has had one for

a while over at maps.live.com, but I like Googles version better. It’s cleaner and more detailed.

I wonder if someone will create a website where hikers can start plotting out trails using a combination of the Google My Maps and Terrain features.

Here’s a quick sample one I whipped up for Copper Ridge Loop: Copper Ridge Loop Map.

Something like this for all the hikes in the US, with clickable pushpins showing photos at that view point. How cool would that be?

Heck - I’d even go a step further and allow people to collaborate photos taken from the same view point, combined with Photosynth to give a 360 degree view.

I would love to hear from people who stumble on my site what software they use to manage their gear lists.

For day-day management, I simply have an Excel spreadsheet with stuff in. Then for my blog, I wrote a bunch of custom php code to allow me to easily edit my gear list page without dealing with HTML formatting issues.

What does everyone else do? Any one use Google Docs spreadsheets? Anyone found a gear-list management application that they like? Anyone found a web-based list application that can be used for gear-list management?

I’m noodling on the idea of adapting my php/wordpress code into something that could be used by others.

Anyone out there? Hello? …

I’ve had several folks ask me how I do the ’tilted’ Polaroid effect on my image thumbnails, including a popup for the larger version.

Until today the answer was somewhat complicated: “using some tools and scripts I wrote that run manually on the server”.

I exchanged some email on Friday with an old friend Greg Friedman - who is the Development Manager for several Windows Live products and who has Windows Live Writer under his command. He inadvertently prompted me to think about using Live Writer for editing.

Live Writer is a very cool WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor that allows people to author blog posts seeing them in the style of their site. I use WordPress as my blog platform - which I love - but often the editor and the ‘published’ view differ quite a lot.

Last night, I downloaded the Live Writer SDK and hacked up a plugin that allows me to compose Polaroid images on the fly.

To get the ‘popup’ style, I added the Thumbnail Viewer WordPress plugin. With this technique any images that are marked with rel=”thumbnail”, get automatically lightboxed. My Live Writer Plugin sets this attribute for you, so you don’t have to do a thing. It also generates an 800×600 sized image to go in the lightbox automatically. So you can shoot big photos, and publish them in seconds.

If you use WordPress and are interested in trying this out, do the following:

1. Download and install the WordPress Thumbnail Viewer.

2. Download and install Windows Live Writer.

3. Download and install my Polaroid Plugin from the Live Writer Gallery.

4. Run Live Writer, and there should now be an “Insert Polaroid” option.

Oh… and I made a few upgrades while I was at it - a new drop-shadow effect, and also the option to put a caption on the Polaroid.

I’m sure there are bugs - so if anyone uses it let me know and I’ll fix ‘em.

OK - enough geeking out - I did promise myself I’d try not to post any tech-related articles and so far I’m doing pretty good.