June 29th – Ever wondered what that hill was on the horizon? Find dioramas a bit hit and miss? There’s a great piece of software for your smartphone called Viewranger.
It’s actually a quite good 2d/3d mapping application, but has this great augmented reality feature where you hold it to a view with the camera and it labels what you can see.It’s quite remarkable, and that functionality is free, too!
It was great for the view from Morridge over the Roaches.
February 28th – After some grim weather over the last few days, I thought I’d seek out a weather app for the Edge, the Garmin GPS based bike computer I use. I’ve tried Accuweather, and it’s really rather good.
Accuweather loads via the Garmin IQ App Store, and uses a paired iPhone or similar to access internet weather data; it then gives what I’ve found to be fairly accurate predictions of wind and precipitin for the next two hours. It’s in an easy to read format, and if free of charge.
Being a widget, it’s accessed by swiping sideways from the pull down status screen, which had me fooled for a bit. It only loads data when accessed, so it’s power and phone plan friendly to boot.
It accurately predicted the rain that dappled the screen…
Jun 2nd – This is a bit of a geeky one for fellow owners of Garmin Edge bike GPS units: I notice now that under the Garmin ConnectIQ brand, there are a selection of installable, free apps to give new screens and data fields for your device. Most of the stuff available is fitness related, and doesn’t appeal to me; but this app – called My Edge – giving an analogue-style speedometer with clever max and average speed implementation, with other data fields configurable, is really nice. It has a slight bug in that elevation related fields display in feet, rather than the labelled meters but it’s cool. You can investigate the My Edge app here.
There are other interesting apps too – another I’ve loaded shows the current OS grid position you’re at, which I find nicely geeky.
Check out the Garmin Connect service here.
January 23rd – I also noticed that the piece of street-art under the reservoir place bridge has been completed. It’s quite impressive – there’s real skill and artistic ability there, and I love the way it adds interest and colour to an otherwise dark corner. The artist is called Apps, and @dhintheman on twitter found his youtube channel. You can see his self-made film there, together with other films of his derring do. Apps, I salute you.
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