Saturday, May 19, 2007

GPS



I got a PDA with GPS, WLAN and a lot of other stuff, including TomTom Navigation for west europe. So now be prepared to more boring posts about GPS...

This had as a consequence a lot of fights with the GPS and my computer. The PDA is running Windows Mobile, which is a pile of crap and annoys me with sheer stupidity. The WLAN connection is dying randomly, but else you can work with it under the normal annoyance level of Windows.

I installed Outdoor-GPS for tracking and general GPS purposes. It's free and looks quite nice. Tracks are saved as opx, so in a format which is actually usable. With gpsbabel you can convert it eg to kml and import the track in google earth, which you see in the screenshot (I took the GPS with me on the way to the supermarket. Inside it had no GPS reception, this caused the track to look like I went swimming in the pond.)

Getting google earth to run again was also some pain in the ass, for some reason it froze at the splashscreen and ate up all my CPU. What helped was exchanging libGL as mentioned here.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Be true, this was your training for the way home next weekend!!! But as far as I can remember... swimming in the pond we din't do the last years... may be a really good new idea!
XL