Tagged: Technology RSS

  • Dave 11:10 pm on October 11, 2009 Permalink
    Tags: duet, logitech, squeezebox, Technology   

    Squeezebox Duet update 

    Squeezebox Duet

    I wrote previously about what a hugely frustrating experience using the Logitech Squeezebox Duet was. More recently version 7.4 of the Squeezebox server software was released and along with it, some new firmware for the Duet.

    This new firmware has transformed the device for me. There are still little annoyances, but on the whole, the device does what it’s supposed to do just about all of the time – it’s a massively different experience to how it behaved with the older firmware.

    Overall, it seems like a much more polished product than how it started. It really should have been like this when it was released. Regardless, I’m finding that I actually use it a lot more now that it’s not a pain in the arse.

     

  • Dave 7:28 pm on December 1, 2008 Permalink
    Tags: , , Technology   

    BT I-Plate 

    A few weeks ago, I fitted a BT I-Plate to the phone socket that my ADSL router is plugged in to.

    This little plastic gizmo is supposed to, well, I’ll knick this bit of text :

    The I-Plate (also known as IPLATE) is a special ADSL filter that can be easily installed to improve the speed and stability of your connection. It works by filtering electrical interference created by TVs, lights, extension wiring and other everyday electrical equipment in the home.

    This interference is usually caused by phone extension wiring as it acts like a giant antennae picking up interference. Some lines have seen up to 4 Mbps increases in speed although improvements of 1.5 Mbps were found to be more typical in a benchmark survey of 36,000 filtered lines. This I-Plate can also help with poor performing long lines.

    I completely forgot that I’d fitted it after a day or two of checking that I’d not made things worse. I’ve been doing some checking though, and my connection used to reach a maximum download speed of 670Kb/sec – it now maxes out at about 830Kb/sec.

    This is almost a year after I was getting 15Kb/sec when using Virgin Media! Since I left Virgin Media, I’ve been using ADSL24 and I’ve not had a single issue in the 12 months I’ve used them.

    So, hooray for the BT IPlate giving me a near 25% speed boost and hooray for ADSL24 for doing a perfect job invisibly.

    I bought my Iplate from ADSL24 for a tenner.

     

  • Dave 8:18 pm on November 6, 2008 Permalink
    Tags: , evernote, fringe, game, , Technology,   

    Some Good Stuff 

    I’ve not posted for a while so he’s a picture of a donkey and a horse to make up for that.

    Two friends with ticklish noses

    Both of them were big fans of having their noses stroked and showed no signs of getting bored with it – so when we left they would just have to wait for the next set of people to come along and fuss over them.

    Anyway, the rest of this post is a list of some stuff that I’ve either enjoyed or found useful that I thought I’d share. It’s a right mix of stuff:

    It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia

    iasip

    The series continues to make me laugh. Now in it’s fourth season. The main characters are all self serving and amoral and Danny DeVito is just great.

    They really need to get some UK DVD’s released though.

    More info at FX.

    Fringe

    fringe

    Fringe is a TV show with hints of The X Files. In the screenshot above, some of the main characters are enjoying some food and Spongebob Squarepants on TV. The cow is called Gene. One of my favourite moments, other than the one pictured above, saw them driving across town chasing some homing pigeons that had been tuned to home in on somebody’s magnetic field. Thankfully a lot of it isn’t silly, but it’s a nice balanced mix.

    World of Goo

    worldofgoo

    This is just a lovely game. Very simple – get a lot of goo balls to the exit. More at 2dboy.com.

    Evernote

    evernote

    Evernote is a great application/service. It stores notes and lets you search them. There are plenty of things that do this already, but over the years, everthing I’ve tried has just been lacking. Evernote is very good at it’s job and in all the time I have been using it, the speed of development and improvement has been quite impressive too.

    I use evernote to store notes about anything and everything. I can drag PDF documents in to it, clip a section of a web page, send it a photo or recording from my mobile phone and it all goes in to the searchable pot. The windows client I use synchronises with the web so that I can get to my notes from anywhere. There is a mobile client for some mobile phone times but also a mobile version of the site for other mobile users.

