cyclemeter GPS track experiment

A little experiment today, using one of the iPhone GPS trackers whilst I took a short spin around part of tourist London.

I was really more interested in how the Cyclemeter iPhone software drew the route rather than exactly where I travelled. The phone was thrown into my backpack amongst car keys and various other electronic miscellanea, so GPS reception was far from ideal.

My start was by The Navigator in Belgrave Square and then out towards the eastern extension of King's Road before heading towards Westminster Abbey with views of Parliament, Big Ben the Eye and then around the back of Downing Street and past the Spitfire parked on the pavement.

The Mall is currently closed to traffic giving an easy run to Buckingham Palace which I did twice because it was quite fun zipping along such a deserted street, except for the roadblock quantities of tourists taking photos. Back past a busy Victoria station and then through a few twists around Eaton Square and back to where I started.

Only a few miles, mainly flat with thousands of tourist spots. A good example of how one of the London hire bikes could do simple sight-seeing in a matter of minutes.

Okay, so the map isn't perfect, but its not bad, and sufficiently good for anyone to be able to work out the route.

And, alright, I'll admit I was using my own bike today, but I did have to pump one of the tyres before I could start.

time to use the iPhone pub detector

We are using the iPhone pub detector this evening to select a venue.

It doesn't tell you how good the pub is, but it does tell you where the nearest ones are. It seems like a fun thing to have on a phone, but then I also have the Star Wars light sabre module which glows and makes all kinds of laser beam swooshing sounds when you move the phone around.

My low serial number iPhone is one of the original ones with the aluminium back, but on the whole, around London, I don't notice the lack of 3G because of the pervasive wi-fi.

Another £1.59 well spent was the GPS Motion-X software which lets the phone run as a GPS tracker, similar to a Garmin unit. Of course, the built-in Google maps does that as well- eerily telling me exactly where I am when I think I'm lost, but the Motion-X creates a waypoint database, which is sort of handy for photography for recording where & when. It can run in automatic mode or you can save waypoints at will, as well as exporting them as pins onto Google maps.

But now, off to GPS reference 51.512668,-0.13168 the pub.


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