Earlier today I discovered I had a quandry. I want to be able to track my runs to see how far I go, where I go, how long it takes me, what kind of altitude changes I experience, current speed, airspeed of coconut laden swallows, and that kind of thing.
After a little bit of poking around I found a free piece of GPS mapping software called GPSVP. I downloaded and installed it, and could not get a GPS signal. Durr.
Here is the solution.
Run GPSVP
Tap “Menu”
Tap “Setup->Settings”
Change the “Port” to COM4
Change the Port Speed to 4800
It now connects to the GPS satallites just fine.
To use the software, just start it up and go about your business. After you are done with your run, it generates a “track” file. Then simply upload that using GPS Visualizers Google Earth or Google Maps converter.
Tada! You now have a cool record of your run! Including distance, altitude, etc.
Some of my friends and I went to BiggBy’s yesterday night, and I tagged along. One of my other friends is a barista there. Fast forward to today, when I took my colleague, compatriot and minion Davin to BiggBy. Since they had just opened they have these awesome buy one get one free coupons, which I didn’t happen to have on me. I asked the nice barista if I could have one. She did a (highly exaggerated) eye roll, sighed, and said “I guess so” and smiled at me. I laughed and said “Well, you’re much nicer than the barista last night.” She handed my my receipt which I promptly began signing and she said “Oh yea?” Me, lost in my own little receipt signing world didn’t even look up and (thinking that my friend was the barista yesterday) responded “No.”
All of a sudden it hit me what I had just said. I looked up, horror stricken and started apologizing profusely. “Oh my gosh, I did not mean to say that, I don’t know why I said that, I am so sorry, that was incredibly cruel, I cannot believe I said that!” Meanwhile, Davin is standing there just cracking up.
I know, this seems rather silly and inane, but I seriously miss how in Ubuntu I could have the window focus follow mouse, whereas in OS X I cannot do that. I can make the window come to the front, but if I just want the focus to follow where the mouse is I cannot get that to happen :(.
Woohoo! Open Source at work! much thanks to Tom Wright, who sent me an email with an update to the Thesaurus Ubiquity Command. Not sure how to do multiple contributors, or I’d add him.
So, I find it horribly amusing that an the official Owosso Michigan home page hired a Canadian marketing firm to design and build their website. I’m also horribly amused by the fact that they didn’t build iin spam protection! The site appears to have gone live fairly recently, and when I first visited they had no spam, and now they have 3 spam articles at the very top of their page.
What I Like!
I’m all for making central hubs of information based upon a location. Owosso.com Looks like it will be great for finding up to date news, as well as pulling in information, and maybe even advertising my services. The facebook page is cool because it lets people from Owosso sort of socialize. That’s neat, I dig!
Update! Tom Wright sent me an updated script for it with a preview pane! I’ve updated the original JS file! OK, so I’ve been slacking lately… But I found I had need of a thesaurus and figured ubiquity would be a great place to start. The command is simply “thesaurus word” and it opens up a thesaurus.reference.com page with the, you guessed it, word :-D. Not sure how much time it will save, but it is nice for pulling up quick references. Future revisions will include a preview pane… Maybe.
I was reading a post on Adactio titled The Framework Age. The article made an interesting correlation between how the Internet and web services are evolving and how Music evolved in the early to mid 20th century. It was specifically referencing a lecture given by Liz Danzico in which she tells the story of a musician who created an album based off the concept of “creative instability.” This begs the question, “What is creative instability?”