    There are lots of nice things about this. For example, if I take a photo of something I want to remember on my phone and send it to Evernote, when I’m searching for it later, it will recognise words inside the photos too. This means, for example, that if you snap a photo of a business card, you’ll be able to search for the person’s name or company and find the details. It’s not just nicely typed text it recognises either, it has a really good success rate with hand written stuff.

    For me, it’s great for technical bits and bobs that I always used to end up searching for time after time. I also use it to store quite a large library or walking routes in PDF format. The has multiple advantages over my previous method of storing them – just in a folder on my computer with filenames that tried to explain what the walk was about.

    Now that they’re inside Evernote, I can browse them visually with full previews of the map and route, I can search for phrases that are within the route description and place names too. So if I fancy a walk that takes in the village of Longnor, I can search for that and find some.

    It also means that all of this stuff is backed up away from my computer in case disaster ever hits it.

    Evernote has become invaluable to me. More at evernote.com.

     

    • Stephen Hill 1:30 pm on November 7, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      Hi Dave,

      Evernote is awesome. I was using OneNote for quite a while until Evernote came along, which has the big advantage of being web based and available on almost any device.

      Great little write-up :)

      Stephen

  • Dave 1:40 pm on May 25, 2008 Permalink
    Tags: , Technology,   

    Back to Windows 

    For the last month I’ve been using OpenSuse Linux as my main operating system on my home computer. I have now switched back to using Windows Vista Home Premium (64bit).

    During the month I tried to just use Linux and not switch back to Windows for anything. In theory, anything I needed Windows for, I should make the effort and search out a useable alternative in Linux. This was usually possible, even if I wasn’t entirely happy with what I could find.

    General desktop and office type tasks were fine. Browsing the Internet was perfectly pleasant except for the fact that I used the 64 bit version of OpenSuse and there isn’t an official version of the Flash player for 64 bit versions of Linux. It was possible to get it working using a bit of jiggery pokery but this wasn’t quite right. There were still places that used Flash that just didn’t work properly. It didn’t seem that stable either and Flash playback would stutter if you tried to do anything else at the same time.

    My biggest problems though were trying to process photographs. I tried a number of free programs, the best of which was called DigiKam, but after using Lightroom, it felt like very basic. Comparing Digikam against a commercial product isn’t really fair though. I had a look at some of the commercial offerings for Linux and found Bibble Pro and Lightzone. Lightzone seemed very basic as well. Bibble Pro seemed to be quite good, but it didn’t have any support for my Ricoh GX100’s RAW format (which is DNG format, but standards aren’t really standards I guess).

    The end result of trying to use all of this software for processing photographs was that it slowed me right down and I just couldn’t process my photos nicely, easily or quickly.

    Using Linux full time seems a lot more plausible this time than any time before when I’ve tried it, but there are still problems. Not having a standard installation mechanism seems to be a huge problem that needs to be sorted out. Some of the installation instructions I followed seemed downright bizarre. Some software installed and didn’t let you know it had completed correctly, or even give you a choice or tell you where it had installed to. On a couple of occasions I found myself browsing the file system looking for clues to where something had gone. There were plenty of other foibles, but one of the most irritating occurred after I plugged in a USB hard disk. An icon appeared on the desktop and it just worked – so that was nice. When I had done with it, I right clicked on the icon and told it to unmount, then switched the drive off. The next time I booted up the computer, I found myself at a command prompt with some disk and partition mounting errors listed. No GUI to play with. From that point on I discovered that I had to switch on my USB drive, then boot up so that the error wouldn’t prevent booting up. I could turn the drive off afterwards without later problems. Trying to geotag photos with data from my Gisteq Phototrackr probably wasn’t impossible, but it wasn’t easy. I had to download some Perl scripts to get the data and then trying to get something to edit the metadata. It’s all such a painful process that just worked when I used Windows – it definitely wasn’t worth all of the extra effort.

