Chirrup...!

When we were in the UK in 2007 we bought ourselves a Garmin GPS which we named Malvina. I wrote about 'her' at length on that trip; she was invaluable, and only very rarely did she do the equivalent of landing us up in a village where it was impossible to get the car through the narrow street (as some continental lorry drivers experienced around that time) or bring us to a river bank so we could get a ferry across - except that was no ferry, as some other poor GPS user experienced.

These days, if we're going somewhere unfamiliar, we use the Tom Tom app that's on my wife's smartphone; it's pretty good, although suffice to say there are times when we know the city a good deal better than it does. And we certainly know it better than Google maps, which on one occasion wanted guests coming to our house to go around the block in a direction that took them away from the house before setting off towards it...

I've never played geocaching, although I heard about it quite some time ago. It something like a treasure hunt, in which you use the coordinates given via GPS to find the 'treasure' -or, as it's normally called in this game, the 'geocache'. Not being a person greatly enamoured of going off in the wild with nothing but a GPS system, this isn't a game I'm likely to play.

Now, apparently, you can add to the fun when you buy Garmin chirp, which is some sort of homing device, as far as I can make out...but also a lot more. The 'chirp stores hints, multicache coordinates, counts visitors and confirms the cache is nearby' presumably for those searching for it. It sounds a bit like making things too easy, but no doubt for those who take up chirping, it adds to the fun.

Expect, then, next time you're out in the wilds, to hear unfamiliar bird chirps.

Treasure hunt

Having been using a GPS to get ourselves around the UK while we’re here, and having successfully negotiated all manner of routes without getting completely lost, and having gained confidence through having the GPS with us, I’m almost tempted to take up the challenge of doing a bit of geocaching. This is where you use GPS coordinates to find a ‘treasure’. It may not be a treasure in the sense of pirate treasure, or long lost treasure, but it will be something that’s worth chasing. Even if it’s only for the fun of doing it.

I note on the official geocaching site that there’s even a cache in Mosgiel, the smallish town near the city I live in, in New Zealand. They say that the treasure in this case is as follows: This is the original cache type consisting, at a bare minimum, a container and a log book. Normally you'll find a Tupperware container, ammo box, or bucket filled with goodies, or smaller container ("micro cache") too small to contain items except for a log book.

Tupperware and treasure in the same paragraph? (Though apparently the Queen even uses Tupperware at the royal breakfast table…!)

SD cards - what little I know.

The SD card has been around since 1999, but has really only taken off in the last year. It’s a secure digital memory card, though originally the SD stood for something else altogether, that is, Super Density. The secure aspect was an encryption process added to the already existing Multi-media card, in an attempt to overcome piracy problems.

There is now an SDA – an association – and they have issued detailed specifications for the non-security aspects of the SD memory card standard. The cards have quickly gone from having megabytes of memory to gigabytes. The current versions are highly secure, and very small. Some only stamp-sized. They have no moving parts and retain data even power is turned off. Battery consumption is small and there are write protect switches to even great security.

SD cards can be used in a variety of SD enabled digital products, from music players to cellular phones, from handheld PCs to digital cameras, from digital video recorders to smart phones, car navigation systems and electronic books.

A Challenge!

I haven’t done much driving while we’ve been in England. Just a bit concerned as to whether my driving skills were up to scratch when faced with the rather more aggressive English drivers. So my wife has done most of the driving, and she’s happy to do it. She’s always had more confidence in driving in unfamiliar places than I have.
Those of you who know England will know that the M roads are the major ones, and have three lanes of traffic on either side, and in the inside lane drivers go full bore. The A roads are dual carriageway, and not quite so intensive. Then there are the various lanes and smaller roads, that mostly have larger numbers, like the A508, which comes into Roade where we’re staying.
I thought the other night I’d drive back from Northampton centre into Roade, since we were familiar with the territory, and there was little hope of me getting onto a wrong piece of road. So off I went with confidence, and was getting on well until we came to one of the final roundabouts before the Roade turnoff. Through a mixup of communication between the GPS, my wife and I, I turned off onto the M1. Panic stations. Once you’re on there, you can’t get off until it lets you off. So here I was, the person who didn’t really want to drive in England, driving on the most extreme road in the UK.
We quickly learnt, from our trusty GPS, that the next turn-off was eleven miles down the track. Eleven miles on the M1! However, I girded up my loins, metaphorically, since it’s difficult to do it any other way in a moving vehicle, and reminded myself of the sermon my nephew-in-law had given in church the previous Sunday. He’d spoken about the power of Words, and told us that words can change even our physical behaviour. So I said to myself, This isn’t a nightmare - it’s a challenge. I realised that any traffic that got into the same lane as me quickly saw that I was an old and doddery driver and needed to be passed, and because there are all these lanes, passing is a breeze. So for most of the time I had the M1 to myself…as it were.

Enthusiasms

My wife used to have a thing about GPS – it was one of those patches of enthusiasm she went through. She craved to have a GPS thingee of some sort. Any sort, as long as it was one. She’s gone past that craving now, and in fact we sold a book on Trade Me the other day dealing with the subject that she’d acquired somewhere. Such is the case with fads in our house.

A friend of ours has a little computer in his car that tells him where to go – in a polite sense. He taps in his current location and then his destination, and his little lady friend in the computer tells him street by street and metre by metre where to drive. It’s a fad too – but like my wife, he’s rather addicted to techno-toys.

My wife also used to fish – another enthusiasm that seems to have gone by the board – but if she still did fish, and if she still had an enthusiasm for GPS, she could combine it by looking out for fishfinders. Nope, they’re not people who prowl the sea looking down through the waves for fish: they’re marvellous little techno-toys that help hobby fishermen find fish – and catch ‘em, presumably….although that may be up to the fish.
I don’t think I’ll let her see this post – it might encourage her to go back to these two enthusiasms in some combo-format!