Vango Banshee 300: First Impressions in the Wild

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Took the Vango Banshee 300 out camping last night for the first time. I’ve seen reviews where people suggest you would struggle to get 3 people in it. Well, I had 4 in it last night, and it was fine. Note, however, that it was one adult plus three primary school aged kids, and I can definitely confirm there’s no way you’d want to have 4 adults in there. However, I do reckon that it is a reasonably sized tent for 3 adults, assuming you don’t want to bring any of your luggage into the tent with you. I don’t do that; I take my car camping with me and have it parked beside the tent, so I have no issues there.

The best thing about this tent is how easy it is to get back in its bag. I’m no expert at packing a tent back up and I invariably end up not managing to get the tent back in its bag without a monumentous amount of effort. Not so the Banshee 300 – it goes back in with little problems, and you can then tighten it even further once it’s in the bag by pulling on the handle bits. I can’t really describe how that works adequately, other than to say you can tighten it further. You’ll just have to believe me.

The tent experience is good. It’s got pockets for the kids to put random crap in (as young girls just seem addicted to, it seems), and it has got a handy zipped bit for you to, for example, stick your shoes between the outer and inner lining to keep them dry, but out of the way. Nice.

It takes about 10 minutes to erect on your own. I could probably do it faster, but I don’t yet seem capable of managing to figure out which way it goes up to start with, and therefore stand looking at it for about 2 minutes scratching my head. I’ll get there, though. It’s pretty obvious when you just get going.

Two poles keep it up. Lots of your standard tent pegs which bend quite easily; I’ve yet to buy a tent which comes with really strong tent pegs, tbh. Ultimately, you can’t really sit up in the thing comfortably, but it’s not that kind of tent. It’s the tent you get when you just need somewhere to sleep, and nothing else. If you want a tent that you can spend time inside, then you want a different tent. This is a sleeping residence, IMHO. I assume that’s what it was made for, and assuming it was, it’s perfect.

Sadly, these are the best pictures I’ve ever drawn

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SSIA; I’m terrible at drawing, and much like the rest of the planet, I’ve been playing Draw Something. These are quite simply the best drawings I’ve managed so far, which doesn’t say a lot for my standard drawing ability.

Review of DogCam Bullet HD Wide

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I’ve posted variously in the past few weeks about the DogCam Bullet HD Wide, but I thought I’d take the time to write up a general review of the camera so that others can get a better idea as to the good and bad things about it.

It’s been sent back for a refund, as you again have probably discovered from previous posts, but I’ll try to be as fair as I can and assume that I was just unlucky with my experiences with DCS, the makers / suppliers of the camera. That said, their customer service will therefore be commented upon in this review, since that was part of my overall experience. That’s surely only fair.

Aside from that, I’ll also mention the comparisons with the camera that I got to replace it; the Contour+. Now, you do have to take note of the significant price difference between these two products. The RRP of the DogCam Bullet HD Wide is £130, while the RRP for the Contour+ is £499. Do note, however, that while I had to pay the full RRP for the DogCam, I didn’t have to for the Contour+, and was easily able to get it for £320 on Amazon. Even then, though, the price difference is still significant, so do bear that in mind when I get on to the comparisons later on.

Picture Quality

So, first things first, what was the DogCam like in terms of picture quality? Well, for a £130 camera, pretty damned good, to be fair. The 720px HD size was great and it truly was a picture that does the HD name justice. It coped very well at fast moving speeds, as I generally hit 25mph on my bike when commuting to work. Oh, and that’s probably worth pointing out; I have only used it so far on my road bike, I never used it on my mountain bike, so there was no time it was getting really thrown around; potholes in the road was the most bumping it had to deal with.

There’s no way to change the quality of the picture, mind you – you are stuck with the default 720px size. This didn’t bother me before I bought it, or after I bought it – that size is, AFAIAC, perfect for my uses. To be honest, I think I’d struggle to understand why anyone would want more if you just want a camera for social activities. You want to broadcast the video on a TV channel? Go get a better camera. For the 99% of other people, 720px should be more than enough, I’d have thought.