    There were things I did like though. Even though I use two monitors, I started using virtual desktops to switch between. I had never considered using virtual desktops, because I thought two actual monitors would be enough. In practice though, I could fill the two monitors with windows relating to the task at hand – processing photos for example, and quickly switch to another virtual desktop where all of my music playing and info was. This is only really worthwhile if it’s fast and easy (instant and easy really) – which it was thanks to a few keyboard shortcuts to flip around.

    The other thing I found useful also wasn’t Linux specific. It was a feature in the Opera browser called Speed Dial. Thankfully there’s a plugin for Firefox that does the same thing. Basically you get a grid of thumbnails showing your most used sites (you set them up manually) when you open your browser or a new tab (lots of options). I find using this faster than my old approach of having several tabs open right at the start when I open my browser.

    Maybe I’ll try Linux again one day, but there would have to be a good reason for it and I’d have to be sure that I stood a fighting chance of being able to process photos at least as easily as I can already with Windows and Lightroom.

     

    • Joe Lencioni 7:32 pm on May 25, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      There’s http://www.codeplex.com/vdm“ rel=”nofollow”>a vista application for virtual desktops that I’ve been using for a while. It’s been pretty nice. It’s pretty fast and is definitely easy (Windows Key + Desktop Number to switch, for example). Give it a try, maybe you’ll like it.

    • Rick Harrison 1:59 pm on June 1, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      Did you look into the Wine stuff for linux? the other year Google invested quite a bit into it under the Google Summer Of Code specifically into getting photoshop to run nicely under it (im guessing they want to ditch windows completely), aparently CS2 ran very well under it, im guesing cs3 might do too. bit fiddly – you need to export your registry settings having first installed it on windows, but im quite keen on giving it a try with ubuntu.

    • publicenergy 7:20 pm on June 1, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      I did try Wine to get some apps running which were maked ‘Platinum’ in the compatibility list but it wasn’t really that good.

      For the time being my life is easier with Windows.

  • Dave 8:15 am on April 24, 2008 Permalink
    Tags: linux, , Technology   

    Photography and Linux 

    I use Microsoft Windows every day. Mainly 64 bit versions of Windows Vista because I use the Home Premium variant at home and the Business version at work. I have used Windows on computers for as long as I can remember and it’s so familiar to me and easy to use.

    As for photography, in Windows I can pop in a memory card and have Lightroom grab the images and file them all away in the right place, tagged up with metadata templates applied and then happily browse the photos and make RAW or other adjustments, right-click and export to Flickr or do a multitude of other things with them very easily.

    Considering how easy this process is, I wondered if it was possible to achieve the same thing using Linux. This is out of curiosity more than need.

    So far though, it all seems like going back in time to when graphical user interfaces had just been invented. Everything seems very rudimentary and there are lots of basic things that don’t quite work right that are getting in the way even before I get to looking at a decent photographic workflow.

    The issues that I have so far:

    • I haven’t found any good way to browse a lot of images quickly

    • The image editor (GIMP) doesn’t show me previews when I try and open a file (it just says “Loading Preview…” and sits there (for JPG as well as RAW)

    • My mouse doesn’t have enough buttons available! – this one sounds silly, but I have a mouse with five buttons, the usual 3 on top including the clickable mouse wheel but also two buttons where my thumb lives. I’m so used to using these for forwards and backwards when browsing files or web sites.

    • Graphical acceleration doesn’t work properly with my graphics card. This I find particularly odd because I’m using probably one of the best known manufacturers of chip sets – Nvidia. You’d have thought if any of them would work properly it’d be them!

    • Adobe haven’t released a version of Flash 9 for 64bit Linux so a lot of web sites don’t display correctly.

    Despite these problems, which I’m going to look at sorting out, it is quite pleasant to use for browsing, email and general bits and bobs.

