Fri, 10 Apr 2009

New Garmin Forerunner

Going for a run--or a race--almost always meant grabbing the GPS and often also meant setting a target pace and distance. For the last four and a half years, this was measured by a Garmin Forerunner 201. That's the large rectangular model in the original "brick" form factor. I've come to love the device. Training is great because the distance log, as well as the pacing, keeps you honest. Racing is probably better because it helps a lot with the pacing (but then I also had PRs in race where I had forgotten the GPS at home). But there is a downside. This model sometimes takes forever to find tracking, and has interference / weak signal problems when it is cloudy or moist. But worst of all, it just bonks out in the 'urban jungle' downtown where it drops signals too easily. And now after all these years the display had some minor damage, the strap didn't really hold anymore, and it was generally time for something new. On Tuesday it even lost a quarter mile when we were going for a short but really fast three miler.

But then a few days prior I had followed fellow Debian marathoner Christian and used my birthday at the end of this month (as well as the upcoming Boston Marathon) as an excuse for conspicuous comsumption. After some price comparison, I ordered a factory reconditioned Garmin Forerunner 405 from this web discounter at a nice rebate to the regular price. It arrived this afternoon, seemingly shining new and I have been fiddling with it for the last little while.

This device features wireless data transfer to a usbstick. This meant booting the laptop in windoze for the first time in years to load the 'client software' after which data transfer proceeded. The Garmin Connect site has very slick presentation and aggregation of the data. The trouble is of course how to get the data there when running Linux... Christian had mentioned the garmin-forerunner-tools package. Unfortunately, this seems to really be written for the Forerunner 305 models as it doesn't see the device at all. Some more googling lead to this page and the gant tarball. All still fairly raw, but with some prodding in the settings of the 405 ('pairing' set to 'on', 'force send' set to 'yes'; which may have to be reset each time ?) I got my two xml files off the gps watch. Yay. We'll see what mode I will settle one. With the 201 and its ancient serial port, I basically just dropped the run and training histories which their fairly limited data collections.

Last but not least, fellow Oak Park runner Peter Sagal had a humorous Runner's World column on the whole GPS geekyness. If he'd only known how to pair it with programming geekyness...

/gadgets | permanent link

Tue, 06 Jun 2006

Vraiment mal!

A few days ago, AvantGo syncing to my trusted (yet dated) Tungsten C failed all of a sudden. As I hadn't updated anything on the Kubuntu / Ubuntu box I use as my home workstation, and the (aptly named) malsync library which implements the protocol under Linux/Unix didn't change, I was a tad puzzled. Perusing AvantGo's website was pointless. Years ago they mentioned Linux support via the (unsupported) malsync library, now they seem to hide it. So what the heck, off went an email to AvantGo's support. To their credit, a reply arrived within 48 hours. While they pointed me to a Mac OS X answer (eek!) in their knowledgebase, it contained the basic hint: new prc files for a new version were required.

So Google: if someone asks you why AvantGo syncing from Linux all of a sudden fails, tell them to get the new files from here. The app is now called M-Business and requires a fresh setup of server, id and password; but you're off to the races afterwards.

/gadgets | permanent link

Fri, 05 Nov 2004

HP48/49 Emulation on the Tungsten

Ever since I got my Tungsten C, I had been intrigued by one particular application for Palm OS 5 that was listed on PalmOpenSource.Com: the Power48 emulator for HP calculators. The problem was that the emulator required actual roms from HP. While these are available at HPCalc.Org, they needed to be installed in a particular way on the SD card. Which posed two problems: I didn't have an SD card, and when I tried to copy the rom files onto somebody else's SD card as a test, it seemed like the digital rights management software embedded in the SD card, in conjunction with the Windoze box on which we tried that, kindly prevented me from doing that, or at least in the way needed for Power48. So we called that a draw.

More recently, I noticed a 16 mb SD card for a whopping $2.99, shipping included, on the always help TechBargains site. So I ordered one, and got it today.

And lo and behold, it now works. I first tried to transfer the files via Card Directories, a little Palm app to place files anywhere on MMC or SD cards. Didn't seem to work, though.

After upgrading to the newest version of Power48, I sort-of learned from the README that a) the HP roms needed to be converted -- for which one needs to employ a Windows binary, and having the work laptop home proved useful for that, and b) that these thusly generated files needed to be installed under Windows too -- pilot-xfer did indeed fail.

