Last weekend, the wife and I made it down to Brown County State Park to hit the mountain bike trails for the first time. With my wife being more on the beginner-intermediate end of things, we didn’t venture onto anything tougher than Green Valley (no Walnut, Hesitation Point, or Schooner). We had a blast.
|
||||||
|
Got out today to attend a group ride put on by the Hoosier Mountain Bike Association at Ft. Harrison State Park in Indianapolis, IN. What a great place this is. I first rode here back in the summer and fell in love with the flowy trails here. They’re not super hard, but they’re a blast to ride. It’s also a good place to take beginners. There’s a little elevation change, but it shouldn’t be too much to discourage them if they need to work on their fitness. There’s a great beginner’s loop, too, where they can stay pretty close to the trailhead if they need to bail. I’ve been busting my tail on my thesis lately and not doing much else, so when a friend invited me out to Tyler SP on Sunday with the Morning Glory Yoga Run Club, I had to come. Most of the group was there to do a 16mi trail run in training for the Tyler Marathon. The longest run I’ve done has been just over 4mi (partially on trails, I might add) so I wasn’t up to that. But the time would give me the opportunity to do the whole ABCD loop. I have had a number of questions from readers about how to get some certain trail data onto their GPS. That answer is complicated, because it depends on the trail data and it depends on the GPS you have. If the trail data you want to use is a simple track from someone’s previous ride, you can load it directly onto your GPS. Fitness GPS receivers (like the Edge models with mapping) can do a Virtual Partner based on that file and do performance comparisons and whatnot. With a mapping handheld, you get a basic navigation (it warns you if you deviate from the trail, but not much more). If that .gpx track has more track points than your GPS receiver’s track point limit, you have to reduce the number of points in the track by simplifying it (some programs allow you to do this) or by converting it to a route, which will prompt you to turn (best used on roads where turns occur at intersections, than on trails where turns often occur dependent on terrain). It’s well into tick season and for many, getting outdoors means dealing with ticks. Not only are they annoying little creepy-crawlies, they are also vectors for many different diseases. According to the CDC, the following disease/tick species associations are notweworthy in the United States (they are not necessarily exclusive to these particular tick species and there are likely to be more diseases, too): I have been playing around with ArcGIS Online and I’m debating whether or not to implement it permanently on my site. My best guess at this point is that I won’t use it for everything I map, but it seems to have its place. I am using it right now on my new “Trailheads” page on a test basis. So far, I’m liking that it allows me to layer multiple files (I am currently using .kml files) onto a single map. It can even load .gpx files that way, so it might have a use for track display possibly in conjunction with waypoints. It can certainly handle more complex web mapping than Google Maps can. This trip has been in the planning stages for quite some time. The wife and I paid a visit to the Costa Rica Yoga Spa in Nosara, on the Nicoya Peninsula. It’s an outstanding resort, and the food was incredible. The retreat was organized and taught by one of my local yoga instructors, so I knew most of the people in attendance. There were a couple people there I had not met before, however, and enjoyed spending time with them. This past week, Groundspeak announced that it’s switching away from Google Maps and to OSM (another announcement about the changes, explaining why). Looks like Geocaching.com is responsible for something like 2,000,000 hits to Google Maps per day and Google wanted to start charging. Fair enough. But how does this change work in the real world? I was playing around with some old footage from my GoPro and getting an animated map to follow my track. It’s not exactly how I’d like it, but it’s a little taste of what’s possible. Quite awhile ago, I posted my Giant GPS Data Sharing Site Shootout, and Strava was included in that review, and not reviewed well. Strava has been showing up in a lot of online discussions lately, and having a lot of favorable comments. It seems a lot of people are starting to use it, and some of those comments suggested that there have been some changes since my big review. That page is rather unweildy, so rather than add all of this there and make it worse, I thought I’d make a new post, and just put a link to it there. |
||||||
|
Copyright © 2013 The GPS Geek - All Rights Reserved Powered by WordPress & Atahualpa |
||||||
Recent Comments