Published on
June 25, 2007 in
Music.
Today I bought my first mp3 album. It is from a german Hip-Hop group called Kinderzimmer Productions. I had the option to either buy the album as a CD from amazon for 14.97 Euros or I could download it for 10.99 Euros. The good thing about the second option (downloading) was that I saw that the money would go directly to one of the artists and not through who-knows-how-many-hands if buying it through amazon.
All the files are encoded with 256 kbit/s and as I would have ripped the CD anyway after buying it and probably never listening to the actual CD there were no reasons for not downloading it. The best thing was that from the point I decided to buy it until I could listen to it not more than 5 minutes elapsed.
If they would also offer the download as flac and ogg it would be perfect but right now I am already pretty happy the way it is.
Almost one week ago (last Saturday) we came back from our trip through Scotland.
We drove all the way from Germany to Scotland with our own car because it was much
cheaper than flying. The good thing about driving the whole way is that I was able
to record a complete route via GPS of our trip. This resulted in 80MB GPS data in
nmea format. After some struggling with gpsbabel I was finally able to
convert it to a 300MB googleearth kml file (compressed with bzip2 it is only
8MB).
The problem now was that googleearth would not load such a big file it
either just hung or was complaining that it was out of memory. So I tried to
visualize it with some other tool but the data were just too big.
While talking to Alex he came up with
the idea to optimize the data. The file has therefore been converted to
igc and Alex wrote a simple python script which optimizes the data:
gpsopt.
With the help of gpsopt (./gpsopt.py all.igc 300 > red.igc) I was
able to to create a file which googleearth can handle and this is the
result:
It is pretty fascinating to have such a detailed log of such a trip and
thanks to Alex’s Python skills I can now even use almost all the data I
collected.
