Saturday 6 August 2011

Gadgets

Sometimes I wonder if it's possible to have too many gadgets. 20 years ago setting out for a ride my sole thought would have been whether to have water or juice. Now I've just finished the detailed route planning for the 14 days of JOGLE; using my laptop and a Garmin Oregon as well as a Philips Road Atlas.

The Oregon is a pretty versatile device; as well as moving map display and turn by turn instructions it takes 3 megapixel images tagged with your position. In a pinch you can get route directions back to anything you've taken a picture of, clever. Best not take any pictures of body parts, you never know where you could end up.

Me and the Oregon are old friends now. It sits nicely in a cycling jersey pocket and pings when you have to alter course; sometimes this is a cue to take it from said pocket to check where to head next - which is shown as arrows on the map. I bought the frankly rubbish handlebar mount for it but that gets in the way of my barbag and cycle computer. I'm running Opencyclemap which is open source and shows all the National Cycle Routes.  Hooray for Sustrans. Garmin Mapsource serves as the planning tool, after the near impossible feat of converting the map database for its use, why does it have to be so hard, but a big thanks to the boys and girls who provide free help to make it happen.

Apparently I have to have a phone and a camera as well, so there is only limited space in said barbag for the real essential - energy food - but more on that another time. The phone is for keeping this blog up to date (and emergencies) and the camera is, well, for making sure I have a decent record of what happens this time, and sharing some of it with you.

This means I have 4 separate chargers to carry plus sundry leads as well. Long gone are the days when a Victorian gentleman adventurer would set forth to conquer the world armed only with a questionable set of tweeds and a slice of toast.

Anyway, the point is that thanks to those 20 years of progress, I cannot contemplate a bike ride without at least the use of a GPS, cycle computer, phone, camera and laptop.

Right, time for some sleep as we start our journey North tomorrow.

No comments:

Post a Comment