Geoff Jones

Inveterate dabbler in business, travel, gadgets & life

Category: Personal

Plotting your course..

One of the great finds today in my feeds was this post on the Google Earth blog discussing Wikiloc.

Wikiloc is a free wiki that allows you to upload your GPS traces to their site as GPX files. You then get detailed statistics on your trail complete with map and aerial photo overlay.

As a confirmed GPS addict I couldn’t resist, especially as I strap my Garmin Etrex to the helmet I wear whilst boarding. This way I can gather a whole days activity and then upload the days tracks to my PC using memory map. Here is my favourite day from my apartment in Les Gets displayed. Fresh powder empty pistes bright sunshine – one day out of 30 🙂

wikiloc

Clicking on the image takes you to my page on the wikiloc site.

As you can read I travelled 29miles with a total descent of 15,446 feet in just under 4 hours (from memory map I know my peak speed was 55kph.

Pretty neat application except that wordpress seems to have a bug that doesn’t allow me to post iframe links that wikiloc gives you 🙁

Apart from that an excellent application for my long walks.

Viewing your teeth…

Earlier this year I came across this Gizmodo article featuring a low cost dental camera. I’ve always been fascinated by the concept of doing your own body inspections using small cameras (preferably with some sort of measurement capability – is that spot growing or shrinking ? )

Well the camera finally arrived direct from China. Here I am in Les Gets using it.camerame

Its pretty neat especially for the price, less than $200. After a lot of hassle with the provided CD software, Windows eventually chose to download the HP starter camera drivers of the net. I could then view the images in the Skype video test mode. Images are grabbed by pressing a button on the handle.

Here are a couple of images of my teeth, one with an amalgam filling. one with the white plastic filling. Not bad image quality considering the cost.teeth3

teeth2

So if you want to buy one get in touch with me and maybe I can help you. Will be interesting to get Sonal’s opinion on the image quality 🙂

Sharing the good life….

Just thought I would share with all (8) readers my google reader statistics:-

Google Reader statistics

As you can see I’m averaging about 1500 new posts a working day down to around 600 a day at the weekends. I’ve been reading more consistently here in Les Gets as there seem to be fewer distractions, I can only hack about 5 hours a day riding the slopes 🙁

For those interested how I do it.

I use Google reader in List View, set to display updated items only. I then click on All items and then the first item. Using the J key takes you to the next post, K takes you to previous. Using the cursor keys scrolls down any long posts. Pressing S tags the post with a star, Shift S shares the item. To email the post I press e. (Other shortcuts press the ? key when in reader)

I also use Google Notebook which I have set up with pages for my interests. To add content I just highlight the text of interest and then click Clip on the relevant notebook page- this adds the clip and the posts url. Google notebook is in the cloud so I always have it.

The friends shared items works OK for my friends, so Sally sees me in her shared items but I cannot see hers 🙁

However I get to see Roberts, Davids, Hughs,Loics and Stowes shared items.
So there we go, George et al do their sudoku I do my google reader stuff. Its a good life here in Les Gets with 5litres of red for 10Euro 🙂 and a season ticket for 199 Euro for us golden oldies.

Deserted or Desert?

Clear Roads in Dubai2Apparently George Bush is visiting Dubai, so at 4pm on Sunday (A normal working day in Islamic countries) a National Holiday was declared for today, Monday. Aren’t dictatorships so wonderful . You just do as you please 🙂
With the result today here was no traffic congestion, in fact no cars at all!

So I guess Bush will really get a flavour of this bustling place.

Thanks to Nick for the  iPhone picture of Dubai this morning.

Dubai visitHowever in the desert things were different according to this article in The Associated Press:-

“The motorcade of U.S. President George W. Bush makes its way down the desert road to a dinner hosted by the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi Sheik Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, at the Royal Stables at Al Asayl Racing and Equestrian Club, Sunday, Jan. 13, 2008, near the town of Sowaihan, United Arab Emirates.

(AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)”