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.

Bikes and Computers

I got a new saddle for my bike today as the old one was falling apart. It has a ventilation system which keeps your rear end cool. Actually quite a nice feature...

I did a short cycle trip to check the saddle, to play with my GPS and to get some training. See picture for the trip, in total 19km.

The power supply of my computer died today, taking the fuse with it. So my living room (where also my fridge is located) was without electricity for some time... Fortunately the fridge is mostly empty. The computer was switched off while it happened, the computer has some fancy display which is always on, so the power supply was doing something. As it smelled quite badly, I think one of the capacities just exploded. This computer had about a year and a half... Hurray for reliable technology. So I am sitting now at my old desktop and wonder why I bought the new computer as it does not feel slower.

Web 2.0

Just returned from a field trip with fellow flickrites to the bergkirchweih... As we talked also a bit about geotagging, I was wondering, if you can include geo-tagged pictures in google earth. Well. You can... So, here is a google earth link of all my photos :-)

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.