Procras^H^H^H Gaining Experience in GIS and Mapping

I bought a new mobile phone. My old Siemens SK65 started to annoy me by being generally shaky and having a flickering display (as you might have noticed I am not that into Flickring anymore...)

So I got a Nokia, it has WLAN, can do VOIP, has lots of other stuff with fancy abbreviations. And it can talk to a GPS via bluetooth. So I bought a bluetooth GPS mouse. I tried the Nokia Sports Tracker which is quite cool but cannot do a lot. It can do tracking though.

I then found AFTrack, which can do everything, from tracking to moving map. If you use a bitmap map, you need to calibrate it, which really sucks doing with the mobile's keypad and it is really slow. So I tried to find a better way...

AFTrack can read OziExplorer map files. OziExplorer can read GeoTIFF with a plugin (via Import Map->Import single DRG Map). So taking a scanned map, reading it in GRASS, marking coordinates in GRASS, saving as GeoTIFF, transfering to my Laptop (Windows...) to read it in OziExplorer and save as map-file. Then editing the map file by hand to convert from UTM to Latitude/Longitude using a web-based converter. Then saving it on the microSD card of my mobile, importing it in AFTrack and voilá, now I know where I am and find my way around Erlangen. Not that I didn't before...

(If you ask now why I needed GRASS, and did not use OziExplorer from start: I hoped not to have to use OziExlorer. And knowing a bit what a GIS does is also fine. And it can do a lot of warping around the map to get rid of distortions...)

Next Step: get the maps of the Virgen-Valley onto my mobile, so that I can get lost in the alps next week.