While cleaning out my ginormous pile of tabs in Firefox today I stumbled on this Gizmodo article about the new Leica V-LUX 20. It has a GPS chip inside and geotags where photos are taken.

My dream!

I’ve been manually geotagging my photos on Flickr for quite a long time. (Not to mention titling, describing, and tagging my local images; it’s quite a process.) It’s something that the iPhone does to photos taken (if you have the setting turned on). Many other phone cameras and DSLR cameras also geotag photos and video.

Unless you’ve been living in a bunker (I.e., with no GPS signal), you’ll know that geolocation services have exploded over the past couple of years. Kaboom!

Services like Gowalla, Whrrl, and Foursquare have made it easier to connect with friends in real life. Or, ahem, stalk them. And all of the aforementioned services have partnerships with various businesses (such as Ben & Jerry’s, NJ Nets, and Murphy USA) to offer discounts/coupons on products to entice people to “check-in” to their business.

Back to cameras.

I bought my Panasonic Lumix TZ5 in September 2008. It’s a very good point-and-shoot camera. The wide-angle 10x zoom lens covers so much range that I don’t need any other camera. It is a bit on the bulky side, but that’s the price I pay for performance. Oh, and it records HD 720p video — which is very important to me.

The Leica V-LUX 20 is almost physically identical to my Panasonic camera, but it packs a higher zoom range, GPS, and hasn’t fallen into the trend of encoding the video in AVCHD; win!

Sony has had GPS in their flagship point-and-shoot cameras and camcorders for a while now. They have similar specs to the Leica and it’s hard to choose between these two brands as they both make very sharp glass.

When these cameras are used with applications like iPhoto (geotagged photos are automatically placed on a map) and Flickr, then combined with services like Gowalla and Whrrl, well, you’ll have a truly streamlined REAL life.

Oh, and the fact that the iPhone 4 geotags videos is huge. I guarantee your mind is going to be blown up (Exploded. Everywhere.) when you see the integration of video into real life locations. You’ll probably want to keep an eye on sites like Viddler.

Footnote: Stalking is bad. Don’t do it. So is lying. I guarantee it’s going to be near impossible to lie (about anything) in a few years due to technologies like GPS. You better get your honesty cap on!

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This morning Allie and woke up really early, and went out to watch Queen Elizabeth II sail in to Sydney Harbour.

At 6am she strolled through the heads sounding her horn. We watched from Middle Head; a perfect view.

Once she’d past Middle Head, we got back in the car and went down the road to Bradleys Head. (I’d never been there before; the view of Sydney Harbour is the most amazing I’ve ever seen!) As we arrived the QE2 was just passing by. Perfect.

We shot some beautiful photographs, and I filmed the video below on Will’s Sony HDV video camera.

The Queen Elizabeth II docked at Garden Island, while the Queen Victoria – Cunard’s latest cruise ship – docked at Circular Quay the day before.

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