Gratuitous Gadget Post

[hrj]

I could swear I already made this post, but I think I must have been working on it when the DSL went out Wednesday evening. I got two fun new transportation-related gadgets this week. My bicycle now has a speedometer thingie (also does odometer, trip odometer, average trip speed, max trip speed, and clock). Unlike the bike speedometer gadgets of my youth, this one doesn't rely on mechanically using the wheel to drive a mechanism (thus making you work harder), but instead has a small magnet fastened to one spoke with a sensor on the fork nearby to time revolutions.

And the new car now has a GPS (Garmin's Nüvi 760). I'm still mostly playing around with it on known routes (to evaluate how smart it is). In theory, I can also use it when walking or biking (although I don't have a bike mount for it yet). It does have a few quirks. It gets a bit discombobulated if you turn it on in a different location than it was when you turned it off. (Has to re-acquire the satellite fix.) Although it's perfectly happy to do Bluetooth pairing with my Treo, it has not yet managed to actually respond appropriately to an incoming phone call. And in theory it will transmit the audio directions to my radio, but this hasn't actually worked yet (possibly because it isn't happy about the station I picked). On the other hand, I'm utterly delighted to know that it will provide me with driving directions in several dozen different languages, including in some cases multiple dialect and gender options. So if I should need to know how to get somewhere in Estonian or in Serbian, I'm good to go. (No Welsh, alas.)

Comments

[kareina.livejournal.com]

Is the car GPS just one for things like driving directions, or could you use it to make notes of coordinates of, say, field trip sample locations? (not that Linguists need to collect many tangible samples in their work)

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

You have just bought what we over here would call a "sat-nav". :)

You'd think that with new gadgets, we English speakers would standardise our terminology, wouldn't you? :)

I would like one of these devices, but at the moment I don't really go to new places often enough to justify one. On the other hand, the price has dropped remarkably, so I probably don't really need to justify it any more.

[goldenstag.livejournal.com]

Interested in more revues of the GPS device. I am not sure how much I would use one, as the spouse is a pretty good navigator, but ...

[hrj.livejournal.com]

Hmm, you know? I think it could. It does have a "remember my current location" function, and it does have the option of remembering addresses as coordinates as opposed to map locations. (I'm not saying that all GPS devices have these options, but the model I have does.) So, for example, when I wanted to add my work location to the "favorite places" file, but didn't want to use the street address (since I normally enter and park on the far side of the campus from the ostensible street address), I just parked in my usual spot then told it to remember that location as "work". (It then shows me in the middle of a featureless block, since the map doesn't include any of the campus-internal streets that aren't publicly accessible.)

I'd have to experiment to see what the granularity of the coordinate system is -- but you seem to be talking about the equivalent of "reverse geo-caching", so there should be plenty of information about the general topic out there in the geo-caching community.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

"GPS" isn't the most accurate of nicknames, since technically it refers to the satellites themselves. On the other hand, it meshes well with USians' fondness for TLAs.

I really have no practical need for a GPS -- I'm quite handy with conventional maps; I don't have a job that entails finding locations easily and reliably; and I'm quite happy with the notion of looking destinations up in advance of leaving the house. But I am irretrievably and hopelessly in love with gadgets. And as long as I confine myself to ones that I actually do use (as opposed to ones that are found still in the shrink-wrapped box years later) I try not to feel too guilty.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

As I mention above, for the sorts of things I'll use it for, it really is a luxury toy. And if you have someone in the car who loves map-navigating, it's utterly unnecessary. But it is a cool toy.

[goldenstag.livejournal.com]

Okay. I can see how they COULD be useful, but I am not real sure I want to spend money on one (other things I need to do, I think) anytime soon. I think I want to wait ... guess I'm just not "early adopter" material. <g>