Tag: Fun

How to share Garmin routes with your friends

Posted on By rolfje 5 Comments on How to share Garmin routes with your friends

Recalculated route (green) does not match the original (pink)I’ve been struggling to get routes into my Garmin Zūmo® in such a way that it matches the plans of the original author, while at the same time setting the Garmin to “recalculate” so that when I take a wrong turn, it will send me back to the track. After reading a lot on the Garmin forums, and experimenting with this on my two recent road trips (one to Eifel and one to Sauerland in Germany) I can say I have found a way to do this. It’s a bit of work, but it will make your trip a lot more trouble-free. Here’s the recipe.

Needed:
– Nice motorcycle route in a GPX or GDB file
– Garmin BaseCamp (BaseCamp 3.0.1.0 for OSX at time of writing)
– Garmin Zūmo® (model 660 at time of writing)

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Software

Programmer Quotes

Posted on By rolfje No Comments on Programmer Quotes

On StackOverflow, there is a question asking for the greatest programmer quotes you know. In the top 3 quotes are the following two quotes which I think hold much truth:

“Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.” – Rick Osborne

“Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.” – Brian Kernighan

These two quotes are briliantly summing up the usual rant I always use. “if my phone rings at 3 a.m. for a prio 1 production issue, I want to be able to easily read the code. And I’m not going to be awake or cheerful at that time of night.” I guess at that time of night, it’s easy to awaken the violent psychopath in me, and so it better not be “smart” code. CVS blame support anybody?

Software

New Helicopter to Master

Posted on By rolfje 2 Comments on New Helicopter to Master

A friend of mine and me ordered 2 Walkera 4#3B electric model helicopters 3 weeks ago. Last frinday, they finally arrived, and this weekend we had some good fun flying them.

If you think flying a PicooZ is hard, don’t even start thinking about one of these. It looks easier on the youtube video’s than it seems. I have some experience with RC models (mainly cars and boats), but flying this helicopter is really hard. I can not get it to hover steadily, I need some serious practice to tame this baby. 🙂

I just took my camera out to shoot make some action shots of the heli’s in the air, when one of them crashed so hard that the tail boom broke. We ordered some spare parts for both ‘copters, they’ll arrive somewhere next week. In the meantime you can check out some of the photographs I made of my Walkera on my desk.

Hardware

Reboot…

Posted on By rolfje No Comments on Reboot…

Today the Mac OS Software update popped up, and warned that these updates would require a reboot (about 80% of the updates do not require a reboot). I have gotten so used to not having reboot and hangup troubles that I almost was surprised to see that I needed to reboot. I use my Mac mini for editting foto’s, video, recording TV programs, streaming music, programming, mail, and the usual webbrowsing. It is so quiet and uses so little power that I only power off the screen, and leave the Mac on. I noticed that I have not turned it off for the past 20 days:

rolf$ uptime
20:17  up 20 days, 23:37, 3 users, load averages: 0.20 0.26 0.20

Not bad for a workstation eh? Glad I bought a Mac, it was worth every penny. The other Mac mini I bought to replace my fileserver is also still worth every penny.Just thought I’d share some of my newly acquired Zen with you…

Apple, Software

Where’s North again?

Posted on By rolfje 1 Comment on Where’s North again?

Lately, I’ve been collecting race circuit locations using Google Earth. It’s really nice to see the sometimes very detailed satelite images of race circuits. You can actually see the seperate kerbstone blocks of silverstone, and see how many cars there were parked at the time the picture was taken. You should try it.

What really started to catch my interest is the fact that the maps of circuits as they are used in logo’s or (worse) “how to get there”-maps are almost never of the “north pointing up” type. An example:
The circuit “Road America”, which is located a few miles north-east of Atlanta, Georgia, has a web-site which shows you a detailed map of the circuit, as well as pointers to the nearest highways. I have grabbed an image (because they only have these stupid noise making flash movie thingied nobody is interersted in after the second visit). It looks like this:

So, in my quest to find this circuit using Google Earth, I found the circuit to be along the 53, halfway from the I85 to the I985, just like the directions stated. But, the circuit seemed to be “turned around:

I have noticed this with a lot of ciruits. I understand the need of turning and simplifying the circuit to make a nice logo, but when the circuit is depicted next to driving directions, I would make the map “north side up” so nobody gets confused. In the first image, the I85 apears to be west of the circuit, while it is actually east of the circuit.

Google Earth location of Road America (so you can check for yourselves):

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<kml xmlns=”http://earth.google.com/kml/2.0″>
<Document>
<Style id=”khStyle662″>
<IconStyle id=”khIconStyle664″>
<Icon>
<href>root://icons/palette-3.png</href>
<x>224</x>
<w>32</w>
<h>32</h>
</Icon>
</IconStyle>
</Style>
<Placemark>
<name>Road Atlanta</name>
<LookAt>
<longitude>-83.81483349103033</longitude>
<latitude>34.14598906888146</latitude>
<range>2835.974155514713</range>
<tilt>-8.888997363646108e-012</tilt>
<heading>0.3186400317363279</heading>
</LookAt>
<styleUrl>#khStyle662</styleUrl>
<Point>
<coordinates>-83.81483349103033,34.14598906888146,0</coordinates>
</Point>
</Placemark>
</Document>
</kml>

Racing