Here are the steps to do so manually on any OS:

1. Download assistme.dat using this link
2. Download assistme.md5 using this link
3. Verify that the MD5 sum of the assistme.dat file matches the one in the assistme.md5 file
4. Create a top-level folder hierarchy on the memory card for the camera (not the internal memory of the camera) called PRIVATE/SONY/GPS/
5. Place the downloaded assistme.dat file in the PRIVATE/SONY/GPS/ folder
6. Place the memory card in the camera and verify that the GPS Assist Data is valid

IMPORTANT: The GPS Assist Data is only valid for approximately 30 days, after which it is necessary to re-import the data.

Brix Andersen has written a small perl script for automating the above tasks. The script takes the mount point of the memory card as argument. It will run on any OS that has Perl installed.

You can get a copy using this link.

Technology News: Car of the future emerges at Las Vegas electronics show
It has four wheels, is always connected and the driver is optional: the car of the future is starting to take shape from collaboration between automakers and their technology partners. At this week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, a new breed of cars with nearly complete autonomy and elaborate gadgetry has provided a peek into transportation solutions in the coming years. One of the most ambitious of the prototypes on display comes from German auto giant Daimler, which rolled its electric-powered Mercedes-Benz F 015 through the streets of Las Vegas without a driver to show how four occupants can converse face-to-face while leaving the driving to an on-board computer. The interactivity extends beyond the vehicle itself: the car can project a virtual crosswalk to assist pedestrians in its path.
Read full story => BangkokPost

Programming News: Which programming language is the most popular in your state?
Python is huge in Idaho, and Michigan loves PHP. That’s the upshot of a map of the most-tweeted programming languages across the 50 states as measured by Experts Exchange, a network for tech professionals. Although tweeting isn’t necessarily the best indicator of popularity, the map, based on activity in October 2014, does reveal a surprising geographic variation in coding languages. Most notably, Java has a stronghold in New York and New Jersey, but also New Mexico and Minnesota. C# is big down south, while California and Texas love them some JavaScript.
Read full story => Mashable

Photography News: 15 Tips for Protecting Your Images While Traveling
You have saved and saved and spent a large investment to go on a trip, on your photography gear, to photograph what matters to you, and to create lasting memories and images. Losing your images is not an option. Have you thought about the precautions to help make sure your images are safe after the shutter is pressed? Many people cringe at the thought of losing their images while traveling or any other time for that matter, and rarely do they think it will happen to them. Yet, unfortunately the reality is that people lose their precious images. Has your memory card ever suddenly decided to give you the dreaded “error” notice? Maybe your new back-up hard drive failed or maybe you simply lost your camera bag by leaving it in the over-head bin of the airplane? Sound familiar? Maybe one of these situations has happened to you, or one of the many other possibilities that can occur to ruin all of your dream trip photography has taken place.
Read full story => DigitalPhotographySchool

Dear Mr. Cook,

“It just works.” That’s getting tougher and tougher for us OS X and iOS users to say with straight faces lately.

Read full story => SiteName

Technology News: Bold Predictions Sure to Go Wrong in 2015
For the past three years I’ve made an attempt at predicting what the future might hold for the Educational world, usually around the area of technology. The truth is, anyone can predict fairly obvious things (like Google will be the number 1 search engine), so what I attempt to do here is make some daring predictions that may or may not come true (like Alta Vista will make a comeback! Ok…maybe not that daring). Here’s a look at my 2013 and 2014 predictions which I also review every year to see how I did. Some of my predictions that have gone right include my 2013 predictions that a non-Apple devices will rise up to challenge iPads in education (see Chromebooks) and my 2014 that a new form of social media will crop up with teens (see YikYak or Whisper). And so, I present to you, my 2015 bold predictions that are sure to go wrong this year.
Read full story => HookedOnInnovation

Programming News: Significant Software Development Developments of 2014
One of my favorite posts to write each year is the year-ending summary of some of the developments in the world of software development that I have read about or observed during that year. As with any opinionated posts, these are significant developments from my perspective and may be more or less significant to others than they are to me. I’ll undoubtedly completely miss some significant events in the world of software development during 2014 as well.
Read full story => MarxSoftware

Photography News: 13 photography truths you cannot disagree with
There’s plenty of photography advice out there that deals with the nuts and bolts of camera technique and photography concepts. But what about the stuff that other photographers don’t tell you when you’re starting out in photography – the facts that you only discover after putting in the hours, months and years with a camera? Well, we’re here to save you some time. Here are 13 digital photography truths that you’d normally only get to appreciate with hindsight. We challenge you to disagree with any of them…
Read full story => PhotoVenture