Sound Quality

Terrible. There’s no way to change the volume that it records at, and my commutes just had massive wind sounds the entire time. Unless you’re going less than 5mph, you’re faced with that volume the whole time. You might therefore argue that it’s recording reality, since that’s the sound of the wind as you cycle past it, and that’s a fair point, but not having it set to a reasonable volume to begin with is not ideal.

Attachments

I wanted to attach the cam to my vented cycle helmet. That was no problem at all, as it comes with a variety of attachment things, one of which was ideal to put on the top of my helmet. The velcro strap went through the vents and attached nice and tightly. Absolutely no problems with that.

The problems I did have was lining the thing up. I would line it up, but the video was always slightly off centre. I came to the conclusion that I rode with my head tilted to one side, but this was disproven when I got the Contour+ as it showed that I actually don’t ride like a mentalist, and instead I do indeed have my head straight. So that wasn’t ideal. But the camera did fit snugly in the velcro strap, and I ended up just having to line it up slightly off centre to take account of the fact that the lens must’ve been off centre.

Usage

It was sometimes difficult to tell whether it was recording or not. It has lights on the front that tell you if it’s recording, but in daylight, and especially in bright sunlight (which does happen occasionally in the UK), it made it really difficult to tell if it was recording or not.

On top of that, you couldn’t really put it on or off while it was on your head. You put it on by holding the single button down for 1 second, and switch it off my holding the same button down for 3 seconds. There are no beeps to tell you if it registered this. Therefore, you have zero confidence that it’s registered what you’ve done unless you’re looking directly at the front of the camera, and if you are likely to be switching it on and off repeatedly while it is located in a place that you can’t see it, you might end up recording the bits you didn’t want to record, and vice versa. So not good at all.

Battery Life

This is poor. It runs for about 90 minutes, and then you have to charge it. It has a built-in battery which means you can’t do anything that lasts more than 90 minutes unless you get another camera.

Problems

And then we’re on to the problems.

It crashed the first time I used it. It then crashed almost every single other time I used it. The video stopped recording for no reason at all, and more importantly, it wasn’t able to tell you that it had failed. You just cycled on, under the belief that it was recording because the difficult-to-see blue light on the front was suggesting all was well, even when it wasn’t.

I used the camera around 30 times, and I think it crashed approximately 25 times out of those 30. That’s a really bad hit rate. Yes, I sent it back – more on that shortly under “Customer Service”.

Over and above that, the camera crashed in a variety of ways. Most of the time it crashed by stopping recording video and only recording the audio with a massive amount of hissing over the top of it; so pointless. Another way to crash was to record 25 minutes of video, taking up 1.44GB of space, and then when you go to your Mac/PC, they can’t read the video file because the encoding type of “undef” is unknown. Well, no shit, Sherlock. Again, no indication while you’re out doing your awesome activities that it’s had a problem, you just instead find out when you get back home that it’s lost your treasured video of your awesome activity.

Sorry, my child, the video of your awesome accomplishment has been lost.

Customer Service

This was debatable. Note again that I had lots of experience with Customer Service because the camera had serious faults.

The DCS guys were definitely responsive and came back with replies very, very quickly. They didn’t shirk the issue, and went from the usual initial response of “your SD card is the problem” through to acceptance that there was a serious problem with the camera and providing a refund. They even went as far as wanting to talk to me on the phone to discuss the problem to try to identify any issues that could have been causing the issue.

Unfortunately though, DCS did initially claim the SD card was the problem, despite me explaining why I had discounted this, and their testing before they sent it back to me didn’t pick it up. When they sent the camera back, it also came with just a yellow post-it note with a scribbled message on it, rather than a somewhat more professional response as to what the issue was; and of course, it came back with the same fault.

Summary

So, in summary, I didn’t have the best experience with the camera or the company. I suspect I’ve just been unbelievably unlucky, because if the camera hadn’t crashed, then obviously I’d have been happy. And while the customer service was, in my view, not ideal (post-it note!!), they did respond very, very quickly and took the issue on board. To that end, they believe they’ve identified the issue and are working on a fix, but I’d lost faith by that point, hence wanting a refund.

