Month: January 2015

A ride in the cold

The solution to Everytrail failure was to shell out the £15 for a licence for Adze. What the Everytrail web page did was to cleverly separate out the different active logs from the Current.gpx file that the GPS unit writes so that you can select the one you want to investigate and to share. Adze can read this file and show each active log that can then be exported as its own GPX file.

Today I braved the cold with so many layers of clothes I could barely move and my huge enduro boots that I haven’t worn for a while adding to a general stiffness. It wasn’t an inspired route but as Bertha was hard to start I am glad not to have left it any longer. I wish the garage had a power supply. Here is the route, 40 miles in all.

And now that I’ve worked out how to do it, here is another ride from just before Christmas, made from combining two separate logs.

Alternatives to Everytrail

Mysteriously Everytrail seemed to stop importing tracks from my Garmin a couple of months ago. I tweeted this a while back and got offers of help from the Garmin support people but when they realised that the problem was with a third party they said they coudln’t help. Emails to Everytrail’s so called helpdesk have not produced any response. GPS guru Geoff Jones has suggested TripTrack, a European equivalent and it even imports everything from Everytrail, so, as long as it really does embed these trips onto blog posts then I will use it. There should be one here:

That’s a hopeful start.

More talk about cameras

I have treated myself to a(nother) camera from Ebay, a Nikon D610 and from another source, a slightly old school 50mm f/1.4 lens. I only ever dreamed about lenses like that as a young teenage photographer with an East German SLR bought for me by my parents. At last, a full-frame camera again, the first since my faithful Pentax purchased in 1983 at the airport in Singapore on the way to my first visit to Australia which still mostly works (I mean the camera still mostly works – not Australia). The lens produces beautiful shallow depth of focus shots like this one:

D610-pics1

and it is almost indistinguishable in bulk from my current and soon to be sold small frame camera:

two-cameras