Technology News: News flash: CIOs are sick of cloud everything
For those who wanted cloudwashing to just go away, 2014 wasn’t a very good year. But that won’t keep CIOs and other techies from hoping the practice — in which vendors and others append the term “cloud” to almost anything, whether it’s relevant or not — will die in the coming year, as CIO Journal (paywall) pointed out in its year-in-review opus.
Read full story => Gigaom

Programming News: A Comprehensive Story of ‘this’ in JavaScript
‘this’ keyword just got a whole lot easier to understand! Variable scoping has always been a part of every programming language. Whether we are using a class based object oriented language (e.g. Java/C#) or a class-less object oriented language, scope has a very important role to play. In easiest terms, scope defines the visibility of any variable/data. In JavaScript, you can define a piece of code (function/method) globally or you can keep it within an object and expose it for public use. The keyword ‘this’ has a special significance when it comes to JavaScript. Other languages also use the ‘this’ keyword but it needs some serious attention if you are trying to use or understand it in JavaScript world.
Read full story => CodeProject

Photography News: What produces the best photographs?
I don’t know about you, but many of my best photographs are from some time ago when I was using equipment that is not near as technically good as today’s equipment. It would seem as if some things that led to great photographs in the past are being lost in today’s choices. Today’s lenses are technically very good, yet in many cases are approaching a level of perfection that to some extent takes away from the character of photographs, especially as more and more photographers seem to be after a crispness, sharpness, and loss of distortion across the entire image. If we all could afford the technically best lenses, shoot them at the F Stop the produces the best technical image, and they were all easy to use – what would that do to the world of photography?
Read full story => mu–43

Technology News: Smart House predicted the smart home in 1999. So where is it?
In 1999, before internet of things was a buzz word and back when we still used floppy disks, there was a movie called Smart House. It was a Disney Channel Original movie, directed by LeVar Burton, and unless you are in your early 20s (or a parent to a millennial), you’ve probably never seen it. But if you happened to catch its run on the Disney Channel, at the changing of the millennia, you would’ve seen the future: an intelligent home with a built-in Siri-esque AI that could do anything from control your home temperature to cook meals. It projected rock concerts or waves to wake you up. And if you had seen it, you would be left, like me, wondering why it’s not here yet.
Read full story => Gigaom

Programming News: Coding Standards and Best Programming Practices
Anybody can write code. With a few months of programming experience, you can write ‘working applications’. Making it work is easy, but doing it the right way requires more work, than just making it work. Believe it, majority of the programmers write ‘working code’, but not ‘good code’. Writing ‘good code’ is an art and you must learn and practice it. Everyone may have different definitions for the term ‘good code’. In my definition, the following are the characteristics of good code:

• Reliable
• Maintainable
• Efficient

Read full story => CodeProject

Photography News: 9 creative photo ideas to try in January
As part of our ongoing series to help you get more creative with your digital camera, each month we publish some fun, seasonal, creative photo ideas to help inspire your imagination. Along with some amazing images, we’ve also provided some quick photography tips by both amateur and professional photographers who are experts in these fields. We’re kicking off January with a new list of exciting projects like finding ways to make photo art from the mundane and everyday, astrophotography, movie poster portraits and many more.
Read full story => DigitalCameraWorld

Technology News: UK wants hot tech grads to do spy work before building startups
The British government is considering a program that would see the most promising tech graduates spend some time working for the GCHQ signals intelligence agency, the U.K.’s equivalent to the NSA, before they move into the private sector. As per a Thursday article in The Independent, confirmed to me by the Cabinet Office on Friday, the scheme would give the U.K. a rough equivalent to the system in Israel, where many tech entrepreneurs have come out of Unit 8200 of the Israel Defence Force. Unit 8200 is also a signals intelligence operation, and the cybersecurity firm Palo Alto Networks is a notable spinout.
Read full story => Gigaom

Programming News: Problem Solving for Software Engineers
The work of the software engineer is a never-ending effort of solving complex logical problems with ever-changing tools and technologies. We spend a great deal of time learning trending technologies and keeping up with new frameworks and methodologies. Yet, we frequently neglect to develop the very core skill of our profession, the ability of thinking critically and creatively about problems and their solutions. In 1945, the Hungarian mathematician George Pólya published “How to solve it”, a very unique and insightful book on heuristic, the art of reasoning upon a problem. While mostly focused on mathematics, many of the guidelines provided in this small volume are generic in nature and can be applied to any logical problem. Following is my attempt to ‘flavor’ these key problem solving concepts based on my experience as a developer. There are four main phases that are clearly identifiable in the process of solving problems:
Understanding the problem, Devising the plan, Carrying out the plan and Retrospection.
Read full story => CodeProject