Comparison with Contour+

I’ll finish off with a comparison with the Contour+ camera. Again, note the price difference; but also note that you sometimes get what you pay for.

The Contour+ picture quality is staggering. Even better than the DogCam. Full 1080px HD. It’s ridiculous.

You have four different picture sizes, and each of those have three levels of quality to record in.

The sound quality is better, and you can adjust the volume it records.

The Contour+ is bigger and looks more daft on your helmet. This doesn’t bother me, but might bother some.

The Contour+ has a replaceable battery. OMG, this is so important. Running out of battery on a 25 mile jaunt was pretty depressing. With the Contour+, you get more batteries, charge ‘em all and can go on all day. Wonderful.

The Contour+ has an iPhone and Android app, allowing you to view the shot your camera is going to take, which means you can make sure you have your camera lined up correctly before you start to record. The app, you should note, is not that reliable and crashes a lot. I assume they will fix that, but as of right now, if that’s the most important thing for you, then you need to (a) consider waiting until it gets fixed and (b) get a grip on your priorities.

The Contour+ looks awesome. Sorry, but it does.

And finally, the Contour+ takes video and your GPS track at the same time, and then shows you these back to you at the same time when viewing your video. Yep, that means you can always see where you are, on a map, while you’re watching the video. I’m not kidding you. It’s bloody brilliant, and I don’t think they make that clear on their marketing stuff, which they totally should because friends I’ve shown this to think that’s a killer bit of functionality.

So, is the Contour+ worth the extra money? In my opinion, it can be argued that it is, and not just because of the problems I’ve had with the DogCam. The extra stuff really is pretty special, allowing you to do more with your cam. However, it is a lot more cash, so you might alternatively want to consider the Contour GPS as a cheaper Contour offering. Or, if/when DogCam sort our their Bullet HD Wide, maybe it’ll be a good cam to get. If it doesn’t crash any more, then I honestly do recommend it, because the price you’re paying and the quality of the picture you’re getting is really good. However, if sound, battery life, functionality and configurability are important to you, then Contour is the way to go.

Vango Banshee 300

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I appear to be addicted to buying tents. Tent #4 has now been purchased, this time being a Vango Banshee 300.

I had three tents up to that point:

  1. A 2 man tent bought instead of a playhouse for youngest daughter about 10 years ago – a cheap tent
  2. The Outwell Montana 6 for the whole family (5 of us) to use on longer holidays
  3. A Vango Aura 4, most likely for a short break for the 5 of us, since our youngest kids are realistically no more than 1 adult in size

And so enter the Banshee 300. This truly is a tent for a one or two night stay; it’s small, very quick to pitch and very small. Did I mention that it was small?

I’ve seen people state that there’s no way that it is a 3 man tent; well, I disagree. Indeed, I will be using it for myself plus three kids, because again, they are not the size of an adult and we will be able to get in there without problems. If people are wanting a tent that they can spend half the day in, then this tent is not for them. This truly is a tent where you lay your head at night, and not much else.

But that’s the point. When I take the kids away for a one night stay at a camp site, we’re going to be doing outdoor stuff like going on bike rides, not spending the entire time in the tent.

Enter the Contour+

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I’ve given up on the DogCam Bullet HD Wide. While I fully appreciate the responsiveness of the DogCam team, the fact that it’s already been back to them for repair/replacement and it came back even worse than before doesn’t fill me with glee. So it’s going back for a refund.

Instead, I’ve moved to the other end of the quality spectrum, and shelled out for the camera that I was considering getting at the outset; the worryingly priced Contour+. It arrived today and I’ve taken it on a 3 mile spin on the bike, and to be honest, it’s damn good.

The picture quality is better than the DogCam, and I’ve only recorded it at 720p – it goes to full HD 1080p, and I’ve not tried that yet. It attaches nice and firmly to my vented helmet (albeit I had to purchase a different helmet attachment for that), and I’ll try attaching it to my handlebars tomorrow with one of the standard supplied attachments.

