My Tracks will record your tracks, and I think allow you to import them into google maps. Google latitude, part of Google Maps, will allow those you tag as authorized to view your whereabouts, if you want people to find you when you're out on the road. Those are the two main apps I use for that kind of stuff.
Do you need to be able to view your phone in this holder, or do you just want it to be able to gather data while you bike? I use a frame bag and just tuck my phone in there, when I'm out.
It will. Here's my Edinburgh to St Andrews ride this year, for example, uploaded direct from the phone. Clicking on the last link in the left hand side bar gives you trip statistics, but does not give you a route profile (you get one onf the phone but not on Google maps).
MapMyRide.com now have an android app which almost certainly does do route profiles, since the site does, but I haven't tried it yet (will try it today).
Is there a good Android app out there I can basically hit "start" on and it will track my movement on a map, my speed, and maybe other things that I can then pimp out to a social networking site afterwards? I like to post my bike rides for my friends, since I have an extra bike and I would like to bring them along. Think advertising. I've got an app that does everything but the map and location meant to track workouts, but I want the map dangit!
Yes, My Tracks, free from Google and now open source.
Bingo. That's why I wear bike shorts. Good sweat wicking without seams or folded fabric prevents crotch rot and chaffing. For really long rides (>60-miles), having the thin gel pad is really nice. Of course I'm reasonably fit and don't look too bad in them. I personally don't find the really heavy-set guys or girls in spandex t all that pleasant to look at. But on the positive side, they are out there exercising trying to improve themselves instead of being couch potatoes.
When I participate in a race and see a really large woman struggling to finish, I recognize that she probably put out more effort and guts than the guy who won the race in half the time.
One in every three Americans, one in every four British, Australian, New Zealand and Canadian people are obese. English speaking people are the fattest, slobbiest, laziest people on the planet. The only non-English speaking country to make it into the top seven fattest countries is Mexico. So what if fat people in cycling shorts look fugly? OK, I agree, they do. But they are out there doing something about it, and next year they're going to look less ugly and be healthy, while you car-driving couch potatoes are just getting uglier and less healthy.
People don't wear lycra to show off or look good. Most people don't look good in lycra (Vicky Pendleton excepted, of course). People wear lycra because it's comfortable and practical. But hey, if you're content to waddle from your car to the burger joint until you're too fat to eat anywhere but a drive in, don't mind us. We're not complaining about how you look. Live and let live, after all... at least until you die of stroke or heart attack or diabetes from all that cholesterol and corn syrup.
Usability is so important. Put you time and effort in to that - the "open data" is already there thanks to OSM.
I just use a TomTom One with a decent bicycle mount. It's easy to use and with USB charging, I can easily power it with a standard battery to USB charger and it cost £100 (much less than an iPhone would have cost). Okay, it doesn't cover bridleways, but you can never be sure what the conditions are going to be like on bridleways. Muddy tracks suitable for horses aren't always suitable for a road bike.
Batteries aren't very practical for significant touring, because they don't last. The last couple of years I've used a solar panel, but it's pretty awkward to arrange a panel to get good consistent sun exposure on a moving bike! However, over the past year chargers have been emerging - mostly in Germany - which charge off a bicycle dynamo: this one seems well made and extremely versatile, while this one fits neatly in the steerer tube and charges via USB. Of course, real geeks will make their own.
I don't think TFA is saying that. It mentions that "those trials" are coming to an early end. Which is appropriate. Obviously you want to work out the kinks before trashing another multi-million dollar UAV.
Particularly if you only had one actual flying prototype example to work with. I too would like to know more about how and why it crashed - something that size coming down hard is not funny, and I'd rather they got the bugs out of the control systems while they're still testing.
I'm not convinced the EU did this for good reasons, or for their OWN corporate overlords (like they did when they sued Microsoft in order to protect the EU-based Opera).
Learn some geography. Opera is a Norwegian company. Norway is not in the EU.
Is there any particular advantage to having a new OS every half-year (versus Apple's two year cycle or Microsoft's 3-4 year cycle)?
