Tidbits
Sleepover at Ikea - Maybe this is the only way to get to the $1 early enough…
A ramen bath - Japanese spa with special baths resembling instant noodles. I wanna play!
Old age homes for dogs - 1) Old dogs don’t like to be abandoned at strange places. 2) Playing with young puppies will probably cause the older dogs to die faster due to exhaustion.
A remote-controlled pigeon - Oh the poor thing…
An article on a brilliant method of teaching grade schoolers about bats and rabies. I smell a lawsuit.
Will trade beer for Crumpler bags. Tempted by the beanbag and messenger bags…
Photos
Fun with GPS Tracking
July 08, 2009, 10:16 pm
We were one of the early adopters of handheld automatic GPS units, way before Garmin and Tomtom became common household names. (You do not want to know how much we paid for our Nuvi!). It was great, no more printouts of first MS Streets and Trips, then Google Maps. Only problem is our unit takes forever to get a fix compared to the newer units, but we can live with that. But there are other features that are in other Garmin products that I wanted. One is called Position Reporting. They have it in their Rino line, which not only show you where you friends are, but is also a two-way radio. It would be very useful as Mike wanders off all the time. They also make a dog tracking unit called Astro that could accomplish the same goal.
Then there’s the track log feature (or cookie crumb trail), which is basically a record of your trip. The annoying thing is that your typical unit should be able to do that, but short of hacking into it, the manufacturers won’t let you have it (unless it’s advertised as a feature of course).
So I got my hands on one of their trail mapping units to play with. Ever since Ride for Heart (and getting a new bike), we’ve starting biking more this summer. There are tons of bike paths around town, but finding our way around, from bike path to road to bike path is rather difficult. Then I found sites like Bikely, where people upload their bike path that you can download and follow on your GPS.
Which is what I did. I googled for Don Valley bike, and found this Google Map “My Maps”. Then I used some free sites to convert Google Maps/Earth KML format into Garmin-friendly GPX format, loaded up into the GPS, and voila.
Then during the bike ride on Sunday, I turned on track logging, and produced this. There’s even pictures (Mike got an LX3 for his trip, so he was very trigger happy)!
You are also able to geotag your photos after the fact based on the timestamp in the track log and exif data. Garmin even comes with software to do that. The only problem is what to do with the geotagged photo afterwards. I do not see any easy to add them to “My Maps”. Heck, I couldn’t even figure out how to merged my lines together into a single line instead of five separate ones. Project for another day I guess.
Tagged: Activities, Geek
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© Maggie Tam 2007-2011 www.onechopstick.ca
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