The software, Contour Storyteller, is far better than I was expecting. Most impressive of all is that you can play the video and at the same time it shows you your GPS track, so you can tell where you are. Simple, yet flipping awesome.

The only downside is the iPhone app. I’d read many comments about it before I bought the camera, and tbh it wasn’t the reason I bought the camera (a removeable battery was, believe it or not, the main driver to getting this cam). But all the reviews about the app are true; it crashes constantly. Added to that, when I tried to use it at work, it said I needed to upgrade the firmware on my camera before it would allow me to change the settings, and when I got home and upgraded the firmware, it said that I had to upgrade the firmware despite the fact I was now on a later version (1.34.3) than it needed; and it still couldn’t let me change the settings for a few hours. I’m going to guess that the iPhone app isn’t top of their priority list at the moment. It did start working later on for some reason, though. I think it’s fair to say that it’s not 100% reliable, so if this is the main reason to buy the camera, I’d think twice if I were you. But then, if that was really the main reason you were buying the camera, you have more money than sense.

Best of all, you can change the battery. If you are going on a long journey, say for more than 2 hours, and you want to be able to record the whole thing, then the DogCam ain’t gonna do you any good. The Contour+ has a battery you can take out, and thus you can take multiple batteries with you. Even more important, once your battery won’t charge any more because you’ve charged it too often, your camera isn’t an expensive paperweight either.

So, first impressions are good. I’ll take it on the commute tomorrow, although the weather is apparently going to be terrible, so that means the video will either be pants, or I will quit and take the car instead.

Cycle, Edinburgh to Dalgety Bay

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I’ve cycled across the Forth Road Bridge before, but in fairness, only went halfway before turning back, as I’d taken my eldest daughter with me and she was quite young, so I didn’t want to tire her out. I’d always wondered what you do on the other side of the bridge; are there further pathways or cycle paths once you get across?

The simple answer is yes.

I took my DogCam Bullet HD Wide with me again, and it crashed again. However, it only failed to record the first part of my trip which was merely me getting about halfway to the bridge, so no real loss there, tbh. I also used the Garmin Forerunner 910xt to do GPS tracking, and it’s unbelievably accurate. The biggest downside to the Garmin Connect site with long(ish) trips like this, however, is that the watch tracks your trip pretty much every second or two, but when you go to look at it on Garmin Connect, it might as well have only tracked one GPS point every 30 seconds, so you get this vague idea about the route you took. It’s a bit naff.

Thankfully, my Activities web app resolves that in that it plots on the map every single GPS point that your watch records, so you get the true route which looks a lot better. I need to update the Activities web app so that it’s possible for anonymous people to see individual routes; it’s currently possible for anonymous users to see a user’s entire map of multiple routes, just not a single one. Something for another day.

Anyway, back to the road trip on the bike. I first went to go over the bridge on the West side, but after crossing underneath, discovered that it was closed, so had to cross back. After getting over the bridge (which is pretty long and contains a fair old uphill), I discovered that the cycle path takes you into Inverkeithing. From there, I totally took a wrong turn and ended up on the A921 going towards Aberdour. I went along it for a bit then took a right into Dalgety Bay and made my way to the Fife Coastal Path, taking it back to the bridge.

Coming out of Dalgety Bay, or maybe it was Inverkeithing, you get this pretty awesome downhill so it’s pretty easy to break the speed limit. Not that I’d do such a thing, of course… And then it was back along the NCR 1 and back home.

A pretty easy ride, to be fair. And if only the camera had worked properly, or could record for more than 90 minutes, I’d have more to show for it.

Change of SD card for DogCam Bullet HD Wide

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The boys at DogCam think that the problem with my camera might be the SD card. I tried it with a different, older card yesterday and it didn’t crash. One day doesn’t prove anything, but I don’t recall ever having gone a day when it successfully recorded two commutes without crashing.

I believe the thinking is that the 16GB card they sent me has some kind of new chip in it, which is potentially causing the problem.