Microsoft isn't on any cycle. They are lost in the woods.
Correction: if Microsoft are on a cycle, it has two punctured tyres, a broken brake cable, and the rear derailleur has just overshifted into the spokes. Oh, and they're lost in the woods.
And this is why my phone isn't a smart phone. Any convenience or value provided by these devices, is never going to be worth placing myself in someone's walled garden.
An Android phone is no more 'inside someone else's walled garden' than an Ubuntu[1] PC is. You can accept the updates offered to you by your supplier, whether that's Vodafone or Canonical, if you want to. You don't have to. And you can install third party applications through the provider's repository, if you want to, but you don't have to. You can download them directly from third party suppliers and install them, or write them yourself and install them. In what way is this a 'walled garden'?
[1] Or Debian or SuSE or RedHat or, for that matter, Microsoft or Apple.
Just in case you're wondering like me how they back down... FTFA:
Following the complaints, Vodafone backed down and said it would now offer an update without the Vodafone-branded applications.
“Instead, in future we will offer customers two updates. The first will be a rollout of vanilla Android 2.2, once we have carried out appropriate testing to make sure it doesn’t cause any problems on our network or handsets.”
The interesting thing is I have a Nexus One on my Vodafone UK contract. I got 2.2 over a month ago, and it is plain vanilla-flavoured FroYo with no social media nonsense or bookmarks I didn't add. I can't believe that the Desire is so different from the Nexus - similar hardware from the same maker - that rolling out plain 2.2 to the Desire would cause damage to Vodafone's precious network that rolling it out to the Nexus didn't do.
These sorts of tyres are well know for bicycles and the effects can be dramatic and noticeable when it is your own legs supplying the power rather than an engine. Indeed, the tyres with the lowest rolling resistance also tend to have the stickiest rubber. When I ungraded my bike tyres I got: lower rolling resistance, better cornering, and better wet weather performance. On a bike at least, they also give a more comfortable ride because you are not bouncing over the micro-contours of the road nearly as much.
Ish. Bicycle tyres don't hydroplane because they are narrow enough and high pressure enough to cut through the water down to the tarmac underneath it. They can afford to be so narrow and so high pressure because the forces on them - acceleration, braking and cornering - are very much lower than for car tyres. If you put slick, supple tyres on a car it would hydroplane in wet weather.
Car tyres built as supple and slick as bike tyres would also be scarily expensive and have short service life. I currently have Stelvio Evolutions on my race bike - 235 grammes (8 ounces) a piece and costing more than my car tyres; but they run for maybe 3,000 miles before needing to be replaced.
Add handsets running Google Latitude for all the people you want to track, and you're good to go.
As others have said if you don't trust Google with your data, you can do your own server based on open streetmap; and it's fairly simple to build a custom program for any smartphone platform of your choice which phones home to report position. if you add a bar-code scanning module (and most smarphones these day have APIs which allow the camera to be used to scan barcodes) then people in the field can also report back the location of hardware assets, simply by scanning them.
I did a system much like this four years ago, for monitoring the collection of shellfish; it's GPL, you can download the source from Sourceforge. Unfortunately the fieldkit is dependent on a Hewlett Packard iPAQ model which is now more or less obsolete. But rewriting the fieldkit for use with Android or iOS4 would not be hard.
The mode of operation was that the inspector in the field would scan his own badge (with barcode); then scan the shellfish gatherer's license card (also with barcode); then scan the barcodes on each sack of shelfish collected. If the fieldkit had a current GPRS connection it reported back location, time and bag numbers to the server in real time, and was able to alert the inspector immediately to violations like re-used bags; if not it would buffer the the information until the next time it got a GPRS signal, at which point it reported back to the server. This allowed near real time tracking of shellfish inspections.
This obviously isn't what you need to do - but it is analogous to what you need to do and you ought to be able to get the ideas you need from the code. If you need any help, mail me - the address is valid.
Android is, for consumers, anything but open. We're still stuck waiting on ROM releases from manufacturers who don't care about supporting their old devices, even though the new devices are internally more or less the same...