Photography News: 10 photography techniques you can use everyday
It’s a new year, and many of you are probably getting to grips with new cameras! In their first guest blog post of 2015, the team at Photoventure suggest ten photography techniques you can use everyday to help improve your images and become a better photographer.
Read full story => DigitalCameraWorld

Technology News: The Solar System Is Slowly Re-Arranging Itself
The Enūma Anu Enlil, a series of 70 clay tablets, was found in the ruins of King Ashurbanipal’s library in Nineveh (on the eastern bank of the River Tigris, opposite modern-day Mosul in Iraq). The name means “in the days of Anu and Enlil”; Anu was the sky god, Enlil the wind god. The tablets, which date as far back as 1950 BC, list 7,000 omens from Babylonian astrology: “If the moon can be seen on the first day, the land will be happy.” But tablet 63 is different: it gives the times when Venus first became visible, or disappeared, over a 21-year period. This Venus tablet of Ammisaduqa is the earliest known record of planetary observations. The Babylonians were expert astronomers who produced star catalogues and tables of eclipses, planetary motion and changes in the length of day. They were also capable mathematicians, with a number system much like ours, but using base 60 rather than ten. They could solve quadratic equations and calculate the diagonal of a square with precision, and they applied their mathematical skills to the heavens. In those days, mathematics and astronomy were part and parcel of astrology and religion, and the whole package was intimately bound up with agriculture through the progression of the seasons.
Read full story => NewRepublic

Programming News: Future of Programming – Rise of the Scientific Programmer (and fall of the craftsman)
[Disclaimer: I am by no means a Scientific Programmer but I just want to become one] It is the turn of yet another year and the time is ripe for the last year reviews, predictions for the new year and its resolutions. Last year I made some bold statements and made some radical decisions to start transitioning. I picked up a Mac, learnt some Python and Bash and a year on, I think it was good and really enjoyed it. Still (as I predicted), I spent most of my time writing C#. [working on a Reactive Cloud Actor micro-Framework, in case for any reason it interests you]. Now a year on, Microsoft is a different company: new CEO, moving towards Open Source and embracing non-Windows operating systems. So how it is going to shift the innovation imbalance is a wait-and-see. But anyway, that was last year and is behind us. Now let’s talk about 2015. And perhaps programming in general. Are you sick of hearing Big Data buzzwords? Do you believe Data Science is a pile of mumbo jumbo to bamboozle us and actually used by a teeny tiny number of companies, and producing value even less? IoT is just another hype? I hope by reading the below, I would have been able to answer you. Sorry, no TL;DR
Read full story => ByteRot

Photography News: Fun with Macro Photography
Macro photography has been on my bucket list of photography genres to experiment with for a long time. Unfortunately, a good macro lens is not cheap and, since I have no use for it for my commercial work, it is not an expense that I can easily justify. However, I am a firm believer that when you make a living with your photography, it is essential to work on personal projects to keep your passion alive and fresh. Just like the fish eye lens, the macro lens is the perfect toy for any photographer. I received one for my birthday last spring and my adventure into the world of macro discoveries and challenges began. Like many photographers, I concentrated first on capturing macro images of flowers and insects. I enjoyed it and learned a lot, but quickly realized I wanted to try other things. Besides, there is snow cover for four to five months a year where I live, so opportunities for outdoor macro photography are limited. I decided to step up my macro photography efforts and experiment with other shots.
Read full story => DigitalPhotographySchool

Technology News: Dylan’s Desk: Four trends to watch in the coming year
It’s the traditional time for journalists to take a look at the past year, extend the trendlines forward, and make some predictions about how the coming year will play out. Unfortunately, journalists’ track record on that score is not so great. For instance, three years ago, I predicted five gadgets would dominate headlines in 2013: the Lytro camera, the Kindle Fire 2, the Tesla Model S, Nokia’s Lumia phone, and Apple’s iTV television set. Of those five, only one did really well — the Tesla — while the Kindle Fire took its sweet time about becoming a big deal, really taking off only in 2014. Lytro is all but out of business, Nokia sold itself to Microsoft after failing to take the world by storm, and Apple’s long-awaited television still doesn’t even exist. In my defense, I’ll say this: All five were really cool ideas. But sometimes “cool” isn’t enough to make a product a stunning market success, or even a reality.
Read full story => VentureBeat

Programming News: Web Beacon Speedup for Improved User Experience
Web Beacons have been used by site developers to understand the behavior of customers. These Beacons are used, among other things, to count the users who visit a web page, track scrolling within the page, or count clicks on a particular ad/video etc. Sometimes these beacons can either take too long or too many beacons are fired from the page, thereby slowing down the performance of the site. Most beacon servers normally have an proxy server fronting them, so all requests pass through them. Lets look at what we can do to minimize the impact of these Beacons on the site performance by using the proxy.
Read full story => Perfplanet