    And after a bit of mucking about I managed to get a music player to find my music and was able to listen to music and have it register with last.fm again. It’s amazing how much more pleasant using it is when you have access to creature comforts like a nice desktop MP3 player – Banshee is quite nice but it does do odd things sometimes. For instance, I paused a track and later closed the application. I later noticed that it was still running and had a little musical note icon near the date on the task bar – so I moved the mouse over it, it displayed a pop-up window showing my paused track, started playing on it’s own for about a second, then closed the application!

    The bit I’ve not mentioned so far is installing. I started off with downloading Ubuntu – mainly because it seems to be flavour of the month and while there is a lot of activity around something, it should in theory be easier to get information and help. However, that turned out to be a right pain. The installation didn’t get very far before I just got a screen full of flashing colours. Another installation attempt and turning on graphical compatibility mode I got further still but then it took exception to my installation CD and bombed out right at the end. Is it honestly too much to ask to check the files on the CD at the start and put them on the hard disk to install from. By this point I was sick of Ubuntu. I thought that if I’m starting off by having to use compatibility modes at the installation point, then it doesn’t bode well for actually using it later.

    So, I did some more digging and research and downloaded another installation image. This time OpenSUSE. I just downloaded a 60Mb boot disk that could install over the internet and fetch whatever it needed. I popped that in, told it where to find the files and let it do it’s stuff. It seemed to correctly identify all of my hardware, suggested the right place to put the disk partitions (something Ubuntu didn’t get right). The placement of partitions was especially impressive becuase my set-up is probably a little unusual. I had prepared two partitions for this prior to starting but Ubuntu didn’t think they were a good first suggestion to use – OpenSUSE did.

    At the moment then, there is no way I can use it to process my photos so I’ll be booting in to Windows and doing it (and probably staying there most of the time). But I’m going to keep looking at this periodically to see if I can sort these problems out and get something nice working.

     

    • greywulf 11:15 am on April 24, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      Yeh. 64-bit Linux is still a way behind the rest of the Linux crowd. It’s, quite frankly, embarassing – I wouldn’t recommend it. That’s crazy given that Linux has a (well deserved) reputation for working on multiple platforms without any issues. It’s one area where Linux needs a serious kick up the a………

      That said, I’m surprised Ubuntu took issue with your machine; the nVidia graphics card should “just work”, though that seems to be the core of your problems. Which release number did you use? 8.04 (the current release candidate) has much better support for 64-bit than before.

      You’re right about SUSE’s default desktop style – it’s a horribly retro design. Thankfully though, that’s very easily fixed. There’s no shortage of MUCH better themes at http://www.kde-look.org/ (for KDE) or http://gnome-look.org/ (for GNOME).

      Your nVidia card will probably need the correct drivers installed; that’s an easy fix – just search for nvidia in the application list (dunno what it’s called in SUSE, sorry!) and install them. My best guess is it’s using the default VESA drivers right now. Ick. You should be able to configure the mouse to your liking in the preferences somewhere – again, I’m no SUSE expert.

      For fast image browsing and organizing I recommend Digikam. That’s a terrific app with much good built-in editing controls that most of the time there’s no need to open up an image editor.

      Phew. Hope that all helps! :)

    • publicenergy 10:15 pm on April 24, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      Thanks for all that.

      I did have the official Nvidia driver but to no avail. But after trawling the forums I discovered people recommending getting a newer version of CompizFusion. I installed that and things look nice and the Gimp previews work which is nice.

      The initial install I tried was the 8.04 release candidate – the live CD version of which worked in graphics compatibility mode but whenever I tried to use the normal mode, I either got flashing colours or my monitor telling me it’s not playing!

      No luck with the mouse yet, but I’ve not really looked for a solution yet. I did have a look at a mouse configuration screen that showed me a picture of a three button mouse and let me know that I had clicked button 4 and 5 – so it knows they’re there – I just need to find a way to map them to functions.

      I’ll have a look at this Digikam software – it looks promising from what I’ve seen on it’s web site.