It's great to see California taking such strides to reduce carbon emissions. Take something which was previously just a static plate of painted metal, and replace it with a high-tech display which continuously consumes energy. What an excellent plan.
What will these plates show when the engine is off? And, more to the point, for how long will they show it before the battery is so drained the engine cannot be restarted?
Real beer is not in the "Distilled class". To high percentages of alcohol would kill the fermentation organisms. That is why alcoholic substances are distilled after the fermentation to obtain higher alcohol percentages.
Like beer, fermented grain is the basis for Whiskey. So, as others pointed out, "distilled beer" is not a wrong term for Whiskey.
OK, to be really picky... fermented grain is the basis for ale. Beer is ale flavoured with hops. Whisky is not flavoured with hops, and is therefore distilled ale, not distilled beer. So we still don't have a name for distilled beer, unless you call it 'hop flavoured whisky'.
No cross environment or VM can replace actual testing on actual target hardware. No matter how closely manufacturers claim to follow the specs, quirks always manage to work their way in, and sometimes these quirks cause things to run differently. A serious development house will want to validate their code on all major versions of the hardware, esp if those versions come from different manufacturers.
That's why everyone who programs for Microsoft Windows has to have a test example of every single make and model of PC that's ever been manufactured to test their programs on.
There's hardware heterogeneity issues also, though: some phones have multitouch and some don't, for example, and the processor speeds and screen sizes are different. Even for devices with the same sensors, the sensors can behave differently, e.g. what kind of control over the camera you have and what data it feeds you, and what the accelerometer's characteristics are.
Doesn't matter for a decent number of apps, but matters for, say, mobile games.
This is mistaken, actually. They all have hardware multitouch, some don't have software multitouch enabled for legal reasons. But as people upgrade to newer versions of the OS, the multitouch magically appears! Also, as the virtual machine has got considerably faster, my original G1 is now much more performant than it was when new, and thanks to the nice folk at Cyanogen it already runs Eclair and will soon run FroYo. Yes, there probably are differences in the actual physical characteristics of things like accelerometers, but the operating system abstracts this out for you so your program can simply ignore it.
If you write your app for the version of the O/S you want to target, and specify anything unusual in the manifest, it will run on the handsets; and that's all.
Android owners bitch because we haven't quite achieved the ideal of end users being able to build our phone's OS from scratch independently of the handset makers, carriers, and Google.
"Triangles" are obviously defined as existing in a plane,
No, they're not. 400 years of terrestrial navigation have been based on spherical geometry, including, specifically and explicitly, triangles. Go and learn some basic maths.
Good thing even less people need netbooks because of their limited functionality. Phew!
Have you actually used a netbook? Four years ago I built myself an absolutely state of the art desktop with all the bells and whistles - dual Athlon, 2Gb RAM, twin RAID array, good graphics card. OK, it isn't state of the art now, desktops move on. But my needs don't change that much, and it does everything I need...
But it isn't as powerful as the £250 netbook I bought this year.
I agree. It should be a day to celebrate in America.
I was talking to a friend in the US over the weekend, about this issue. I, in high-tax Britain, earn substantially more than she does, in supposedly lower tax California. It turns out that her medical insurance alone was more than my total income tax (which, in case you missed the point, pays for the National Health Service as well as all the things your federal income tax pays for).
This can't be anything but good news for America. Everyone will be better off, and the only people who even might lose out are a few big corporations.
Slashdot Mirror
My Tracks will record your tracks, and I think allow you to import them into google maps. Google latitude, part of Google Maps, will allow those you tag as authorized to view your whereabouts, if you want people to find you when you're out on the road. Those are the two main apps I use for that kind of stuff.
Do you need to be able to view your phone in this holder, or do you just want it to be able to gather data while you bike? I use a frame bag and just tuck my phone in there, when I'm out.
It will. Here's my Edinburgh to St Andrews ride this year, for example, uploaded direct from the phone. Clicking on the last link in the left hand side bar gives you trip statistics, but does not give you a route profile (you get one onf the phone but not on Google maps).
