About 11/2 year ago, I helped the gthumb development by adding some functionality that I needed, and is also useful for others: The ability to import the photos from your digital camera to your computer and sort them by the date taken. The current functionality could only import all photos into one folder. 

My experience is that I want my photos sorted in a subfolder for each activity I photograph. In general this means that I want the sorted by the day the photos are taken.

 I offered my help to the gthumb-team via the bugzilla website after finding a similar bug report (431187).I implemented the main functionality with help from Matthias Hawran and  Michael Chudobiak (and others as well), and the result is the following option in gthumb:

Unfortunately, the development of other features of gthumb got into a bit of a slowdown, and up until now the gthumb development branch (called the trunk) was not getting into the main GNOME releases. However, since this month, a new mailinglist for gthumb has opened and it looks that this makes it easier for the developers to communicate. I'm sure this will speed up the development of gthumb, and getting new features into the main GNOME release sooner.

To get this new trunk functionality running in Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope 9.04, I've created the following HOWTO. Note that gthumb trunk development is highly experimental, so don't use is with your sole copy of your honeymoon pictures.

HOWTO install gthumb trunk on Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope 9.04

$  sudo apt-get install git-core autoconf libgnome2-dev libgtk2.0-dev libgnomeui-dev libexiv2-dev libglade2-dev gnome-common libgphoto2-2-dev libgnomedesktop2.20-cil gnome-devel

(it could be that not all packages above needs to be included as gnome-devel may already include those packages above, I added gnome-devel later to get all dependencies resolved)

(alternatives to get extra functionality:

    $ sudo apt-get install  libopenraw-dev

)

$ mkdir -p $HOME/src/gthumb_trunk

$ cd $HOME/src/gthumb_trunk

$ git clone git://git.gnome.org/gthumb

$ cd gthumb

$ ./autogen.sh

Note: you might need to specify some options here to configure it for the right place if you use a different distribution. For instance for Fedora 11 you can use:

		./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr CFLAGS="-ggdb" --libdir '/usr/lib64' --build 

		x86_64

	

	Otherwise, libgthumb can end up in the wrong place.
	

(tip by Michael Chudobiak)

#Configuration:
#
#    Source code location:     .
#    Compiler:                 gcc
#    Have gdk-x11:             yes
#    Have XRender:             yes
#    Have XTest:               false
#    Have libtiff:             no
#    Have libgphoto:           yes
#    Have libopenraw:          no
#    Have gstreamer:           no
#    Use Mac OS X menu:        no

$ make

$ sudo make install

$ sudo ldconfig

I just discovered that Scheduleworld stopped their free contact syncing service. Although the service worked fine, I didn't think it justified the $30 USD/year subscription service for just my personal addresses.

So it's time to look for alternative solutions. I've looked at several alternatives, that satisfied the following requirements:

• It should sync my addresses from my iphone 'over the air', without the use of iTunes or another PC solution. My opinion still is that the iPhone is a internet device that should not be connected to a computer to make it work.
• It should sync my Thunderbird (addressbook) contacts in some way with my iPhone in a 2-way direction.
• Preferably, the contacts should be stored by a well-known, free or cheap online service, but I'm also willing to set-up a web-application myself if it's not available.

For now I settled for both ZIndus to sync my thunderbird addressbook with Google Contacts, and I use NeuvaSync to sync between the iPhone and Google contacts.

To set it up:

1. Apply for an account with Nuevasync, and set it up to sync with google contacts. You must do this explicitly. I used NeuvaSync before for syncing my google calendar, but I initially forgot to turn it on for contacts as well. Do this by logging on to the NeuvaSync website, and you can see what you enabled.
2. Install the Zindus Thunderbird Add On, which can be found on the  ZIndus Webiste.

One of the drawback I've seen with this approach, is that the address given in Thunderbird cannot be synced in a normal way. As an alternative, Zindus makes some embedded XML out of it. The result is that the address is readable from the iPhone, but it is surrounded by some special XML code. This makes entering addresses on the iPhone difficult to impossible, but you still can sync telephone number and other items. So you should use your Thunderbird addressbook to enter the addresses.

On the possible side, the set-up comes close to 'free' as in beer. Zindus is open source (MPL), and use is made of the free Google Contacts service, which will probably continue to be free for quite a while. So as long as the NuevaSync account will also be free, we have a very nice solution.

After some successful scating last week with Surf, Today we did a tour with Ronald and Erik-Jan. Reasonable to perfect ice conditions made the 25km trip a wonderful afternoon in Nieuwkoop.

See the picture above of a trace of my GPS during the tour.

See the photo album for some pictures of the trip as well.

Today, Surf & I did some ice-scating about 10 km north of Utrecht in Molenpolder. We did a tour of 14km and ice quality was generally quite good.

See the picture above of a trace of my GPS during the tour.

See this photo album for some pictures of the trip.

 Hopefully the weather stays cold the coming weeks...

Very short because my fully typed blog entry just did a
"session expired: on me :-(

See following entry on the technical issues, ubuntu bug #114565:

Make following entry to give permissions to user in Ubuntu Hardy:

  /etc/udev/rules.d/45-garmin.rules

SUBSYSTEM!="usb", GOTO="garmin_rules_end"ACTION!="add", GOTO="garmin_rules_end"
ATTRS{idVendor}=="091e", ATTRS{idProduct}=="0003", MODE="0660", GROUP="plugdev"
LABEL="garmin_rules_end"

There are two kind of interfaces:

• Native USB interface (mostly supported, specify usb: for instance for gpsbabel)
• Serial interface using kernel's garmin_gps module

There is also a discussion going on over the Forerunner on Ubuntu Forum

Following linux tools:

• Viking (works directly with usb-babel but cannot import google maps as it should) 
• qlandkarte
• gpsbabel (command-line), outputs garmin XML format
• pytrainer (looks promising but version 1.5.0.0.1 looks like it's missing some essential garmin importing and file importing options)

Update: pytrainer seems to work OK, just use the version from Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon in my Hardy Ubuntu. If you get the error "Cant open garmin device" Make sure to make the following modification to get the Garmin working with Heart rate monitor (the one without works): (following is a patch file, you can also manually change the line with the '-' into the one with the '+'.

 # diff -u /usr/share/pytrainer/plugins/garmin-hr/main.py.orig /usr/share/pytrainer/plugins/garmin-hr/main.py--- /usr/share/pytrainer/plugins/garmin-hr/main.py.orig    2009-01-01 15:03:34.000000000 +0100+++ /usr/share/pytrainer/plugins/garmin-hr/main.py    2009-01-01 15:08:05.000000000 +0100
@@ -29,7 +29,7 @@
 tmpgpx = "/tmp/reg.gpx"
 dummy = 0
 
-if not os.path.exists(options.device):
+if (not os.path.exists(options.device) and not options.device == "usb:"):
     f = os.popen("zenity --error --text='Cant open garmin device. Check your configuration or connect the device correctly.'");
 
 else :

One thing I'm still looking at is importing all my track at once.