The best cure for travel lethargy: spinning and a big bump
Went out for a pootle on the bike today to get over the fact that I’ve been on flights and sat in meeting rooms for the past week or so. It’s all @jimphelps fault, as he’s been going out pretty much the whole time that I’ve been cooped-up inside 
The weather was glorious today - warm, with a bit of a breeze (as ever, it seemed to be anabatic and therefore detrimental to my inbound speed). The heat was also a bit warm for a climb, so I took a detour out to Rocky Mountain Cycles in Llantrisant to grab a new Camelback. If you’re in the area and need a friendly bike shop, then there’s nowhere better - they even filled up the Camelback for me and topped it off with some powder to keep me going. Pretty good job really, as I was out of bananas and hadn’t eaten much before setting out.
Aside from avoiding decorating and other rather dull chores that need to be done around the home, the idea today was to test out the geotagging of the new Blackberry Bold (9000). I wasn’t convinced that it was doing anything when I was out in the States, but it seems I was wrong. It was almost certainly due to the overshadowing of all the tall buildings downtown that was preventing a good lock. Here in sunny Wales, where we’re lucky to see the sky, it’s no problem. I’ll re-edit this later with some of the images tagged for the trip.
Max speed today was down a little on what I might have expected for the route. I’d have thought that I’d have been able to hit 45mph without too much trouble, but it seems that wind resistance was going to spoil that for me on the way back down from peak ride height. The other problem area was 30 miles out on the return leg - I’d forgotten there were a couple of short but annoying climbs on the way back in - and paid the price for it. Oh well, that’s part of the fun.
Tags: blackberry, bold, camelback, cycle, garmin, geotag, geotagging, gps, kona, rhondda, rocky mountain cycles
July 27th, 2008 at 7:32 am
That’s an impressive route trace. ’scuse the ignorance though, but did the Bold and Google Earth work together to produce it, or was there some post-processing involved. Either way I’d be grateful - for when I get my Bold (hint! hint! Young Vaughanie) - for a set of instructions on what you did and how you did it. I may move a slower pace (walking actually), but it would be nice to record them this way.
Btw - any news on Fire Eagle release, or whether Brightkite is going to integrate with the Bold?
July 27th, 2008 at 10:09 am
The track was recorded with my trusty Garmin Edge 25. I haven’t looked, yet, to see if there’s a recording application for the Bold (or other Blackberry), but guess there is. The only problem I’d see would be battery life on the BB - and possibly the fact it ain’t rugged (but is still more rugged than the iPhone
)
The geotagging I was doing was on photos taken withs its 2mp camera, the results of which will be posted back here later most likely.
If I were going to get all GPS-ed up, I’d have to go out and buy a proper one again. Very, very nearly bought the Garmin EDGE 705 when I was in the US, but the thought of Divorce Courts put me off
However, if all you want to do is trace routes as opposed to navigate, then you can do it pretty cheaply.
July 27th, 2008 at 11:27 am
I was trying figure out how your bby had done that too. The blog seemed to imply that the NEW Bby was some sort of Uber-machine! Was glad that the first comment stopped my quest to understand it’s fantastik abilities. Not to mention the fact I wouldn’t have needed to understand anabatic to get a way slower speed graph! If only age was a valid excuse!
July 27th, 2008 at 11:40 am
Well, a quick search shows that there are definitely track recording bits of code out there for the 8800 BB handsets:
http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en-us&q=blackberry gps track recording&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
So it would be possible to do on the Bold - just not as practical to Duct tape a £500 handset to the handlebars when you can get a Garmin Edge 205 for £75 on EBay
The other thing to be careful of is the sampling rate. If the BB only samples every 15 mins to save battery, then it’s not all that much use for travelling at speed.
On the Geography front, all I can say is that it was a late night post, and all posts - no matter how late in the day - should have something educational in. I’ll tweet out some questions to you later as homework.
July 27th, 2008 at 11:47 am
Regarding Brightkite and Blackberry. As far as I know they’re working on a Blackberry App right now, but whether it’s specifically for the Bold or not, I’m not sure. Check out http://getsatisfaction.com/brightkite/topics/brightkite_on_blackberry_is_a_great_idea and give it your support if it’s something you think would be beneficial
Ideally it needs to take account of the geotagged photos with no more than a couple of clicks - then I’d be really happy.
I think I need to go back to working in Geospatial science.