And lo and behold, having done that, Power48 now works and I have three new (emulated) calculators.

/gadgets | permanent link

Sat, 17 Apr 2004

Sweet

Just got the $100 refund check for my Tungsten. Given that Newegg wasn't listed as an official seller in the refund program by palmOne, I gave this submission an expected value of maybe $20. Now the total cost of the Tungsten C is less than what I paid a few years ago for the Handspring Visor it replaces. So shall I go and spend the monies on the GPS receiver currently on sale ?

By the way, I'm really quite pleased with the Tungsten C. It feels less sluggish (400 MHz Strongarm cpu), it has ample memory (64mb), the screen is terrific (but harder to read outside) and the 802.11b wifi is neat. Drawbacks are the above-average weight, the fact that there are way too few open hotspots (but it's nice enough not have to go upstairs to check email) and that documents to go and the adobe pdf converter require windoze. So I only get to use that at work ...

/gadgets | permanent link

Sun, 29 Feb 2004

Grrrr

I wasted most of yesterday chasing my own tail: After my new Tungsten palm arrived, I had set it up 'in bulk' by restoring what the so very useful jpilot had stored as a backup.

It turns out that this mightily confuses the AvantGo reader I am so used to. Despite several upgrade attempts from (gasp!) windoze and directly (nice hints are here and here (though you may need to be logged in) via pilot-xfer, it would sync nicely but never get the reader software going. At first I was confronted with 'AvGoPimPod1 not a shared library'. Deleting libmal and installing libsmal from the 'palm executables' bundle fixed that. But still no reader. It continued to babble about channels -- I guess that's their commercial product for intra-company news transmission.

Well, another attempt his morning fixed that. Deleting AGConnect, AvantGo and libmal before reinstalling them along with a new definition of the server in AGConnect did the trick. While the info is exactly the same as before, this seems to sail around whatever bug was blocking me before. I'm happy.

Now if only the other channels would use a smaller font just like the venerable Globe & Mail does so that one gets more mileage out of the neato 320x320 display...

/gadgets | permanent link

Sat, 28 Feb 2004

New toy

While I was at work, FedEx did me the favour of delivering the replacenent for my aging Handspring Visor that was supposed to be here only by Monday -- a new and shiny Palm Tungsten C with wifi, loads of memory, and a (as far as PDAs go) blazingly fast cpu. We actually had a dinner party earlier, so I couldn't tend to it rightaway, but now, and thanks to jpilot, my backups are restored (though AvantGo seems to require a partially new installation driven from Windoze), the amazing pssh is installed and I'm blogging on a minuscule Palm keyboard sitting in front of the computer that I am connected to via ssh over wireless ip... I guess it passes the first test of usefulness.

/gadgets | permanent link

Thu, 27 Feb 2003

New Compact Flash card arrived

Got my new 512mb compact flash card today. Quite unbelievable how what used to be the hard disk capacity of the laptop I used less than decade ago is now the size of a box of matches (well, call it two) and sits in my shirt pocket, holding 10 cds worth of music, or some files to be carried to and from work. Paid $149 for this and need to file for my $50 rebate...

/gadgets | permanent link

Sun, 16 Feb 2003

New toy

So I finally got my Nex IIe [ an inexpensive, leight mp3 player that uses compact flash cards, manufactured by Frontier Labs and sold mostly on Ebay and by web discounters ] a few days ago, having looked at the thing for way too long. First impressions: very, very nice. The two AA batteries weigh more than the rest of the thing. Installation was a breeze -- I was lazy and tried it first on Windows where the thing was immediately recognised. Getting files onto it was just a matter of drag and drop.

Almost as easy under Linux once the right modules are loaded. I had already built them months ago. The following script mount_flash does the trick for me:

#!/bin/sh
#
# edd 13 Feb 2003
# using info from  http://vic.dyndns.org/linux-UsbMassStorage/
# and http://www.cs.sfu.ca/~ggbaker/personal/cf-linux 
# a matching entry is in /etc/fstab
# also use 'sg_scan -i' and 'sg_map' so that all is well before mounting

# load modules
modprobe sd_mod 
modprobe sg 
modprobe usb-storage
mount /mnt/flash

echo "Compact Flash storage mounted at /mnt/flash"
exit 0

/gadgets | permanent link