This weekend I received two of my toys with which I plan to make good
use off while undertaking my 101 tasks.
The first item is pretty dull, it is a 3G Expresscard 34 card for my
Netbook. Nothing too special or exciting here, it isn't USB as I
really don't like the USB 3G dongle/modems, it slots into the Netbook
but still sticks out a fair chunk. It works though, which is the main
point, I had a spare T-Mobile sim card on which I activated the 5 days
for £2.50 broad band and gave it a test. It worked, what's more
surprising is that when I plugged it into Boomer, my Lenovo S10e
Netbook, which is running Jolicloud a derivative of Ubuntu, it
recognised it as such and let me set up the connection to T-Mobile.
Colour me impressed.
The second item which I received was my GPS tracker. This, I'm having
fun with. Currently I have an Android phone, specifically an HTC Hero,
which is actually growing on me a great deal. On that I've installed
an app from Google called "My Tracks". It uses the internal GPS to
track where you go and then it uploads the maps to Google Maps, so you
can browse them there. I find it quite enjoyable looking over trips
I've taken like that. Sadly though, it drains the batter of the phone
like nothing else. When I got my first Android phone, the G1, I was in
London and turned the tracks on, the phone lasted a whole 4 hours
before it died. That barely covered me from the hotel near Paddington
to Greenwich. Which is annoying because the ride on the Thames Clipper
service is an interesting map to look at.
So as I plan on doing a number of interesting things, like take
helecopter, boat and seaplane rides, travel to the furthest reaches of
Russia and so on, I wanted a better way of tracking my movements.
I had a quick look about and discovered a USB stick type GPS tracker
but it was about £100, fine but I decided to check ebay after that and
found trackers that were just slightly larger than a box of matches
for about £30. Kerching. Sold!
I gave it a try over the weekend, now the interesting thing about this
tracker is that you can specify the rate at which it records your
track, so the first trip, the one in purple was taken with the
recorder doing it's thing every 5 seconds. The second trip, the one in
the lurid limeish colour was taken the following day with the setting
changed to record every 5 meters. I think I prefer the second setting
myself, it cuts out a lot of the milling and wavering about that gets
recorded when you are standing still for any length of time.
One thing I've had fun with is loading the tracks into Google Earth
and then following the trips in the virtual helecopter. I think that
would make an interesting screen saver.
If you fancy getting one of these yourself, this is the tracker I picked up Blumax Bluetooth GPS-4043 Recorder Data Logger
