Diario de xpacifica

Happy New Year to everyone. My trusted old Galaxy Note 4 phone with its 16MP camera died about a week ago. This past Sunday was my first hike on Mt. Tam without any type of camera in... decades! I was thinking back about this - prior to having smartphones was the era when I would sometimes go up there with a Canon PowerShot camera. I think I had an S30 and then later an S40. I am actually finding not having a mobile phone to be liberating. I'm lucky that I'm old enough to remember when that was simply normal. Not having a mobile phone is giving me an odd sense of deja vu this past week.

I was in Northeast Ohio for two weeks in mid-December and attempted to make some observations in the cold which was difficult because my fingers would quickly start to hurt when taking the gloves off to take pictures. However on one walk with my cousin I did manage to make quite a few observations one of which included an Eastern Hemlock tree which was interesting because its needles reminded me a lot of Sequoia sempervirens. I researched this and though they are both in the Pinales order, they are in different families.

People may have noticed that I "liked" some observations that people have made in southern Alaska. I am very intrigued about the climate of the immediate coastal zones along the Pacific coast in places like Ketchikan and it fascinates me that some plants that can be found growing along the coast around San Francisco can also be found thousands of miles to the north. There are parts of coastal Alaska that rarely go below freezing even in the winter. It's funny because right after researching this, when I was in Ohio the same cousin who went with me on the hike said she is going to Alaska this coming Summer.

About a week ago I was near Marshall's beach and observed a stachys - I think this was the first stachys I've seen down there and it was exciting to see it. Unfortunately my phone died before I had a chance to upload the observation. I think that I have managed to save the iNaturalist application data so that I can restore it to a new phone and upload the observations.

My plan is to get an LG G5 phone which also has a 16MP camera which is rated highly. Unlike many if not most phones nowadays the G5 has a replaceable battery. I tend to burn through batteries quickly due to the number of pictures I take and not being able to replace the battery is a major drawback.

Fortunately even though the screen was dead it is possible to connect to the phone with adb and pull the iNaturalist app data from /data/data/org.inaturalist.android

In particular the inaturalist.db database contained in the databases directory is what is useful. This is an sqlite3 database and the following two tables are what I needed: observations, observation_photos. If there had been sounds then observation_sounds would also have been useful.

The date field is in Unix timestamp with milliseconds format which needed to be converted to local date/time format, and the _id from the observations table needs to be matched with _observation_id from the observation_photos table. The tables are connected using a join.

The relevant fields necessary to create an observation are:
observations.observed_on
observations.latitude
observations.longitude
observations.species_guess
observations.description
observation_photos.original_photo_filename

Finally, I also only wanted the observations that were made from 12/26/2019 onward. These records are filtered using a WHERE clause.

Here is the actual command:

SELECT observations._id, 
observations.observed_on, 
datetime(ROUND(observations.observed_on / 1000), 'unixepoch') AS isodate, 
observations.latitude, 
observations.longitude, 
observations.species_guess, 
observations.description, 
observation_photos.original_photo_filename 
FROM observations 
JOIN observation_photos ON observations._id=observation_photos._observation_id 
WHERE isodate > '2019-12-25 23:59:59';

Here is the output:

264|1577387141872|2019-12-26 19:05:41|37.9038325792225|-122.571555711329|asteraceae||/storage/7672-BA7A/DCIM/Camera/20191226_120451.jpg
265|1577388307000|2019-12-26 19:25:07|37.8969966246212|-122.569546736777|Angiospermae||/storage/7672-BA7A/DCIM/Camera/20191226_122507.jpg
266|1577388787000|2019-12-26 19:33:07|37.896361120291|-122.566486671567|asteraceae||/storage/7672-BA7A/DCIM/Camera/20191226_123307.jpg
267|1577388922000|2019-12-26 19:35:22|37.8961060703826|-122.566429004073|asteraceae||/storage/7672-BA7A/DCIM/Camera/20191226_123522.jpg
268|1577389296000|2019-12-26 19:41:36|37.8960055317941|-122.563664652407|Angiospermae||/storage/7672-BA7A/DCIM/Camera/20191226_124136.jpg
269|1577390172000|2019-12-26 19:56:12|37.8937439064166|-122.564252726734|angiosperms||/storage/7672-BA7A/DCIM/Camera/20191226_125613.jpg
270|1577390730000|2019-12-26 20:05:30|37.8923648840782|-122.567022442818|Angiospermae|Tastes good|/storage/7672-BA7A/DCIM/Camera/20191226_130531.jpg
271|1577392176000|2019-12-26 20:29:36|37.8967288774207|-122.575220279396|Angiospermae||/storage/7672-BA7A/DCIM/Camera/20191226_132936.jpg
272|1577392301000|2019-12-26 20:31:41|37.8974127949668|-122.574964463711|gilled mushrooms||/storage/7672-BA7A/DCIM/Camera/20191226_133142.jpg
273|1577996487000|2020-01-02 20:21:27|37.8002776774237|-122.479512691498|grasses||/storage/7672-BA7A/DCIM/Camera/20200102_132127.jpg
274|1577996858000|2020-01-02 20:27:38|37.8011270032275|-122.479240782559|asteraceae||/storage/7672-BA7A/DCIM/Camera/20200102_132738.jpg
275|1577997057000|2020-01-02 20:30:57|37.8014438421677|-122.479247152805|Hedgenettles|Hairy leaves and stems leaves have lemon-y scent|/storage/7672-BA7A/DCIM/Camera/20200102_133057.jpg

Based on this I recovered all the information necessary to create these 12 un-uploaded observations using the pictures which I also saved from the phone.