I’m just getting around to being able to blog about this new I took last Saturday. So far this is one of my favorites that I have done and gives you a nice degree of difficulty, elevation change and great scenery. The hike is hidden in Larksupr, California (Marin County) and is about 5.3 miles round trip if you take the trail I did. I found a great book of 141 hikes for my local area, which also allows you to download the maps in PDF format and print them so you don’t have to carry the actual book around.

Baltimore Canyon (A15 hike in the book) starts out in a really nice redwood tree area and slowly climbs up to Blithedale Ridge where you can see great views of the bay and Mount Tamalpais. When I went it wasn’t to crowded which is good but I did run into a little friend (Banana Slug) slowly going across my trail. Check out Picture 42 and 43 of my hike to see.

I have exported my photos and GPS coordinates into Google maps which you can see below. You can zoom in or select a red push pin to see a thumb of a photo and clicking on the thumb shows your a full screen image. These Images are taken directly where they found in the map. I usually carry a GPS logger and my camera around to log my hikes.

Click here for a larger view of my hike along Baltimore Canyon.

Another cool thing is if you have the Free Google Earth viewer you can download my trip here for Google Earth.

“Google Earth combines the power of Google Search with satellite imagery, maps, terrain and 3D buildings to put the world’s geographic information at your fingertips.”

Mission Control We have a Problem

You know I have this great friend who will remain anonymous, but hes into collecting remote controls and while I was over at his house the other day I had to take a snap shot of this gathering of remotes.

I count 8 in this photo but I know he has another 3 hiding somewhere Now the thing is that all of these are in use in some form or fashion but I think we need to take up a collection to get him the Logitech® Harmony® 1000 uber remote control all in one, it even gets you beer.

Ok last part is a joke but would be great, maybe we can rig it up to the beer launching fridge (see video)

This weekend I went on a great hike with some friend of mine and decided to put all my gps gadget stuff to use. With my gps, camera, camel pack and hiking shoes I was off to a great hike in Marin, California. Its a small 3 mile hike with various terrain and not to much difficulty. I snapped a few photos, most of them are just of the hills in Deer Park but the cool thing about all this is I now have gps data of the exact locations where I took my photos and as you can see below I placed them in google maps. Clicking on a red push pin pulls up a thumb of the photo and clicking on that image brings up the full images in another window.

I also put together a full sized map of the hike with the photos here.

I plan on doing this on most hikes and hopefully next time ill write a bit more descriptions about the photos and locations.

One of my good friends who works for Factor5 spoke at the latest Game Developer Conference (GDC) about “Creating Next-Generation Materials for Lair”. This presentation gives you a bit of incite on the next generation of game development and the directions the top developers are going in order to create great visuals for you gamers.

Screen Grab from Presentation

This is more of a technical presentation geared towards artist but if you have any interest in game development its worth checking out the PDF that Matthias Worch released recently.

BTW this screen shot the full 1080p was hidden somewhere in the presentation.

Links:

Lair GDC Presentation Page
Factor 5 - Developers of Lair
Lair HD Trailer

Keep and Eye on this game to hit your PS3 some time this year!

Got a cool mobile phone that allows you to stream video? Check out my new project im working on which is going to try to demystify the issues with mobile phone streaming as much as possible. Currently their are so many different mobile phones and each has its own way of streaming or downloading video that it drives developers made. I have set up a site Mobile Video Streaming Project which aims from the help of you guys to try to eliminate as much hassle for both developer and user who wants to watch video on his/her phone.
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It seems that Trent has been a busy boy as of late and will have a new CD out in the wild (some tracks have already been leaked) soon. Head on over to Year Zero and check out the Survivalism Video (quick time required) or search for it on YouTube (faster). This is a pretty good track, lets hope the rest of the cd is good, I already have colleted a few tracks (shhhh). Rejoice NIN fans the cd will soon be out, Also check out NIN live no DVD, HD-DVD, and Blue-ray here.

I have been waiting for this game for some time and still have to wait till the end of the year to get my hands on it. While a lot of media (video, photos) of this game have been released I was wowed the other day when looking at these new photos that match their in game visuals vs the real life areas that they mimicked in the game.

The game engine dubbed CryENGINE2 is used in the upcoming game Crysis by the company Crytek. What a mouth full but here are some screen shots of game vs reality, enjoy!

If these photos arnt enough for you check out some videos from the game at GameTrailers.com .