Cycling and Online Maps

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Being a mountain cyclist in Suffolk is a bit of an oxymoron. So I’ve bitten the bullet and got some road tyres. I have no intention of giving up off-road cycling but it’s just more practical to do the majority of my cycling on the road. What’s more the local forests such as Tunstall and Rendlesham are criss-crossed by well made up trails that don’t really require off-road tyres, so I don’t need to spend too much time on the boring black stuff.

As a side-effect of this I’ve been looking at some online tools to help with route planning and the like. The best straight-up map I’ve found so far is provided by Sustrans, the Sustainable Transport charity.

The only problem I’ve found is the lack on information on the state of some of the off-road, and to some extent on-road sections. Some of them would be unsuitable for delicate road bikes and would require a hybrid if not a dedicated cross-country (XC) bike. The vast majority of routes are no cause for concern, however.

Google also have cycling maps, the cycle tracks highlighted in green…GoogleCycling

These include many of the Sustrans routes as well as other cycling facilities. The problem I’ve found is that they’re not entirely accurate. The above example (as of the time of writing) includes a large section alongside the River Deben. Some of it is made-up track, but the surface is very poor and narrow. The rest is just a mud track. I’ve bumped into similar problems elsewhere too – overall I’d recommend not trusting the Google Cycling Layer unless you’re an experienced off-road cyclist.

OS Atlas Android AppOn my smartphone I have a few apps, but one of the most useful is OS Atlas. It’s pretty basic, its main advantage is that it displays the Ordinance Survey’s 1:25k scale mapping. This is extremely useful for navigating because it contains a good level of detail not just about the roads but about landmarks. It also has GPS integration so it can show you as a dot on the map. The app’s not free but it is cheap. There is a free version but this doesn’t work terribly well. Beware that it does rely on an internet connection.

For full browsers the Ordinance Survey themselves offer the 1:25k scale mapping via their Getamap interface – you need to make sure that you have “Leisure” maps selected.

There are a number of online route planning and measurement systems. For a quick calculation of distance Map-O-Meter is good. The system I use for planning and recording rides however is MapMyRide. There’s a smartphone app to record your rides and upload them to the web site for proper analysis. It has a route and course feature so it will detect when you’re repeating and ride and you can compare performance. It also allows you to jump onto other people’s published courses so you can compare your performance with everyone else who’s ridden that route. You can also search for other people’s routes and courses in any given area, although they do tend to be “my commute to work” rather than “a scenic 30 mile loop around Lavenham”.

There’s one final web site that I’d like to mention – whilst over the past few weeks I haven’t needed it much the rain radar at Rain Today is about the most useful weather forecast I’ve found. It doesn’t actually do a forecast (unless you pay), what it shows you is where the rain is now and where it’s been recently. This is about as good as it gets for being able to predict if you’re going to get soaked on your 2 hour ride.

Why is In-Car USB Reading so Poor?

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Car MP3 Technology, apparently
Car MP3 Technology, apparently

Why is it so difficult for car manufacturers to make cars that play MP3s?

Today’s hire car was an almost new Vauxhall (Opel) Meriva. It has a USB slot so I plugged my USB pen drive in it, “no data recognised” said the dashboard, “you can unplug the device.” There was nothing special about the device, just a plain USB pen drive with a handful of folders in the root dir and in each folder a handful of MP3s with a M3U playlist file. It’s difficult to imagine what could be simpler, so why is General Motors’ entertainment system not able to cope with this?

I’ve had similar problems in other new cars too. I know cars have a long development cycle and therefore we can’t expect all the very latest gadgets in them but there have been cheap commercial MP3 players that can cope with a few folders and MP3 files on the market for more than 10 years. There really is no excuse now.

In contrast my previous hire car was a Volkswagen Golf. Whilst initially annoying that I had to copy my “driving” MP3s to an SD card as this is preferred to a USB slot, the Golf had a neat little menu structure and worked very well.

Yes, there is another argument – most car manufacturers seem to have got Bluetooth integration working, so why don’t I just pair the car to my phone and play music from my phone? Because I want to change the music occasionally. DragonForce isn’t really ideal music when you rock up to the back of a huge traffic jam, perhaps Bat For Lashes or Portishead. Although if mounted to something it’s not technically illegal it wasn’t technically illegal when I wrote the article for me to operate my phone whilst driving it’s still fiddly to use and the voice command is good for a laugh but nothing more.

A simple menu structure and simple easy to use controls beat trying to fiddle with my phone hands down. I really don’t understand why it’s so difficult for some manufacturers to provide it.

Compare and Contrast: Glastonbury vs. Silverstone

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In 2013 Glastonbury and the British F1 Grand Prix fell on the same weekend. They’re both enormous events, but the there are some very notable differences. This article in The Guardian gives us a few pictures of the aftermath of Glastonbury – I’ve cheekily linked one of the images to give an illustration.

Glasto cleanup

It is true that charities recover usable equipment from the Glastonbury camp sites for less developed countries but there doesn’t appear to be a hell of a lot of usable equipment in the pictures. I suspect that most of the tents etc. might have been usable when the original occupiers left them with that noble intention, but it looks like a herd of drunken elephants have stampeded through since then.

This however is one of my pictures. It was taken a few minutes before we left Whittlebury Park Camp Site having spent the weekend at the British Formula 1 Grand Prix at Silverstone.

Whittlebury Park after F1 GP
Whittlebury Park on Monday

Is that one single abandoned chair I can see?

It seems rather perverse to me that a festival synonymous with charity and environmentalism could leave such a mess whilst one more associated with reverse barely leaves a trace.