GPS navigation for your bike
Since about one month I’m proud owner of a Garmin GPS 60 handheld and so far I used it most times together with my bike. Receiving 6 satellites and with EGNOS support you can locate your current position with a precision of down to 2m with this device. While I have by far not tried all possible things one could do with a GPS I still want to give a short collection of links I found useful and notes you might find useful.
- I put my first track on gpsies.com
- Also having a classical bike computer on my bike I compared the measured distances of my GPS with that of the bike computer. They agree to better than about one percent on two different routes (both about 20 km).
- Good GPS website with technical information about GPS in English and in German.
- Mac-GPS-Software I used so far and found useful are
- LoadMyTracks to transfer tracks between yor Mac and the GPS handheld (Freeware).
- GPSPhotoLinker to geotag pictures you took on your track, provided your camera’s clock is accurate or at least that you know the offset of your camera’s clock (Freeware).
- GPSBabel — a great open source tool for transferring and especially for converting GPS data.
- A good (German) Mac Geotagging Howto can be found at gpsmedien.de: Part 1, Part 2
How to record the past with EyeTV
A few minutes ago I was watching a show about German comedy (“Komisches Deutschland”) on ARD, the first German TV channel. When watching TV, which doesn’t happen too often, I mostly use my Mac with a Terratec T2 DVB-T USB 2.0-receiver powered by Elgato’s excellent EyeTV software. EyeTV makes your Mac to a full-fletched digital video recorder with all its benefits. However, one option is missing.
After watching “Komisches Deutschland” for several minutes I decided that I wanted to record it but also realized that there is no option in EyeTV to include the past of the currently broadcasted show into the recording that starts when pressing the Record button. This past is normally buffered in EyeTV’s Live TV Buffer.eyetv package inside the EyeTV Archive directory and is used for jumping back in time in the “live stream”. So the data is there, just the software doesn’t allow you to get it.
So if you want to record a show but realize it only when it has already started it is best not to click the Record button (as this ends your Live TV Buffer.eyetv recording and also introduces a break of a couple of seconds) but just let it be recorded into the Live TV Buffer.eyetv. When the show is finished you must not quit EyeTV.app as Live TV Buffer.eyetv is deleted on quit. Instead just close your TV window go to your EyeTV Archive (which is the one that you specify in the preferences as the directory where EyeTV saves its recordings), locate the Live TV Buffer.eyetv and copy it to some place outside EyeTV Archive. The whole show can now be found as the .mpg file inside the Live TV Buffer.eyetv package.
And if you want to edit that show…? Well… That’s a bit more difficult as EyeTV doesn’t recognize .eyetv packages inside EyeTV Archive unless they are described in the EyeTV Archive.xml file in the same directory. But naively editing EyeTV Archive.xml unfortunately isn’t the easy solution as EyeTV will just ignore incorrect entries in the XML file and delete those lines when the application is quit. I’m trying to find out how to persuade EyeTV to accept such a package until the weekend sometime, but if anyone has any tips please feel free to comment on this post…
Update (24.09.2007): “Recording the past” is now possible with the latest EyeTV 2.5 upgrade (free for EyeTV 2 owners)!
No category ‘meta’
It seems to be not possible to add a category named ‘meta’ to WordPress. When doing so the category page links to a 404 page as the rewriting seems to not work in this case. So I named my ‘meta’ category ‘about’ instead.
Hello World!
Hi,
After considering for a while whether to start a blog, I finally made up my mind.
Numerous times have I found answers to seemingly unique and individual questions in blogs all around the world. Powered by full-text indicating web search enginges it doesn’t really matter how specific your contribution is, someone out there might be looking just for that.
In this blog I want to talk about computers, the web, digital photography, science, especially astronomy, and also a little bit about every day life if I find something worth noting down.
German is my mother tongue, but I’m writing this blog in English as this is the web’s language and I hope to be able to deliver at least a better English than the currently available babelfish’.
Update (January 2010): Some posts are also written in German when the intended audiency is mostly German speaking friends and family.
Thanks for reading!
Leonard