    • publicenergy / A New Start 10:57 pm on April 26, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      [...] was only a couple of days ago when I posted about the posibility of me using Linux and still being able to easily process my photos. Well, [...]

    • DJK 12:12 am on April 29, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      Hi there. I use Vista (32-bit, Business flavour) and Ubuntu (older – 6.06) on this laptop, and find that my workflow is actually marginally quicker with Ubuntu as the OS due to RAM considerations: 2.5GB is just about enough with Vista, and is more than ample with Ubuntu.

      I use the File Manager (or whatever it’s called) to view my files – up to 400% on preview compared to Vista.

      However, I use GIMP on both platforms, and ipernity as my internet photo displayer (used to use Flickr). And Open Office for many other things I hobby about. The fact that Ubuntu installs with GIMP and Open Office out of the box saves oodles of time, and my entire re-installs have taken less than an hour, complete: the longest thing is downloading the latest flavour off ‘tinernet, and creating an iso disc that has to be checked to make sure it works (did you do a checksum on yours ?).

      Oh, and I have a very old laptop which still manages to work, albeit slowly, with an older version of GIMP and xubuntu (6) – and 184MB of RAM :-D

      I’ve tried OPENSuse, too, but that requires several CDs, not just one.

      Partitioning has been a breeze, and is highly customisable: but I tend to perform clean installs, with fresh, formatted hard drives – I can imagine that a well-used and consequently fragmented hard drive would be a nightmare to sort out, with the risk of data loss.

      So, I would say it depends what you use as to which works better: I’m no uber-techy, and only stick with Windows ‘cos I need it for work (or, rather, haven’t converted work to Ubuntu / Linux). But my workflow is actually a little quicker in Linux, and more pleasant for its customisability – and the fact that it is not Microsoft :-D

  • Dave 1:12 pm on March 7, 2008 Permalink
    Tags: , , Technology   

    Geotagging and FeedDemon 

    For a long time now I’ve used FeedDemon to read RSS feeds. There are lots of reasons for that and there are plenty of posts around that explain why it’s better than online-only readers.

    I noticed today that when a feed item is geotagged, I get a new globe icon appear which links me to Google Maps. That’s a nice little touch. Of course, it’s be even nicer if it used the new icon!

     

  • Dave 9:28 pm on January 10, 2008 Permalink
    Tags: , photophlow, Technology   

    Photophlow 

    photophlow 

    Yesterday I received my invite from Photophlow. Click on the image to view the official screencast showing you what it does. I think it’s much easier to see it working than describe everything it does.

    I think this is a great add-on for Flickr. The nice thing about it is that it’s related to people and groups so in the same way as Flickr contacts and groups work, you only participate in the ones you’re interested it – that is important considering what some of the groups are like on Flickr!

    A warning though, if you thought Flickr was addictive, this is only going to make it worse!

     

    • brendadada 5:46 am on January 21, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      I wonder what happens if you don’t think Flickr is addictive? Will I get even more aversion theraphy, or get sucked back in like Duran Duran’s evil organ vortex? Heh.

      Have registered my curiosity with their robot. Will let you know.

  • Dave 10:14 pm on January 2, 2008 Permalink
    Tags: , , , Technology   

    Nokia N82 – After two weeks 

    I’ve written about the N82 a couple of times before and this will probably be the last.

    First impressions

    Sports Tracker

    I think everything I wrote in the first impressions post still stands. The phone hasn’t done anything to surprise me and change my opinions about it.

    The battery lasts a reasonable amount of time when used for talking and general standby and text messages, but drains much more quickly when you use all of the features like wi-fi and GPS – but not badly by any stretch of the imagination. I have had the Sports Tracker software enabled tracking my route when I’ve been out walking for several hours and it made a dent in the battery meter but still had plenty of juice left.

    I did manage to crash the Sports Tracker software once when I was out walking – I’d turned it on, put the phone in my pocket and then forgot about it. Later in the day I checked it and it was back at the default dashboard screen. When I went back in to Sports Tracker it told me that it had crashed and recovered the previous workout – which upon inspection, looked like it had crashed about 3 hours in to the walk.

