August 22, 2006

Down but not out

I've been dealing with some, um, technological challenges for the past day or so, and I hope you'll please bear with me. We had three computers go down -- two before vacation, and then my laptop failed when we returned home yesterday, as my wife was researching a replacement laptop for herself. They were all unrelated hardware problems, not viruses. Talk about bad computer karma.

Fortunately, things are looking up. She got her replacement laptop, and installed a new video card in mine (she's very handy!).

So I'm back up and running now, getting comments approved and responding to them. Hopefully I'll get a new post up by tomorrow and soon get back to the "Choosing the best mapping software" series.

Aug 22, 2006 8:51:18 PM

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Another broken RAM mount Last month I wrote about trying to find a RAM mount that would fit 31.8 mm diameter bicycle handlebars. It turns out that my new bike doesn't have 31.8 mm bars, but my wife's does. So I was able to go with a RAM mount while her bike got the Garmin mount. That's okay I thought, since I'm the one with the expensive new Garmin 60CSx, while she is stuck with the last generation 60CS. RAM mounts have a reputation for being tougher than the Garmin mounts, so I felt secure having my new GPS in a RAM mount -- until a few days ago anyway. To make a long story short, we've been on a mountain biking vacation for the past week and, while riding the Hole in the Ground trail near Lake Tahoe, I had a rather spectacular crash. Fortunately, I was okay and my bike was okay, but my 60CSx was nowhere to be found! Yes, the mount had taken a hit and the 60CSx went sailing. A 5 or 10 minute search located it, but it definitely picked up a few nasty screen scratches. Do any readers know if Garmin will fix that under their warranty?...
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Downloading tracks to your GPS for navigation I returned a couple of days ago from a week long mountain biking vacation at Lake Tahoe and Downieville, California. I had wanted to ride many of these trails for years and since I had not ridden them before, prior to going I downloaded tracks that others had posted online. Most of them came from MotionBased, although I did get a file of the Tahoe Rim Trail from National Geographic TOPO!'s mapXchange. Tracks from the latter are much easier to use now (even for non-TOPO owners), thanks to the newly minted ability of GPSBabel to convert .tpo track files from TOPO! So I layered the downloaded tracks and waypoints on maps I then printed with TOPO!, constructed routes, transferred maps and tracks to my GPS, etc. But once on the trail, I was reminded what a useful tool these pre-loaded tracks are for navigation, especially when you are moving fast on a bike. The image at the left is one such track. Notice that I set the track color to blue. The screen image to the right gives you an idea what this looks like in the field, as my actual track (in red) overlays the pre-loaded track as I...

Rich Owings

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