Geotagging Flickr pics

There's a not-too-complicated web app to manually generate geotags for your Flickr! photos at beeloop.com. Just

1. drag and zoom the map center to the location that the pic was taken,
   
2. copy and paste info generated in the first field into your Flickr! tags for the pic,
3. copy and paste info generated in the second field into your Flickr! description of the pic

You end up with something like this:

canvassing our newly made cedar canoe at Flying Moose Lodge, on the weekend, when the boys are back from their trips. Click here to see where this photo was taken. By courtesy of BeeLoop SL (the Mapware & Mobility Solutions Company).

On the cool scale, I'd say this isn't quite as nice as panoramio.com, but it *does* have the Flickr! connection that may be useful.

Ogle Earth

If you're interested in place-based stuff, and haven't already been accessing the Ogle Earth site, you should start now. Their list of links has a lot of cool things like Panoramio, and Mappr!, etc. And the blog itself highlights some of the sorts of things potentially of interest to place-based game developers -- for example, the Gombe Chimp Blog post points to a place-based blog done up by the Jane Goodall folks. Pretty cool. Imagine place-based game content on Google Earth, further blending the line between virtual and physical. Especially integrating photos (hey! that's my camera!)

PocketPC annoyance

It may be that I'm overlooking something obvious, but if my experience is typical, I'm at a loss to understand why anyone keeps using this platform. Here's my question: "If the battery is completely discharged, do I lose everything on it?"

It seems as though, on my 3 day drive back to Wisconsin, where my HP iPaq 4350 PPC was left in its case with an admittedly low battery, the battery died. This shouldn't matter, but when I restarted it, it ran through the initial set up (and stupid tutorial) sequence, and when it announced that it was ready to use, all my files and settings were gone.

Why does this matter? After all, my game files are safe because I have to load them from the Dell, and the things that I had sync should be safe, right? But the programs like chikyu, that lets me take waypoints and save them as Google Earth-friendly files, is gone. And all the Google Earth-friendly waypoint files I made in the Wildlands (in Maine) are gone. And the Task Manager program I loaded is gone. And EarthComber. And a bunch of other programs. Gone. Very annoying.

I suppose the thing to consider is that this sort of thing usually only happens once, and after that the user (me) learns to either never let the battery die, or to back up everything all the time. Maybe there's a program that will automatically back everything up to the storage card (I have a 1GB card I could use for that). But the bigger issue is that the waypoints are lost. They're still on the 'backup' GPS unit I bought when I was having troubles with the PPC and BT GPS combo -- as far as I know the Explorist 400 uses a memory that does not lose data when the battery is dead (at least it didn't when the battery last died).

Grrrrrr....