(no subject)

[which_chick]

I have bought a gps/stopwatch thing. For jogging or whatever. It's a Garmin. Garmin Connect (a website) helps you make graphs and charts and shit, from your outings. The graphs and charts website uses a browser plugin to communicate with the gps/stopwatch thing, which hooks to your computer via USB. The browser plugin provided by Garmin only works with Windowses or Macintoshes.



A brief internet research before I signed up to buy a Garmin revealed that some dude in Germany had written a browser plugin that should make my computer and browser appear to be legit to the Garmin Connect website. So, I bought a Garmin Forerunner 305. It's like a watch, only bigger, and it's entirely too much videogame-like fun.

The german dude's browser plugin works flawlessly. I can upload my data and make charts and graphs and stuff JUST LIKE I used a more common operating system. Thanks, dude in Germany! Also have twenty Euros for your trouble. (He has a paypal DONATE button on his website. The software is free, but having my 305 talk to the charts-n-graphs website on the first try is definitely worth 20 Euros.)

I am all kinds of excited about the charts-n-graphs aspects.

Comments

[fooliv.livejournal.com]

Jason, the guy I'm helping experiment with trebuchets (we're on Mark III.5 or IV, depending on how you measure your versions - this one can do about 125 ft, but the steel cord keeps slipping on us, weakening the pull after a few tries), tried to use a GPS app on his phone to estimate distance for measuring the throws. It's laughably inaccurate at those short distances, we were getting better estimates from counting paces & comparing results. Dunno if the embedded gps on your stopwatch is closer to a 'phone unit, or a proper technical gps unit. The latter's closer to accurate at human ranges.

[which-chick.livejournal.com]

This is a garmin forerunner 305. It's for jogging or hiking or whatever. The gps runs off of satellites and has (thus far) shown itself to be reasonably accurate. I've only used it twice so far, but the data it has given me seems very reasonable given what I already know about the terrain and my routes.

The maps that it draws accurately reflect what the route is, as near as I can tell via google maps and my paper USGS 7.5 maps. The elevations that it reports are accurate to as well as I can determine using my USGS maps.

Distances reported by the gps unit are also within the realm of the reasonable. For example, the dirt road from the turnpike underpass down to my house is a distance of 1.96 miles as per Google Maps. It's "just under two miles" by way of my truck odometer. And it's 1.96 miles by the GPS as well. Second example: Route I did last night was something I expected to be (ballpark) 7.75 miles as measured with google maps and having to draw approximate lines on sections of forest trail that do not show up well on the google maps airplane view. GPS says that the route was 7.85 miles and I'm inclined to believe that. Third example: the schlep up the mountain is very close to 9/10 of a mile. I've measured it via string-on-usgs-map, via google maps, and via gps. GPS says .93 miles, which is close enough to "9/10 of a mile" for me to deal with.

[fooliv.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah, measuring in hundreds of yards or fractions of miles ought to work right even with the crappier GPS. Measuring in dozens of yards or even dozens of feet, unless you've got something industrial-grade? Pfft.