My Mac's Christmas present...

Thank you Apple. I have had my Powerbook for 15 months now and I'd like to give you an update on it...

The impish nature of your product fist came to light when the power adaptor stopped working just a few months from new. Oh the fun I had trying to get a new one while in Mongolia as even with Applecare (costing a few hundred quid) you couldn't find a way to send one out to me. Surfing your support forum I felt a warm glow that I had joined a select group of Apple users - actually not that select, there were loads of them, and I was only admitted as a junior (it was my first power-adaptor to go kaput, not my 3rd, 4th, 5th...)

I think next was the DVD burner - what you so amusingly call a 'super'-drive. One day it just point-blank refused to burn DVDs anymore. The entertainment of buying a new type of DVD every time I went to a computer shop and then the suspense of seeing if it would work or not continued for months. My coaster collection is now the envy of my friends and I’ve even had to start giving them away to the local taxi drivers so they can dangle them from the rear-view mirror and blind-themselves with reflections at hilariously critical moments. My DVD drive problem entitled me to join another not-so-select group on the apple support forum who had all had 'super'-drives; I think you should rename that branch the “Coaster Club” in honor or all the people who didn’t know they were beta-testers.

Moving along a couple of months and I was now in Kazakhstan. Yep, the land of Borat and copper-line modem dial-ups. Ho, ho, ho (well it is Christmas), the joyous time I spent trying to connect to a local ISP was increased ten-fold due to the speaker on the laptop's modem not working. Was the line engaged, was my ISP not answering, had I got a crossed line with Borislav as he discussed this year’s water mellon harvest with the Central Committee? I guess I’ll just never know and will miss out on corning the Kazak mellon-futures, at least for this year.

And finally, to seal 2006, you gave me the best present at all. Did you know I had time on my hands and was rapidly running out of books to read? Trying to recover the data from my hard-drive has been a most enjoyable challenge, I must thank you all for giving me a puzzle that was so complicated it took several days to solve. Not including any software in the OS that could deal with the failure was a brilliant step as it took me several extra hours to find, download and run a program that would recover the data.

However, despite all the fun I’ve had with my Mac I think it’s time we took a break from one another for a while (this will probably be enforced by the amount of time I hear Applecare takes to turn around repairs). When the laptop does come back I think it will be time to grow-up and get a serious computer. One that has parts that aren’t cutting-edge but will, hopefully, work for at least a couple of years before they give up the ghost.

Thankfully I still have my trusty work laptop. It’s a Prostar, not very common as you get them put together to spec rather than off the shelf. It weights a ton, the fans wail like a banshee, and it’s made of a very boring grey plastic. It has traveled with me for over 10,000 km off-road in Mongolia and for at least 200 hrs of vibrating around in the back of a Mi8 helicopter. It’s been used at +35 Celcius and stored at -30 C. It’s a year older than my Powerbook but it still works. Every single bit of it (right, back-up now just in case…).

Happy Christmas.

Garmin and Mac, GPS and Google Earth

Well, back on the 10th Jan Garmin announced that it's GPS software products would be compatible with mac computers by the end of 2006. I found a Garmin 'blog' site the other day here and asked them if their developers' Christmas bonus were dependent on that, as with only a few days to go it's doesn't look promising... Obviously the criticism didn't go down well as my post never materialised.

Searching the rest of their site I then found a later press release from 27th Jun 2006 which admitted that only one of GPS software products "Training Centre" would be up and running (pardon the pun) by the end of 2006 and further announcements would then follow regarding the release date of other Garmin GPS software.

Sorry guys, sounds like you paid lip service to mac users earlier in the year without having finalised a realistic project time-line; either that or just slacking off. As your site says, the Arizona office, where mac compatible software is being developed, "is also an ideal place for us to test and use Garmin devices while biking, hiking, and geocaching." Hmm, more time needed in the office maybe?

Anyhow. Garmin software will be overtaken by 3rd-party translation software fairly soon. Why do I say this? Two words, that should shake the fear of god into Garmin, Google Earth, which I'll call GE from now on to save my fingers. GE uses a simple code language to put points on Google's 3D globe of the earth that is already well stocked with satellite images, maps, roads etc and is all available for gratis after downloading a and installing a small program file. (As an aside Google managed to roll-out a mac version of GE within less than a year of the PC version becoming popular...) Google calls uses a language called KML (keyhole mark-up) to put points on the GE globe but this language uses XML convention grammar and files which can be edited in a simple text editor (if you haven't heard of XML then just pretend it is similar to HTML, used to write web-pages, if you haven't heard of HTML then you can give up now...). Googles explanation of KML can fe found here and if you haven't yet discovered GE then get the program from here.

I haven't done a huge search on the topic, but once you have GE on a mac you just need a program that will download points from your GPS and save them in kml format to see them in a glorious full-colour world. Up till now I've been using MacGPS Pro to do this, a program available for around 50 bucks here. So far this program gets data out of your GPS and into KMZ format for GE but has issues up-loading points saved from GE in KMZ format. (Don't worry, kmz files are only kml (and therefore xml) files in a compressed format, see my previous post for how to uncompress and examine them using Excel.)

So, the last step of the puzzle is how to get points out of GE and back into a GPS. I suspect there are copyright issues involved, storage of data in a digital medium etc etc that have slowed Google's development of this, or are they just being leaned on my the GPS manufactures who see their own market for selling digital mapping products vanish in a puff of smoke?