The only down side is that the SD card I used yesterday was only 4GB in size, and it ran out of disk space after 54 minutes. That’s one heck of a lot of data for just 54 minutes; the commute home was @ 2.25GB in size after just 25 minutes and the card was full. Still, the picture quality on the camera is mightily impressive and justifies the amount of data being used.

I’ve found an 8GB card so I’m going to try that next week. That should at least manage to record my daily commutes. I’ll see how it goes.

DogCam Bullet HD Wide – More Crashes

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The Dogcam Bullet HD Wide has been replaced, but alas, it’s still doing the same thing in that it is crashing repeatedly. My daily 6.5 mile commute takes me around 25 minutes, and the camera crashes well over 50% of the time during my commute; the last 6 journeys have seen 5 crashes, for example. I can’t see any routine to it, and I’ve used two different 16GB cards in it now.

They think it might be to do with the new style SD cards. I didn’t know they had changed, but I will try swapping it for a 4GB card from tomorrow to see what happens.

There’s certainly no way I can take the camera out on any kind of proper activity where I’m wanting to collect video, since it crashes so often. There’s also no way to tell it has crashed until you plug it into your Mac/PC and play the video. Still, I’m getting plenty of feedback from the guys at Dogcam who are as confused as anyone, so I’m hopeful a resolution will be found soon.

Realistically, I’m needing a camera that works reliably within the next month so I can take the girls on a camping / cycling trip up near Callander.

DogCam Bullet HD Wide Crashes

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I got myself a DogCam Bullet HD Wide a few weeks ago, for use mainly on my road bike. It’s pretty small and attaches very well to my helmet, but alas, it repeatedly crashes when I use it outside. I’ve tried it three times outside now, and each time, it stops recording video at a random point during the recording and the audio changes to a badly tuned radio sound, with massive hissing noises. Totally pointless. I’ve not even taken it anywhere where the terrain is such that it gets knocked around, this has been on roads on a road bike. Not impressed, tbh. I’ll see if I can get a replacement, failing that I’ll chuck it and try something else.

Marathon? Na.

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Went out for another long training run today. Did 17 miles a couple of weeks ago. Was going for 19 today. Got to 11 and just couldn’t be bothered. It wasn’t that I was physically hurting or anything, it was that I finally realised that this is just really, really boring. And I have other things I would rather be doing with my time.

At first, while I walked to the bus stop so I could get back home, I attempted to reconcile whether this was my overall feeling, or whether it was just because my run today hadn’t been particularly enjoyable. And you know what? Overall feeling, it was. I felt immediately happier within 2 minutes of deciding to do something else, because it now means I can do other stuff that I actually want to do, like take my various daughters on bike rides and camping, and start training for triathlons (sprint ones at first).

The triathlon thing looks a lot less boring. For a start, they are much shorter than an entire marathon. Also, you’re doing more than one thing. Finally, I need to learn how to do something I can’t really do yet, which is to swim properly.

So, ultimately, sod this marathon lark. It just isn’t fun to train for and I have other things that interest me more right now. If I get into the New York marathon, things may change, but until then, sod it for the time being.

Multiple Garmin Connect Activities On One Map

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I’ve posted before about my attempts to get multiple Garmin Connect activities on one map, and how I wrote a Perl script which might make it easier for people to do this for themselves.

About a week ago, I then decided that I’d go one step further and write a web application which anyone could use, so I’ve gone ahead and done it. It’s here:

http://www.irreverence.co.uk/activities/

I now use this instead of my scripts. It seems pretty easy to me, since all you have to do (once you register, which is free and painless and requires no manual action from me to get going) is put in the URL from your Garmin Connect activity, and the web app goes off to download it and stores the plot of your activity. Upload more than one activity, and they all appear on the same amalgamated map.

You can also see individual tracks on the site too, if you want; that’s there mainly to assist you if you want to hide an activity from your main map, for example.

I had a bit of a problem initially with parsing the larger activities; however, that now appears to be resolved – thanks to the assistance of a helpful poster who was able to send huge activities far larger than I’ve managed to do so far.

