2ni’s Blog

The new swiss topo maps v2 for garmin devices appeared on the market some days ago.

I decided to get the new version. The maps are quite great and have a lot of details which make them very useful for biking, hiking or similar outdoor activities.

Unfortunately the company failed in keeping an easy installation procedure. Besides the exorbitant official price of CHF 398.-, it took me about 3 hours (!) to install the new map. (It’s still not working on OSX, whereas v1 seems to work).

Similar to the music industry, they try to protect their products. They chose complicated registrations, several different passwords, serial numbers and key generators. It’s no surprise I failed on my first attempt! So of course I also “lost” my first of two available keys (you can only install the maps on 2 devices).

There is no information about what will happen if I change/upgrade my operating system nor if I would get a new gps device (or it’s deeply hidden in the terms of conditions).

Of course there is openstreetmap which allows you to upload the maps of your choice for free. At some places they show even more details than on the original topo maps, but… there’s a downside. There are still large fields with a very poor coverage. But I’ll definitely participate in helping to fill this gap.

I’m definitely not ready to pay that much for a product with such an installation mess and annoying limitations while there is not even a running support hotline.

Let’s hope they get the learnings from the music industry!

Distance:   39.9km
Elevation:  800m
Duration:   3h01
Avg. Speed: 13.0km/h
Details:    gpsies, trainingstagebuch

Plan was to do the Reppischtal track (Loop 7) from the Swiss Singletrail Map with Adrian. We did a big part of it and it was quite a nice trip. Very diversified! A lot of sometimes steep up and downs, singletrails, …

Unfortunately we had to shorten our trip on the Albis, as it was getting too dark to bike further in the forest. We decided to stay on the paved road to Adliswil.

Next time I’ll do the complete track.

Unfortunately my Edge crashed once, so the history files were invalid and I can’t show you the biked path. But there were no big changes compared to the plan.

If you want to be able to communicate with your Garmin Edge using Windows on Parallels on OS X, it is required configuring Parallels to attach USB devices to the guest OS, rather than letting both the host and the guest see the device.

You can change this settings in Configuration / USB Controller / Connecting Options -> Connect to Guest OS

So if you have problems connecting your device, check these settings!

If I compare the altitude elevation from my last running trip, I get very different values, depending on the software I use:

gpsies.com: 495m
Edge 705:   467m
Garmin TC:  578m

So which one shall I trust? I think I’ll just believe in my Edge 705 for the time being…

Distance:   10.12km
Elevation:  105m
Duration:   59:56min
Avg. Speed: 10.1km/h
Details:    gpsies, trainingstagebuch

Again a quite simple and short track, with a little uphill, to test the state of my achilles tendon. It seemed to be very ok! I didn’t feel any pain!

As I had a long training session yesterday, I did a regenerative training today. It seems to be better to do a very easy training to regenerate instead of doing nothing.

The elevation might be wrong, it’s what gpsies tells me. The Edge was stock on 26m and didn’t show any grade neither, but I don’t know exactly when it freezed. I had this already 2 times when cycling, but it then didn’t count from the beginning.
I hope it’s not a “bugfix” from the recent upgrade

If you check the track in detail, you might see some detours. Don’t worry, I did that to update some missing tracks on openstreetmap. My goal is to update at least one missing track every time I’ll go for a runningtrip in an area I know.

BTW: I can’t use the track from my cyclingtrip on Pragelpass, probably because the Edge crashed 2 times. Bad.

A new version for my Edge 705 is available. You should use the Webupdater for updates.

I hope they fixed some stuff. My Edge restarted 2 times yesterday

Wie nett, hat mich Christof auf seinen Blogroll verlinkt. Ich überleg mir auch die Alpen-Challenge zu fahren. Im Gegensatz zu ihm, werd ich mich aber sehr spontan entscheiden, da ich seit ein paar Tagen an einer Achilles-Sehnenentzündung leide, und zudem keine Lust hab im Regen zu fahren (nach einer 4tägigen Sportpause wag ich mich morgen wieder auf eine lockere Runde Velo oder Joggen und weiss dann mehr zur Sehne).

Aber falls es jemand interessiert, Silvio vom Race Office hat mir den Link zum GPX Track für die Alpen-Challenge gemailt!

If you don’t own a camera with GPS, but you are in possession of a GPS tracker (such as Garmin Edge), you can still geo tag your pictures quite easily.

On the last excursion I tried to geotag my photos.
It didn’t work (on flickr), because you first have to activate your account to allow Flickr processing the GPS exif information. I don’t know why, flickr does not use that information from the beginning?!? Maybe some strange privacy thoughts…

I used my Garmin Edge 705 bicycle computer to geotag my photos as follows:

1. Set the time of your camera as the one on the garmin. (Eventually you might set recording data to “1sec” instead of “automatic”, for better gps precision on the photos later)
2. When you’re ready to shoot, just start your track on the garmin. (You might configure and select another “bike” definition to not fake your total distance count of your real bicycle)
3. When finished shooting, just stop your track on the garmin.
4. Use a software to automatically add the gps information to your pictures.
5. Do whatever you want with them, i.e. upload them to flickr and check the map!

I use GPS Photo Linker for now on my mac. I’ll try with another photo session, if now also works on flickr, after I have activated my account for geotagging.