    That happened only the once so I don’t think it’s typical. It’s also worth noting that the software is still at the beta stage and over the last few weeks while I’ve been using the phone, the Sports Tracker software has popped up to tell me that new versions are available 2 or 3 times, so it’s still being actively developed.

    One thing I didn’t mention in my original post was the size of the buttons on the keypad. I have fairly large hands and fingers but my concerns about the keypad aren’t justified – it felt a little odd after using my old phone for so long then switching to this, but it didn’t take long before I could use it quickly.

    Overall, I like how the device feels, it feels solid and well made and is comfortable to hold and use. It seems fast in general use and the camera is definitely the best camera I’ve seen on a mobile phone with lots of settings that point and shoot cameras have. The screen is also very nice and easy to read.

    I could quite easily get used to using one of these phones full time.

    Niggles:

    • The USB connector doesn’t charge the phone, but as somebody pointed out in the comments of my first post, you can get a cable to rectify that.

    • The mains charger plugs into the bottom left hand corner of the phone – this makes it slightly awkward if you have to pick the phone up for a call while its charging. My older Nokia has it’s charging socket on the bottom which makes more sense to me.

    • The USB cable isn’t a standard mini-USB connector on the phone end. It’s a smaller and flatter connector. The phone looks big enough to accommodate a mini-USB port, so I’m not sure why they used this.

    Those niggles really are tiny ones and I’m really struggling to think of other things I didn’t like about the phone.

    Thanks to WOM World for letting get my hands on the N82 to have a play with it.

     

    • Nseries WOM World » Blog 2:26 pm on January 4, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      [...] The day-to-day use of the device was very respectable in Publicenergy’s opinion, with the battery lasting a reasonable amount of time. Sports Tracker also performed as expected on the vast majority of occasions, though he did experience one crash while using the application. [...]

    • Nokia N82 8:06 am on January 13, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      How have you gotten on with texting?

      The letters are obviously above the keys and have no illumination so texting in poor light conditions is exceptionally difficult – unless you are a texting guru?

  • Dave 10:50 pm on December 29, 2007 Permalink
    Tags: , Technology,   

    The joys of not using a crap ISP like virgin.net 

    Yesterday I escaped virgin.net and started getting my broadband from a well regarded smaller company. The problems I had with virgin.net are gone in to here. Needless to say, they’re a horrible company who doesn’t do anything right and treats their customers like shit. When I changed the login details to use my new provider yesterday the crapness just disappeared and my connection has been going like the clappers! I live a few hundred metres away from the exchange and my ADSL rate has always been very high, but the actual data flow over the Virgin network has mostly been at near narrowband speeds.

    Every time I tried to watch a YouTube video, I’d have to pause it at the beginning and wait a few minutes for it to fill the buffer before it started to work, the BBC iPlayer was unusable as was 4oD – the Channel4 on demand service. Downloading anything remotely big – even 10Mb + really needed to be left and done either early morning or in the middle of the night on a timer. I may as well have been using a dial up modem or an acoustic coupler – I knew I should have kept a 1970’s style telephone – If you’re a current virgin.net customer you might want to get one of those from eBay to improve your performance ;)

    Of course, when I have used other ISP’s I know my connection is near 8Mbit because of how close to the exchange I live. So I have been used to very fast speeds prior to using virgin.net. Now that I’ve escaped, it feels like I’m back in the fast lane so I’ve been testing various things that just wouldn’t work before. Earlier on I watched a documentary called 638 Ways to Kill Castro which is both sad and amusing – the amusing element reminding me of the indestructible nature of Inspector Clouseau in the Pink Panther films, the sad elements being some of the horrible terrorist attacks used to try and kill him that took out lots of other people and footage of a Castro ordered execution in the early days. I did watch a few comedies after that! Each of these played flawlessly and immediately.