MapMyRide.com now have an android app which almost certainly does do route profiles, since the site does, but I haven't tried it yet (will try it today).
Is there a good Android app out there I can basically hit "start" on and it will track my movement on a map, my speed, and maybe other things that I can then pimp out to a social networking site afterwards? I like to post my bike rides for my friends, since I have an extra bike and I would like to bring them along. Think advertising. I've got an app that does everything but the map and location meant to track workouts, but I want the map dangit!
Yes, My Tracks, free from Google and now open source.
Bingo. That's why I wear bike shorts. Good sweat wicking without seams or folded fabric prevents crotch rot and chaffing. For really long rides (>60-miles), having the thin gel pad is really nice. Of course I'm reasonably fit and don't look too bad in them. I personally don't find the really heavy-set guys or girls in spandex t all that pleasant to look at. But on the positive side, they are out there exercising trying to improve themselves instead of being couch potatoes.
When I participate in a race and see a really large woman struggling to finish, I recognize that she probably put out more effort and guts than the guy who won the race in half the time.
One in every three Americans, one in every four British, Australian, New Zealand and Canadian people are obese. English speaking people are the fattest, slobbiest, laziest people on the planet. The only non-English speaking country to make it into the top seven fattest countries is Mexico. So what if fat people in cycling shorts look fugly? OK, I agree, they do. But they are out there doing something about it, and next year they're going to look less ugly and be healthy, while you car-driving couch potatoes are just getting uglier and less healthy.
People don't wear lycra to show off or look good. Most people don't look good in lycra (Vicky Pendleton excepted, of course). People wear lycra because it's comfortable and practical. But hey, if you're content to waddle from your car to the burger joint until you're too fat to eat anywhere but a drive in, don't mind us. We're not complaining about how you look. Live and let live, after all... at least until you die of stroke or heart attack or diabetes from all that cholesterol and corn syrup.
Usability is so important. Put you time and effort in to that - the "open data" is already there thanks to OSM.
I just use a TomTom One with a decent bicycle mount. It's easy to use and with USB charging, I can easily power it with a standard battery to USB charger and it cost £100 (much less than an iPhone would have cost). Okay, it doesn't cover bridleways, but you can never be sure what the conditions are going to be like on bridleways. Muddy tracks suitable for horses aren't always suitable for a road bike.
Batteries aren't very practical for significant touring, because they don't last. The last couple of years I've used a solar panel, but it's pretty awkward to arrange a panel to get good consistent sun exposure on a moving bike! However, over the past year chargers have been emerging - mostly in Germany - which charge off a bicycle dynamo: this one seems well made and extremely versatile, while this one fits neatly in the steerer tube and charges via USB. Of course, real geeks will make their own.
I don't think TFA is saying that. It mentions that "those trials" are coming to an early end. Which is appropriate. Obviously you want to work out the kinks before trashing another multi-million dollar UAV.
Particularly if you only had one actual flying prototype example to work with. I too would like to know more about how and why it crashed - something that size coming down hard is not funny, and I'd rather they got the bugs out of the control systems while they're still testing.
I'm not convinced the EU did this for good reasons, or for their OWN corporate overlords (like they did when they sued Microsoft in order to protect the EU-based Opera).
Learn some geography. Opera is a Norwegian company. Norway is not in the EU.
Microsoft isn't on any cycle. They are lost in the woods.
Correction: if Microsoft are on a cycle, it has two punctured tyres, a broken brake cable, and the rear derailleur has just overshifted into the spokes. Oh, and they're lost in the woods.
I am pretty sure vanilla Android will let you do all of the above.
It will.
Vendor or operator modified versions of Android often will not, and that is the problem.
So take off the vendor's version and put your own choice on!
And this is why my phone isn't a smart phone.
Any convenience or value provided by these devices, is never going to be worth placing myself in someone's walled garden.
