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Thursday 9 May 2013

A day of rest

Today was a quiet day, a day of rest. Plus, ladysolly has a bad tummy. So I installed the voltmeter on the bike; now I'll know the exact voltage of the battery at all times. This should be a better guide than the 1-to-4-blobs of the display it came with.

The 20-inch wheel bike is even worse, the indicator is green-yellow-red. I've ordered more voltmeters (at £1.25 each!) and I'll put one on each bike.

The wattmeter also arrived. I'll install that when I install the wheel that's on a slow boat from China.

Tomorrow, I'm planning to go back to the Great Cotswold Walk; maybe I'll be able to do all the ones I didn't do yesterday. Or maybe I won't; I read one log of someone who went round all 130 is 10 hours. I simply couldn;t do that, I'm not that fast a walker. But I might be able to do 80. Fortunately, it's two loops, one of 50 and one of 30, so I'll do the 50 first, and then see what time it is.

Since I broke my favourite Loox by slamming the tailgate down on it, I've ordered a replacement. These Looxes are about 10 years old now, and no-one wants them any more, so they're quite cheap. This one is a Loox 718, which is the same as the 720 but without a camera. Since I haven;t used the camera on the Loox since I got the iPhone, that's not a problem. It arrived today, and I'm loading it up. And an extra blessing, it came with a little aluminium case, which is perfect for protecting it from rain, dropping and even, if I'm really lucky, slamming the tailgate down on it.

I still think that a Loox 720 (or 718) makes a perfect PDA to use with a bluetooth GPS for caching. The battery lasts for about 7 hours (and is easy to switch), it takes a CF card that can be 8 or even 16 gb, so it'll take all the maps, and it has a 640 by 480 screen (most such devices are 320 by 240). Strangely, I seem to be the only person who thnks this.

5 comments:

  1. I don't think you are the only person who thinks this, but before I know for sure I have my work cut out to figure out how to make it all work together. Maybe something to fill next winter between trying to solve puzzle caches

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  2. It's easy.

    Loox 720 (or 718) for £30, bluetooth GPS for £12, 8gb CF card for £5 and Memory Map for software. And you can get spare batteries on Ebay, maybe £5 or so?

    Switch on the bluetooth GPS, click on the Loox Bluetooth manager, tell it to find new devices, and that gives you the pairing to the GPS. Then start up Memory Map.

    I have my own software to load the Loox with caches, cache pages, logs and hints, but you can do that with GSAK.

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    Replies
    1. Thanks Dr Solly, very helpful, and this weekend I shall start trying this. I already have a Loox 720 after reading your previous posts. Cheers!

      Hope you feel better soon.

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  3. Hey, drsolly, if you have written your own program to load the caches to the Loox, why dont you think about selling it, I hear you can make some money out of selling software these days!

    ps, I haven't heard much about your pies recently, has the novelty worn off?

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  4. You used to be able to make money selling software, but a program for preparing data for a GPS Loox is going to be of interest to an extremely small number of people.

    The pies are running well. I just had a look at my mail server, and it has 100 days uptime - that means it's been running continuously for 100 days.

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