It’s bound to have things broken in it still, and it’s definitely not finished, so if you want to try it out, please feel free. If you find things broken, or you have ideas for things that would make it better, let me know and I’ll see what I can do. This isn’t meant to compete with the likes of Garmin Connect or Endomondo, mind you – the goal is just to provide a way to see multiple activities all on one map. There’s no point in repeating the same functionality of other sites… why re-invent the wheel, when their wheel is already pretty damn good?

Ordnance Survey Get-a-Map Log In Issue

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It might just be me, but I can’t manage to log in on the Ordnance Survey Get-a-map site. I’m on a Mac (Snow Leopard) using Google Chrome, and although the login box appears, and the cursor is flashing in the text field boxes, it doesn’t recognise anything when I’m typing; the cursor just sits there flashing as if I’m not typing at all.

It works fine on Firefox, so the workaround isn’t exactly difficult, but I’m starting to wonder whether it’s just my box, or whether this is a generally known issue. Searching on Google doesn’t seem to bring up anyone else with the same problem…

[ added later ]

I have discovered a way to log in using Chrome on a Mac. Although the login box won’t let you type in the fields, it lets you paste in text, so if you copy text from a text editor and paste it in, that works. I know, mental, eh? But if you desperately want to use Chrome on a Mac, this does seem to work.

I blame Silverlight and/or Chrome, not the Get a Map dudes for this oddity.

Garmin 910xt: lap swimming seems a bit better

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I’m concentrating on improving my technique and efficiency when learning to do the crawl, rather than just trying to “swim faster”. I am therefore doing some lengths quite slowly, because I’m trying to make sure I’m breathing properly and not stopping. It’s hard going, but today I was in a pool quite early and it was pretty much empty, which allowed me a little more time to try to figure out what to improve. The technique of breathing into the trough and therefore not lifting my head is definitely a winner; I managed it a few times today and it’s amazing how much better it is when you get it right, since you don’t stop, I don’t have arms flailing around in the water when attempting to breathe and I seem to have plenty of time to get a load of air into my lungs. I’m still struggling to do two full lengths though, because I’m still running out of breath by the time I get to the end of the second length and need to stop for a bit, but my technique must be improving as the Garmin Forerunner 910xt only double counted two lengths today, which in comparison to last time is a major improvement. One of the lengths that it did it was not surprising either, as I swallowed a load of water and couldn’t breathe for a bit. So things are looking hopeful.

Might get out for a run tomorrow, if my knee has improved. I knackered it during a warm down after a 15.3 mile run 2 weeks ago, just by walking. Pfft.

Plot Multiple Activities from Garmin Connect on a Single Map

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For many months, I have been attempting to figure out how to go about plotting multiple activities on a single map. An activity to me is a run – I run a fair bit, and the lengths of the runs that I do tend to range from 6 miles up to 18 miles. I live in Edinburgh, and aside from three races I’ve run outside of the city, all of my training runs take place in the city itself, generally starting from and finishing near my house.

What I wanted to do is to plot on a single Google Map every run I’ve done. I use a Garmin Forerunner 405, and I’ve recently purchased a Garmin Forerunner 910xt, and I use the standard Garmin Connect utility which stores all of my training runs. This therefore means I can see each run on Garmin Connect and see the plot of where I’ve been. One run at a time.

But I want them all on one map.

I had tried for many months to figure out how to plot these runs on Google Maps, and it turns out I was always searching for the wrong thing. Rather than bore you with where I went wrong, I’ll tell you how I did it. And it was pretty easy (isn’t everything easy when you know how?).

Ultimately, you want to plot multiple polylines on a single map. Each polyline is a single activity, so in my case, each polyline was a single run.

[ edit: I've since created a web application which means you can now get this functionality without having to run any scripts on your own computer - more on that at the end of the article... this next bit is therefore fairly redundant if you use the web app ]

The runs I exported as TCX files from Garmin Connect. Now, I had 139 runs to export, so that took a few minutes, but not the end of the world.