An Android phone is no more 'inside someone else's walled garden' than an Ubuntu[1] PC is. You can accept the updates offered to you by your supplier, whether that's Vodafone or Canonical, if you want to. You don't have to. And you can install third party applications through the provider's repository, if you want to, but you don't have to. You can download them directly from third party suppliers and install them, or write them yourself and install them. In what way is this a 'walled garden'?
[1] Or Debian or SuSE or RedHat or, for that matter, Microsoft or Apple.
Just in case you're wondering like me how they back down ...
FTFA:
Following the complaints, Vodafone backed down and said it would now offer an update without the Vodafone-branded applications.
“Instead, in future we will offer customers two updates. The first will be a rollout of vanilla Android 2.2, once we have carried out appropriate testing to make sure it doesn’t cause any problems on our network or handsets.”
The interesting thing is I have a Nexus One on my Vodafone UK contract. I got 2.2 over a month ago, and it is plain vanilla-flavoured FroYo with no social media nonsense or bookmarks I didn't add. I can't believe that the Desire is so different from the Nexus - similar hardware from the same maker - that rolling out plain 2.2 to the Desire would cause damage to Vodafone's precious network that rolling it out to the Nexus didn't do.
Most strange.
These sorts of tyres are well know for bicycles and the effects can be dramatic and noticeable when it is your own legs supplying the power rather than an engine. Indeed, the tyres with the lowest rolling resistance also tend to have the stickiest rubber. When I ungraded my bike tyres I got: lower rolling resistance, better cornering, and better wet weather performance. On a bike at least, they also give a more comfortable ride because you are not bouncing over the micro-contours of the road nearly as much.
Ish. Bicycle tyres don't hydroplane because they are narrow enough and high pressure enough to cut through the water down to the tarmac underneath it. They can afford to be so narrow and so high pressure because the forces on them - acceleration, braking and cornering - are very much lower than for car tyres. If you put slick, supple tyres on a car it would hydroplane in wet weather.
Car tyres built as supple and slick as bike tyres would also be scarily expensive and have short service life. I currently have Stelvio Evolutions on my race bike - 235 grammes (8 ounces) a piece and costing more than my car tyres; but they run for maybe 3,000 miles before needing to be replaced.
Don't forget to B#.
Do you get your jokes right.
It's A flat minor.
You get it when you drop a piano down a mine shaft....
...(although a mainframe would do two).
Add handsets running Google Latitude for all the people you want to track, and you're good to go.
As others have said if you don't trust Google with your data, you can do your own server based on open streetmap; and it's fairly simple to build a custom program for any smartphone platform of your choice which phones home to report position. if you add a bar-code scanning module (and most smarphones these day have APIs which allow the camera to be used to scan barcodes) then people in the field can also report back the location of hardware assets, simply by scanning them.
I did a system much like this four years ago, for monitoring the collection of shellfish; it's GPL, you can download the source from Sourceforge. Unfortunately the fieldkit is dependent on a Hewlett Packard iPAQ model which is now more or less obsolete. But rewriting the fieldkit for use with Android or iOS4 would not be hard.
The mode of operation was that the inspector in the field would scan his own badge (with barcode); then scan the shellfish gatherer's license card (also with barcode); then scan the barcodes on each sack of shelfish collected. If the fieldkit had a current GPRS connection it reported back location, time and bag numbers to the server in real time, and was able to alert the inspector immediately to violations like re-used bags; if not it would buffer the the information until the next time it got a GPRS signal, at which point it reported back to the server. This allowed near real time tracking of shellfish inspections.
This obviously isn't what you need to do - but it is analogous to what you need to do and you ought to be able to get the ideas you need from the code. If you need any help, mail me - the address is valid.
Should they FORCE the phone companies to support all flavors of the OS? Would this make Android more open and flexible?
Yes, and yes. Doesn't rooting and/or installing a custom ROM void the warranty even on a Nexus One?
I've no idea. Since when were techies worried about voiding a warranty? Just root the damn thing and quit whining.
Android is, for consumers, anything but open. We're still stuck waiting on ROM releases from manufacturers who don't care about supporting their old devices, even though the new devices are internally more or less the same...
