Majorca 2013 - Day 2

Have now started to sort through some of the video material I shot out in Majorca with The Tyneside Vagabonds last month. Here is an assembly of clips from day 2, great memories! To enjoy the material at it's best watch it directly on YouTube in HD at either 720 or 1080p.

Who Needs Alcohol

As many folks will know I gave alcohol the boot about 20 years ago, it was one of the best things I ever did. Contrary to popular opinion doing so does not mean the end of all enjoyment, if you see this stuff in the supermarket buy yourself a pack and give it a try. 0% alcohol and it's a really lovely drink, with stuff like this, well chilled, rotting your brain just seems sort of pointless :-)

"The Escape Artist"

This was definitely the closest thing I've witnessed when descending on a bike. This was one of my mates descending in Majorca last week, it could have been really horrible, I've no idea how he remained upright and I'm just so glad he didn't end up hitting the end of the wall on the right. Best viewed at 1080 on YouTube.

iMapFlickr Trial

Blimey, the options never end. Just stumbled upon a service called iMapFlickr which automatically places all your geotagged Flickr images on a  Google map, works extremely quickly and is just another option for sharing geotagged photographs. On balance though I think EveryTrail is probably more feature-rich but that comes at the price of not being quite as quick to use.

Hillfort Exploration

Today was the first of what I hope will be a series of visits to the hill forts of Northumberland, I don't know why but I just love 'em! Something to do with the peace and not really knowing what happened in these places all those years ago I guess…

Northumberland Hillforts

EveryTrail - Find trail maps for California and beyond

Experimenting With EveryTrail

I must have tried practically all the available free services for bringing together GPS tracks, videos and photographs that have been recorded on trips. I reckon EveryTrail is the one that brings things together really nicely though not being cycling specific it doesn't pull in things like HR, power and cadence but that's not what this is about. Purely as  a means of recording where you have been and pulling various data recordings together I think it's a nice way of presenting a walk, bike ride, or just a day out sightseeing. The other nice thing is that no repeat uploading is required, the GPS track comes straight off the Garmin unit, the photos are pulled directly over from Flickr and and video is played directly off YouTube, all pretty neat.

The upper map is the non-flash version of a trip that can be embedded in a weblog and the lower map is the flash version which offers more functions such as the ability to view the elevation and speed profiles as well as to play a slideshow of the geotagged images. On the upper map just click the red pins to see the photo represented at that point in the route.

Hulne Park Tour at EveryTrail
EveryTrail - Find the best hikes in California and beyond

Hulne Park Tour

EveryTrail - Find the best hikes in California and beyond

Garmin BaseCamp and Garmin Maps

I've been wondering what package to use to store waypoints and tracks for a little while and I recently decided to download the free Garmin application, BaseCamp, which is designed for the purpose as well as offering a number of other functions, some more handy than others.

The global mapping which comes with the BaseCamp application is pretty useless for anything other than a general overview and after doing quite a bit of reading I learned that if one has maps installed on your GPS device the later versions of BaseCamp will display those maps when the unit is plugged into the computer.

Now, I have a Garmin 800 which I use for cycling which has a Micro SD card in it with the 1:50K GB Discoverer maps on it, this works fine on the Garmin 800 allowing me to see detailed maps as I ride along. I also have an "old" Garmin etrex Legend C which I use for hiking but which does not allow the installation of maps such as the Ordnance Survey Landranger maps.

What I wanted to do was to use BaseCamp with the Landranger mapping to identify points of interest and to create waypoints of these points. I then wanted to store them and transfer them to my etrex as required when I wanted to visit a particular place or to navigate to a particular feature, the problem was how to display the Ordnance Survey maps in BaseCamp.

I am sure many folks have come up with a solution to this but I couldn't find one but I did stumble upon one way of doing it. I found that if I put the Micro SD card into the slot on the computer BaseCamp would recognise this as a drive, look for maps on it and then having found them it would just use them and display the Ordnance Survey maps perfectly.

This is great but I didn't want to have the Micro SD card stuck in there all the time so I tried an alternative, which worked just fine. Using the Mac Disc Utility application I simply produced a disc image of the Micro SD card and saved it to the desktop. I then removed the Micro SD card and put that back into the Garmin 800 ready for use. So, when I now want to use BaseCamp with my 1:50K O/S maps I just mount the disk image and fire up BaseCamp and voila! - BaseCamp "sees" the maps in the disc image and displays them perfectly ready for use.

There is I am sure a "proper" solution somewhere to this issue but I couldn't find it and this works for me. The picture below illustrates the BaseCamp window with the O/S mapping in use, with a couple of waypoints (hill forts) marked with red flags and ready to be transferred to the etrex GPS..