Vince's Mutterings » Internet

Waze – User Generated Satnav Maps

Vince Marsters — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 22:18:20 +0000

It is amazing just how far out of date many satnav maps are, even on the latest systems. Companies like TomTom, TeleAtlas and Navteq have procedures where the end user (you and me) can report mistakes but even using these it can often take months or years for the changes to actually make it into the maps we see in our navigation products.
There is a new company on the block who want to change all that by using social mapping to get the latest updates as you drive around. They also provide a mechanism for reporting of hold ups again in realtime. The negative to all this though is that the maps in their current format are not suitable for any serious navigation within the UK until more of the country is mapped by driving around and then someone tidying up these GPS trails to make usable maps.
I recently started the process of mapping Evesham and the surrounding area. In the past month the majority of the town has been mapped with only the housing estate roads of Four Pools left. Once this is completed I plan on moving further out into the villages. Like all community driven projects though, the more people who are working on it the better the end result, whether that be those who just drive around with Waze running or those who then spend time tidying up the maps (and adding those all important road and town names)

If anyone else wants to become involved with Wazing their local area, a quick visit to Waze will explain more. The application can be downloaded for most major smartphones – Windows Mobile, Android, Symbian and iPhone, either direct from Waze for those devices which allow third party apps or from the device app stores (including opnmarket on Windows Mobile)

Joy Across America – a road trip in a 1904 Oldsmobile

Vince Marsters — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 20:09:15 +0000

I’ve nearly finished creating a new website for a friend and local motor sport enthusiast Joy Rainey. This time it is to promote her latest ‘mad’ adventure of driving from San Francisco to New York in a 1904 Oldsmobile. The website is built around the excellent WordPress blogging software with a number of plugins to provide enganced functionality, in much the same way this one is. I’m interested to know what you think of it so please let me know.

The trip itself should take around 5 weeks in total, covering approximately 4000 miles at an average speed of only 20-25mph. Whilst modern cars are all enclosed, the 1904 Oldsmobile is completely open with limited feature comforts so the trip should be interesting as the planned route covers both high and low areas of the States.

Using a TomTom with an O2 XDA Graphite

Vince Marsters — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 21:12:16 +0000

I recently upgraded my O2 XDA Graphite to Windows Mobile 6 using the upgrade path on the O2 website. Overall this was a very worthwhile process as my phone is now faster and more stable. The downside is I could no longer get my TomTom One V2 and the phone working together – so no traffic and weather updates. A quick hunt around the interweb showed I was not the only one to find this, and the cause appeared to be a decision by Microsoft to remove Bluetooth DialUp Networking as a default option. To add it requires the OEM (in the case of the XDA Graphite this will be either Asus or O2 themselves) to build a new version of the phones firmware – not likely to happen very quickly.

Not to be put off I decided to have another look around for a solution and found plently of others (although not with the XDA Graphite) having the same problem after installing WM6. There also appeared to be a potential solution which worked for some of using an installer to add in the old ‘Modem-link’ files used for BT DUN. The file (found here) should be copied to the phone and then installed by simply running the cab file. After this a soft reset of the phone is required (I found it worked best by removing the battery for 10 seconds) and then to pair the phone and TomTom together. For me this was all that was required and the pairing process worked first time, allowing me to use the TomTom Plus features again.

Once O2 get round to updating the firmware again, I hope they will have the foresight this time to include the legacy BT DUN files. It will make using the phone with my TomTom much easier.

Websites Websites Websites – and now hosting too

Vince Marsters — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 22:29:07 +0000

For some reason I have yet to work out, I seem to be getting a lot of requests to create websites for different people. I personally have 4 domains, but only this site has anything resembling a website associated with it. Along with my own domains I also host the site for MVRacing - the race team I pretend to help out – and Buzz-it - a site for a friend who runs is own computer business in Stratford on Avon.

Originally I hosted all these sites on my MacDomains Silver hosting account. This was a very reasonable £5 per month offering 1Gb webspace and 14Gb bandwidth along with MySQL, Ruby on Rails and multiple sub domains. Managing the multiple websites was becoming quite complicated so I have now moved to a reseller hosting account – MacDomains themselves unfortunately do not offer these. This allows me to run all the domains on separate hosting accounts as well as selling on some of the spare space and capacity I have (when I can get round to designing the packages and creating the website). I am thinking of offering something along the lines of 1Gb webspace and 5-10Gb bandwidth per month as a starter. Let me know if you are interested. I can’t promise I will be ready to supply straight away but if there is enough interest then I will get to work on the packages.

Along side all of this I need to work on new websites for Evehosting (the domain I will use for hosting packages), Vale Cycles (A friend cycle shop which was badly damaged during the floods in July - and a website in desperate need of updating), Matt Venn (The personal site of the 15 year old driver of our race team) and a couple of others which I will announce once they are completed.