I’ll explain how to go about creating your map, but first, here’s mine:

http://irreverence.co.uk/runs/

You’ll need to have vaguely capable HTML skills, and a basic knowledge of Javascript; you might get away with zero knowledge of Javascript I suppose, but it wouldn’t hurt to have the most basic knowledge if you’re going to try this.

What you therefore need to do is create a single page with a <div>, so if you look at my page, you can see down the bottom, I have one with an id of ‘map_canvas’. The body tag calls the initialize() Javascript method, and you can find that in js/std.js. If you take a look at that file, it creates three variables; myLatLng just creates a point which will be used as the centre of the map, myOptions tells it the zoom level to start with (the higher the number, the more zoomed in it is) and the map type (TERRAIN and ROADMAP are the most useful, afaiac), and then the map variable creates the Map object. Nothing too difficult there.

Next, there are dozens of calls to methods which each pass in the map variable. These methods, such as initialize_46521721(), are held in separate files. They don’t need to be, but I found it easier to do this as I had a basic Perl script which transformed the TCX files into Javascript files; more on that later. If you take a look at js/46521721.js, you will see the function initialize_46521721() and all that each of these files are doing is creating an array of coords with each latitude/longitude point, which came from the TCX files. In other words, the TCX file shows all of the GPS points that I ran along, and I’m just creating a line (a polyline) from these GPS points. If you look down the very bottom of the js/46521721.js file, you’ll see a flightPath variable being created and a call to setMap(); these bits are the same in every single initialize_123() type method.

That’s actually all there is to it. You just need to make sure that your HTML page contains references to each of these Javascript files, that your Javascript files exist in the format I’ve mentioned, that you have the std.js file which has the main initialize() method which calls all of the other initialize_123() methods, and it’ll display fine. Clearly, you want to set the centre of your map to wherever is more sensible for you – I doubt you live in Edinburgh.

All that’s left is to convert your TCX files to the Javascript. To do that, I wrote a bunch of Perl scripts to convert the TCX files and automatically generate the HTML. However, I figure you might not want to do that and instead just want some way of converting your TCX files to the Javascript such as what I did, so I stripped that bit out of my set of scripts and it’s available as a simple webapp here:

http://irreverence.co.uk/convert_tcx_to_gmap_latlong.cgi

All you do is upload your TCX files one at a time and it’ll generate your Javascript scripts for you. That just leaves you needing to create your std.js and HTML page.

Hope this helps someone…

[ edit - and here's the info about the web application ]

So I ended up deciding to create a web application, mainly to make it easier for me to upload new activities without having to re-run the scripts on my machine. This web application is also built so anyone can use it and see their own multiple activities on their own map. It’s not finished yet, but it does work and I’ll be continuing to make updates to it regularly until it reaches a point of being fully functional, configurable and looks vaguely half decent. The web app is here:

http://www.irreverence.co.uk/activities/

It’s free, your password is stored securely (SHA1 hashed, if you’re interested) and I won’t send you spam or sell your email to anyone, honest.

910xt and swimming: another attempt

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Tried another swim with the Garmin Forerunner 910xt and much the same as yesterday, it reckons I’m doing far more lengths than I actually am. Some people seem to have zero problems but for me, it literally counted double what I actually did today. Granted, I need to improve my technique since I’m just learning, but I’d have thought it would have been possible to merge lengths together once uploaded. Alas, no…

Garmin Forerunner 910xt: First impressions of swimming

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My Garmin Forerunner 910xt finally arrived yesterday. Win! And it looks awesome. You probably know what they look like, but just in case you don’t, they look like this:

The amount of fields you can choose on the thing is amazing, but instead of whittering on about that, I thought I’d first talk about swimming.

Now, I’m useless at swimming. Why buy the 910xt, you probably are thinking. Well, I’m aiming to do a tri at some point, and since I can already run and cycle, I just need to learn to swim properly. Before Christmas, I had never tried to do anything other than breaststroke, and that I do poorly. I’m a terrible swimmer. But I decided that a tri was the next logical thing to try to keep me in shape, and therefore I need to learn to do the crawl.

