We've got a half acre lot in town that's heavily wooded, and it's full of volunteer and invasive trees. Part of the reason that our yard is so full of birds is because it has overgrown. I hold the coffee mill between my knees, and it has made what was already good coffee just even more fragrant and tasteful. But just about a year ago, my wife bought a German-made Zassenhaus coffee mill for us, and it's got a burr grinder. I'm a coffee drinker, and I had relied on an electric blade grinder, for the last 25 years or so. And the Merlin app has just been so extraordinarily helpful for me to figure out what some of these small birds are that after a while start to look alike. But since I have been working from home and sort of staring out the big window in front of my desk, I've been amazed at all of the birds that seem to exist in this little corner of the yard that I don't see elsewhere, looking out from my house. The Merlin app is a product from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and they keep integrating really cool new stuff, including identify this bird by the song. Like several hundred thousand people, I downloaded the Merlin app once the pandemic lockdown started last year. You can find Carol on Twitter to the Cool Tools Show on iTunes | RSS | Transcript | See all the Cool Tools Show posts on a single page Show notes: Merlin Birding App A lifelong nerd and former librarian, her research explores how young people did cool things with and through comics during the mid-20th century. Carol Tilley is a comics historian and associate professor of information science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
As a bonus I can import the GPS log into Google Earth and have a ready-made trace of my travels.Ĭarol Tilley, Comics historian Our guest this week is Carol Tilley. The Mac application, in fact, is a very advanced geotagging tool, ideal for photographers. (Some popular exercise phone apps like Strava will create a GPS log of your movements, but they charge a monthly fee.) MyTracks phone app is free, although the Mac app for syncing is one-time $15. A photo program like Lightroom will sync the GPS log to the time-stamp on each photo, and produce a location place for each image.
At the end of the day I download the GPS log to my computer. I’ve done this all day, every day for weeks at a time. If you set the frequency of data points to every few seconds (enough for my purpose) I can do a full 12 hours tracking from my phone. I turn the app on my iPhone 5 in the morning and it will log my movements all day, without a data plan on.
The Android flavor is from Google the recent version seems to be broken. I use the iPhone version which was developed by one German guy, and works great. There are two versions, Android and iPhone, each from a different company. I wanted a way to tag the location of my photos when I travel overseas, but do it while I have the data turned off on my phone (because it can be insanely expensive). GPS functionality is now built into some high-end cameras, but the problem is that because the GPS is always running, it drains the camera battery really fast, and it won’t last the day. Getting high quality cameras to do that is a challenge. Most smartphones can geo-stamp the location of each photo you take.