Photography News: After Dusk – What You Need to Know About Night Photography
As photographers, our medium is light, yet some of the most dramatic and evocative images we take are when there is a distinct lack of light, in other words, evening or night photography. In this article we aim to give you a few tips on getting the best out of your night photography. Night photography can be split into to distinct timeframes, the hour just after sunset, l’Heure Blue as the French call it, which translates as the Blue Hour and the time after, the night proper. The two need slightly different approaches and can give very different results.
Read full story => LightStalking

Technology News: This Diagram Shows Cornell’s Revolutionary Method For Taking Notes
Business Insider recently discovered that we’ve been taking notes wrong for decades. This is shocking, given that we’re reporters, and notetaking is basically our job. But MIT grad Hooman Katirai revealed to us that the standard method for notetaking — listen to what someone says, write down what you want to remember — is not the best way. We present the Cornell Notetaking System.
Read full story => BusinessInsider

Programming News: A Collection Of Useful jQuery CSS3 Navigation Menu Tutorials
Are you looking for some good and detailed tutorials on creating jQuery navigation menu? Do you want to create useful and fully functional navigation menu by using jQuery? If your answer is yes, then this compilation of 40 useful jQuery navigation menu tutorials is for you. We hope that you will like this collection and feel these tutorials helping as well. So, take a look at this collection and grab some amazing techniques to make your website navigation easier for your visitors in order to find their desired content. Feel free to share your opinions with us via comment section below. Your comments are always more than welcome. Let us have a look. Enjoy!
Read full story => SmashingApps

Photography News: Ten tips for taking great iPhone photos
It’s almost the new year, and to celebrate, we’re going to try starting a new section on photography tips. Former iMore editor Leanna Lofte used to run a regular column back in the day, and we’ve had multiple requests to start it up again, so here goes. I’ll be covering both iPhoneography and DSLR tips here, though we’re going to start off with some how-tos for the portable camera most of you have in your pocket right now: The iPhone. The iPhone is a fantastic device for snapping pictures: It has excellent hardware, smart software, and it’s easy enough for your grandmother to use. It has limitations, as any camera does, but you can work around most of them by being smart about your snapping. Here are ten of my favorite tips to help you along the way.
Read full story => iMore

Technology News: The ‘Third Era’ of IT will bring massive changes to the data center
Imagine you worked in a data center a decade ago and then moved to a remote island. Ten years later, you’ve returned and it’s your first day back in the data center. You walk in and survey your surroundings. The servers have all been virtualized. Much of the software controlling them has changed. In short, it’s a very, very different world. But then you notice something strange: Despite the huge datacenter changes, the networking gear today is virtually indistinguishable from the way it was when you left a decade ago. That’s about to change as we enter what I call the “Third Era of IT.” With Big Data, mobile, and the Internet of Things putting an ever greater strain on the network, the status quo is about to get thrown on its head. As someone with three decades in the IT industry, I can appreciate how far the networking industry has already come, even as we stand on the verge of yet another huge change. When I first started at the minicomputer company Digital Equipment Corporation, in the early ‘80s, the IT industry was monolithic, meaning everything — storage, compute, networking, applications — was combined in one central mainframe/minicomputer.
Read full story => VentureBeat

Programming News: What It Really Takes To Be A Professional Programmer
There’s a lot more to professional programming than writing code. From working with a team to solve problems to version control, you won’t make it to the major leagues without a toolkit of other critical skills. With all the buzz about learning to code, it’s easy to think that knowing a programming language is all it takes to be a professional developer. However, like other jobs, it takes more than one skill to really be great. We can’t list everything that every programmer may need, but here are some of the most important skills (besides coding) you should work on if you really want to be a developer.
Read full story => LifeHacker

Photography News: Don’t Miss Out: Soon These 12 Photography Training Deals Will Be Gone Forever
As 2014 races to an end – so too are our amazing 12 photography deals of Christmas. In just on 48 hours (as the calendar ticks over into 2015 US Eastern Time) these fantastic deals will close forever. Among them are some great savings to be had – up to 88% off resources that will help you make 2015 the year of great photos! Each year we get readers ask for our recommendation on the best deals to pick up so as this all comes to an end we like to reveal the best selling deals so you can see what is hot! Of course the best deal is what is right for you. All these deals come with 60 day money back guarantees so if you’re not quite sure if a deal is for you you can pick it up and then get your money back if you find it doesn’t meet your expectations. It’s also worth saying that while the first 4 in the list stood out from the rest of the pack considerably – there wasn’t a great deal between the other 8 in the list!
Read full story => DigitalPhotographySchool