Mark's Blog about Tech and Cool Stuff

Julian calendar The Julian calendar was introduced in 45BC by Julius Caesar, taking over from the  Roman calendar . Under the Julian calendar each year has 365 days, except for a leap year  every four years which has 366 days.  This averages to 365.25 days.  This however does not approximate the actual tropical year  (e.g. based on the cycle of the seasons) close enough.  Specifically the average year was slightly longer than it should have been (365.24219). So how bad is the Julian calendar? 365.25 - 365.24219 = 0.00781 days 0.00781 * 24 * 60 = 11.2464 minutes It was gaining about 11.2464 minutes per year.  Hardly consequential - right?  Well, that results in an increase of 1 day every 128 years or so.  By now (2017) it would be 13 days out.  Though after 46,766 years (or so) the Julian calendar would be correct again... Gregorian calendar The problem was (mostly) corrected with a new calendar introduced by Pop...

I have a lot of travel photos taken on my DSLR that are missing the GPS location.  Having the location is handy for friends and family to see exactly where the photos were taken from.  Over time your own memory fades too. Most of my photos are in raw format (Canon CR2), and I can use Picasa to set the GPS location, but only after the photos have been processed and saved as JPG (or TIFF etc).  If I add the location to the raw image, then it saves the location to metadata that only Picasa recognises. If I go back and reprocess the raw photo, then the new JPG will have lost the location information.  What I needed was software that could add the location to the raw photo. I looked around for alternate software, and did try a few things.  Usually they didn't work on raw files, or were just clunky to use.  Many applications are also designed for taking coordinates from GPS loggers - which I don't have. Furthermore, I don't want to have to type in GPS c...

Picasa  is a quick and handy picture viewer and organiser for all the photos on your PC. Picasa was discontinued by Google in 2016 when they chose to focus exclusively on the cloud. Even though it was discontinued, Picasa is still my preferred software for viewing, searching and managing photos. This post will explain how you can still use Picasa, and specifically integrate with the new Google Photos cloud storage. In short Picasa is still useful.  Furthermore by integrating with Google Photos, you get great cloud hosting for backup and sharing.