Tag Archives: MyMotion

Another Bike Ride

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I decided to take a bike ride on Saturday and Renee decided she would come along. We started in North Akron, as I always do with the kids, and we went all the way to Peninsula. I forgot my camera, because I guess I don’t associate needing the camera when I go on these trips with anyone other than the kids. I should have brought it.

This was supposed to be the first time that I’d have a tracklog of the trip. I decided, and wrote about it in another post, that I had decided to use MyMotion in order to track the trip. There is one major problem and one small problem.

The major problem is that the trip goes all over the place. You are supposed to allow for some deviation from the trip you actually took since GPS is constantly trying to figure out where you are within something in the neighborhood of 300 to 500 meters at every ping. The problem is that the trip actually went across rivers and all over the place. The distance marked is totaling 19 miles for the trip to Peninsula, when really the round trip is only 19 miles. I don’t know if this is a problem with the GPS unit or the software. Further testing is going to be necessary.

The secondary problem is that all the information, such as speed, were not recorded. Jo informed me that I was doing it wrong. I’m supposed to save the trip as a .trk file and then convert it using a web page that he linked me to. This should fix the problem with information not being retained.

I’m not going to show you the GPS data, because I really feel like it’s worthless.

The trip was a lot of fun. It was supposed to get up to 80 degrees, but to be honest it never really felt that warm. I took plenty of water bottles, but we didn’t finish them all. We saw a bunch of woolly bear caterpillars on the trail. I was supposed to look it up, but I haven’t found any information on why it would appear that they were crossing the trail. Seems really dangerous and unnecessary.

We ate at the Winking Lizard in Peninsula. It was packed, because of the college football games. We ended up walking around Peninsula while we were waiting for a seat and we saw two snakes. They were pretty cool. It’s always so weird what nature you see when you go for these trips.

I hope that I can get some clothes that will make these bike trips possible as the weather gets colder. I don’t think they close the Towpath, but I guess I should grab a pamphlet next time and find out if they have dates for that sort of thing.

Learning GPS Programs

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I had mentioned some time ago that I wanted to learn how to use MyMotion and TrackMe in order to have a tracklog of the bike trips that I’ve been taking. Well there really isn’t a better time to learn how these programs work than when you are taking a drive some place.

I’ll start with the most frustrating, which is TrackMe. It’s the better looking of the two programs, but that isn’t really an issue if it’s so much work. The first thing is that it seems that you have to check a lot of options inside the preferences/tools otherwise all you are really doing is reporting back to a server where you are. His server. Where you can log in and see where you are. That’s neat, I’ll give him that, but that’s not really at all what I wanted, so after a lot of trial and error I finally managed to check the correct boxes and have a tracklog.

Then the problem was saving it. That seems like it would be really easy, I mean you load up the program and hit the “play” button, and then you press “stop” and everything in between is the program recording your position at predetermined intervals, but no it is actually pretty daunting a task to save the file.

First you have to navigate through menu’s, but you have to play “pick the right icon”, since there are several icons that aren’t really intuitive at all. The design choice was really “less words more icons” and I don’t think that works very well when you are trying to learn to navigate the interface for a new program. Then you have to go through more menu’s to find where you can load “existing” and then save it. This is the file that I was eventually able to make, and honestly if you put me on the spot I can’t say that I know how to go through all the steps again to make that.

Next on to MyMotion. MyMotion is ugly, but it works. I was tracking by altitude in this tracklog, so when you look at it the line is solid red, because apparently I never changed altitude. I could be wrong about the red line, but looking at the tools and preferences it’s the impression that I get. I’ve removed that and have it logging by speed, so hopefully the next time I have a tracklog to share you will see the multicolored lines that represent how fast I was going.

The only real problem I had with MyMotion is that the track line actually stopped two points short of where I stopped. I don’t know what that means, but I fixed it. I was driving, so I’m not sure if it’s a bit more accurate on a bike or something. We will have to see.