    For the record, when I was looking to change, I used the site ispreview.co.uk and looked at the reviews and prices of each of the ISP’s in their top 10 list. I went to ADSL24. Not only am I impressed with the lightning fast speed, I’m also impressed with how they handles my order, the fact that their support phone number isn’t a premium rate cash cow and the fact that I registered to use their forum, posted a message and was answered and welcomed by a member of staff almost immediately. It’s a whole different world.

     

    • Roger B. 9:18 pm on December 30, 2007 Permalink | Reply

      Richard Branson seems to be the opposite of King Midas – everything he touches turns to crap.

    • Dave S 1:22 pm on August 13, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      Totally agree that Virgin.net is crap!!!! My broadband speeds are slower than dial-up at times. The combined phone service is a rip-off as well. I had better speeds with Orange and they weren’t great. Can’t wait to move on.

  • Dave 1:52 pm on December 22, 2007 Permalink
    Tags: , , Technology   

    Sports Tracker Test Walk

    Nokia Sports Tracker is part phone application and part web service. I thought I’d test it out because I’ve been given a Nokia N82 to try for a few weeks courtesy of WOM World.

    It’s very easy to use. You create a user profile on the phone, containing details like age, height, weight and when you start you just launch the application, choose the type of exercise and hit go. It locks on to the GPS signal and records your position and all sorts of other data as you go. The application doesn’t monopolise the phone so you can use other things while it’s recording this information – taking photos for example.

    During use, the up and down keys on the phone flick between different information screens and graphs, showing the following information:

    • Course

    • Speed

    • Lattitude

    • Longtitude

    • Altitude

    • Steps

    • Step Rate

    • Average steps / min

    • GPS lock status

    • Pace

    • Distance

    • Time of current session

    A few examples of these kind of screens:

    SportsTracker status screen 1  SportsTracker status screen 2

    The screen shot on the right above isn’t a particular good example because it’s taken immediately after starting – if I’d been moving when I took it, the left hand part of it would show the tracklog of where I’d been.

    As well as the text based information screens, there are some graphical ones showing the following information:

    • Speed vs Time

    • Speed vs Distance

    • Altitude vs Distance

    A few examples of those kind of screens:

    SportsTracker status screen 3  SportsTracker status screen 4

    After your workout is finished, you get some different screens to show summary information. It will also pair up any photographs you have taken with the phone and mark them on your tracklog.

    SportsTracker status screen 5  SportsTracker status screen 6

    When you look at a workout summary, you can choose to send it to the Sports Tracker web service. This will work over any kind of data connection, but I used home Wi-Fi for speed and cheapness! The photos get resized to 640×480 to reduce the overall upload size (they are 5MP images originally unless you reduce that in settings).

    The end result is a page that you can either keep private, share with friends, or just make public:

    My Test Walk in Sherwood Forest

    Although the N82 looks like a phone and behaves like a phone, it’s quite amazing how much is packed in to it really. Having a GPS to accurately monitor your position and an accelerometer to count your steps are useful features. There is another application for the phone called Activity Monitor which dispenses with GPS and just uses the accelerometer to count your steps. That could be useful if you don’t need all of the other data.

    My walk was fairly short and the battery was charged up the night before – so with Wi-Fi enabled, the GPS and accelerometer working away and taking multiple photos all morning, the battery meter had gone down from 6 bars to 5 so I’d think a full day out in the hills would be no problem really.

    I don’t think I’ll be tempted away from taking my normal cameras and GPS devices with me (I left everything at home today) when I go out walking, but as a way of keep track of a fitness regime, this seems very convenient. Being able to rely on a phone which you’ll probably have on you all of the time anyway instead of other devices that will need attention and preparation seems like such an easy option.

     

    • Nokia N82 - After two weeks &l 10:15 pm on January 2, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      [...] Sports Tracker [...]

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      [...] I haven’t started using the service properly (yet), I will link you over to a post on PublicEnergy that feature plenty of screen shots and a comprehensive overview of using the application and [...]

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