No, you're not.
It's a pocket-sized computer, so why don't we have pocket-sized operating systems instead of glorified firmware on them?
Well, that's because it has the same operating system that runs most of the world's supercomputers on it. For heaven's sake, what more do you want?
It's great to see California taking such strides to reduce carbon emissions. Take something which was previously just a static plate of painted metal, and replace it with a high-tech display which continuously consumes energy. What an excellent plan.
What will these plates show when the engine is off? And, more to the point, for how long will they show it before the battery is so drained the engine cannot be restarted?
Real beer is not in the "Distilled class". To high percentages of alcohol would kill the fermentation organisms. That is why alcoholic substances are distilled after the fermentation to obtain higher alcohol percentages.
Like beer, fermented grain is the basis for Whiskey. So, as others pointed out, "distilled beer" is not a wrong term for Whiskey.
OK, to be really picky... fermented grain is the basis for ale. Beer is ale flavoured with hops. Whisky is not flavoured with hops, and is therefore distilled ale, not distilled beer. So we still don't have a name for distilled beer, unless you call it 'hop flavoured whisky'.
Redants'R'Us
There is no decent alternative to outlook.
You say that as if it were a bad thing.
What I think you meant to say is, there is nothing to which Outlook is a decent alternative.
No cross environment or VM can replace actual testing on actual target hardware. No matter how closely manufacturers claim to follow the specs, quirks always manage to work their way in, and sometimes these quirks cause things to run differently. A serious development house will want to validate their code on all major versions of the hardware, esp if those versions come from different manufacturers.
That's why everyone who programs for Microsoft Windows has to have a test example of every single make and model of PC that's ever been manufactured to test their programs on.
Oh, wait...
There's hardware heterogeneity issues also, though: some phones have multitouch and some don't, for example, and the processor speeds and screen sizes are different. Even for devices with the same sensors, the sensors can behave differently, e.g. what kind of control over the camera you have and what data it feeds you, and what the accelerometer's characteristics are.
Doesn't matter for a decent number of apps, but matters for, say, mobile games.
This is mistaken, actually. They all have hardware multitouch, some don't have software multitouch enabled for legal reasons. But as people upgrade to newer versions of the OS, the multitouch magically appears! Also, as the virtual machine has got considerably faster, my original G1 is now much more performant than it was when new, and thanks to the nice folk at Cyanogen it already runs Eclair and will soon run FroYo. Yes, there probably are differences in the actual physical characteristics of things like accelerometers, but the operating system abstracts this out for you so your program can simply ignore it.
If you write your app for the version of the O/S you want to target, and specify anything unusual in the manifest, it will run on the handsets; and that's all.
Android owners bitch because we haven't quite achieved the ideal of end users being able to build our phone's OS from scratch independently of the handset makers, carriers, and Google.
<obama>Yes we can.</obama>
"Triangles" are obviously defined as existing in a plane,
No, they're not. 400 years of terrestrial navigation have been based on spherical geometry, including, specifically and explicitly, triangles. Go and learn some basic maths.
Good thing even less people need netbooks because of their limited functionality. Phew!
Have you actually used a netbook? Four years ago I built myself an absolutely state of the art desktop with all the bells and whistles - dual Athlon, 2Gb RAM, twin RAID array, good graphics card. OK, it isn't state of the art now, desktops move on. But my needs don't change that much, and it does everything I need...
But it isn't as powerful as the £250 netbook I bought this year.
If you search the Number 10 website for 'Repair', it does not show up (prove me wrong, someone!)
I agree. It should be a day to celebrate in America.
I was talking to a friend in the US over the weekend, about this issue. I, in high-tax Britain, earn substantially more than she does, in supposedly lower tax California. It turns out that her medical insurance alone was more than my total income tax (which, in case you missed the point, pays for the National Health Service as well as all the things your federal income tax pays for).
This can't be anything but good news for America. Everyone will be better off, and the only people who even might lose out are a few big corporations.