I’m therefore attempting to teach myself, with the odd kind word from work colleagues who also go swimming at lunch time, and also from Mr Smooth, which is surprisingly useful. I’ve only been about seven times, so I’m still crap, but you have to start somewhere.

So on to the 910xt. How did it do? Well, not that great. Here’s the data on Garmin Connect:

http://connect.garmin.com/activity/149547260

First, it thinks I did about 5 more lengths than I actually did. Second, it thinks I did backstroke for a while, and it also thought I was resting at a point where I wasn’t. Granted, I rest a lot, but I’m still trying to figure out how to breathe.

Now, the reasons it didn’t do well may be to do with my crap swimming style. I shall therefore have to concentrate more on a smoother style and see how it gets on. Sometimes it correctly identified a length, but on one occasion it thought I had done three lengths when I had merely done one. It also missed a length at one point. Not ideal.

But it’s early days. I suspect there are glitches in the algorithm and I also suspect Garmin might decide to add some options to allow you to tell it, for example, that you can’t possibly do a length quicker than X seconds, and as such, it might be able to be a bit more reliable in terms of counting your laps. I mean, I have no clue how the heck it is managing to figure out lengths at the best of times, it can’t be easy, but if you’re paying £400 for a watch that is supposed to be capable of determining when you’ve spun around at the end of a length, you’d hope that it is indeed capable of this.

Early days, both in terms of firmware and in terms of my swimming ability. Yes, I know my times are terrible. You should see me swallow water; I’m really pretty piss poor.

Garmin Forerunner 910xt: Delayed, again

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The Garmin Forerunner 910xt, which has been due for release for a few months and keeps being delayed, was supposed to finally arrive at my local shop in the UK on 01-Feb-12. It looks like one hell of a bit of kit, and although pricey, ticks all the boxes if you’re ever going to consider doing a triathlon.

So today I thought I’d just check with my running shop to make sure that the date they told me (01-Feb-12) was still on target. They checked, and no… it’s delayed, again. This time, stock is expected to arrive 12-Feb-12. You do have to wonder whether this date is as reliable as all the others, which would be roughly defined as “unreliable”. Still, at least the delay is only (ha!) another 11 days.

The watch was originally expected long before Christmas 2011. Slightly annoyingly, Australia seem to have received theirs a couple of weeks ago. Maybe that’s fair enough; it’s summer down there at the moment, and a bit chilly up here right now, so maybe that was Garmin’s thinking. Who knows. I’m just making up excuses for them now.

Keep those fingers crossed for a mid-February release date.

Fixing HP C4580 Printer Woes

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I have an HP C4580 printer, and it’s connected to my home network wirelessly. Wireless printers have to be the most unreliable things I have ever come across. Today was a typical day; attempting to print 4 photos, it took me 45 minutes. And I work in IT, so you’d think I stood a better chance than most of getting the damn thing to work. I honestly don’t know how “normal” people manage to cope with these things.

There were two main problems; first, there was some crazy, half deleted / cancelled job sitting in the print queue that just wouldn’t go away. Turns out, in Windows 7 (yep, I should have used my Mac, I know), you can get rid of stalled jobs by doing two things: restarting the printer and restarting the Print Spooler. The first I’m sure you can work out yourself. Just unplug it, for example, then plug it back in. The second one is only slightly trickier, but still ludicrously simple, in that you go to your Control Panel, then Administrative Tools, and then Services. Find “Print Spooler”, right click it and choose “Restart”. You might need to through this process twice (reboot printer, restart spooler) until it finally clears your jobs.

That should have been it, I’d thought. But it still didn’t work. This time, it was because my PC had managed to get all confused about the IP address of the printer. It is usually on my network at 192.168.2.200, but somehow it got 169.254.134.14 instead. I changed the IP address somewhere in the Printer settings on my computer, but it made no difference. So I just deleted the Printer entirely from my computer and added it back in, within Devices and Printers. After doing that, printing started working again.

It really shouldn’t be this difficult. Goodness knows what happened to cause this trail of devastation. Good luck if you too have a wireless printer.