I woke up early. I had to re-adjust my Sturmey hub which was slightly out of alignment from Friday. On Friday I suddenly lost gears 3-7, just next to Waterloo station. So I waited a full hour till 7pm and took the train home.

So, Saturday, I thought I did it right, re-adjusted the hub, it's not a simple thing, I have to unscrew cables and other things un-fitting for a £1000 bike , went out and tested it. Fine.

Now all I need is to get the map for my destination. I'm helping a work mate trace his cycle route into work. I need to leave soon, and the TFL route is 8 pages of PDF. Hmm, I don't want to print that but OK, I've got two PDA's here, a Palm TX and a Nokia N70. Well the Palm has a nice big screen, and I've already got Adobe Reader, so I'll just bluetooth the file over.

Um, nope. Didn't work, after a few attempts. OK, I'll send it over using Missing Sync....um, nope. OK, I'll put the damn file direct on the SD card. No no no, can't write to it. Pile of pants. OK, I'm already late now...

Plan B, smart phone, yep so I'll just google for Adobe Reader for S60 and wtf? 6680???*

So, how about printing it then, urgh, too fine to read on the road. Cancel the print job. Ack! Aha, GoogleMaps then. Ah, but that's roads, big roads only. Well, no choice. What to use, again Palm TX is obvious, but that needs Wifi, and I can't be arsed to fiddle with Bluetooth now, so it's got the be the phone on it's own.

Google Maps, well, fiddling bloody stupid T9 input, damn I need and friggin iPhone! Anyway, it's a completely different route to the one TFL gave. But, no choice, off I go.

I get 10 meters down the road and I lose all gears again. Aaaaaaargh! I stop and look. When I left the gears were perfectly adjusted, now they are about 2 cm out. 2CM!!!!??? I really don't want to ride the APB today, something is wrong with the front brake and it's squeaking. I've ridden it so much (the TSR has been so unreliable) that it needs another service! But I've no choice, so off I go.

I get lost twice and end up heading toward Forest Hill rather than Crystal Palace (destination Thornton Heath). But I see a cycle route (LCN 26) to Crystal Palace. Nothing to lose now, so off I go. Biggest bloody hill I have ever ridden up. I mean, it went on and on, and the up and up some more and more. And then I was in Crystal Palace. Back to the Phone what now? Down and down and down, biggest down hill ever. And then I'm in Thornton Heath. A half-hour late, but at least the ABP made it, although it's making ever louder knocking noises when I brake.

It takes nearly 2 hours to ride into central London, but the route is fairly reasonably straightforward, and not too taxing. All my mate needs is a bike that is the right size for him, his bike is shockingly small (knees nearly touching hands), and the gear range, fairly slow.

Then over to Russ for lunch and mail re-direction. All good. Then back over to Hyde Park to watch the Prologue to the Tour de France. At which point I regret not having my portable DAB radio, but the batteries are (still) charging in the back room. So I had no idea of who was winning or anything. I was at the far corner of the road near Exhibition Road, but it was hot (sunshine), so I moved near to the time check display, and then moved again into shade at the end. Um, bikes, racing. Whoo! Well, lots of people wooing and clapping. Most for the British riders. It was fairly entertaining at least, and fantastic weather the whole day.

But just before I got to Russ for lunch, I noticed what the knocking noise was with the front brakes. My front rim had split. Expensive icing on the cake.

*Turned out that I should have googled for Adobe Reader N70 instead. And it works well, if slowly. Too late now though!

Tags: Sturmey, Nokia

Well, it was indeed 4th time lucky. The Kingston card works fine. I am quite worried though. It seems the Nokia suite locks up if you try to transfer too much data. I was only able to move over my test Viewranger maps on the second attempt and I wasn't able to copy across a Podcast. This doesn't bode well for when I buy the full Viewranger (300+ MB!).

Aide-Memoire - shopping list next month:

• Solar Charger
• Viewranger
• Zip Off Trousers (you know, it's really hard to google-find certain things when you don't know the proper name for them)
• Gossamer Gear Polycryo Ground Sheet

Tags: Nokia

• The Memory card it comes with is only 64MB
• The 1GB I bought it corrupted. Literally dead within 5 minutes.
• The next one I bought it won't recognise (must be the wrong voltage, works fine in the Mac!

So I've bought a 4th! 4th time lucky maybe??!!

It doesn't appear as a mass storage device on the Mac, in fact it doesn't appear to be accessible from a Mac at all. Except through Parallels and the irksome Nokia PC Manager. The Nokia Music manager is so bad I shouted at my iMac for the first time ever. Windows is terrible, it really is. But Viewranger is great.

Here's something I want to do before this summer:

And this made me laugh:

Tags: Nokia

So, after 4 lost auctions I finally got one, a Nokia N70 and a new one too.  I have wanted a GPS for a few years now. I was going to get an Etrex Venture cx, but the map on it only has major roads, river and lakes.  I wanted the GPS for my first cycle tour in September and that is almost completely off road.  I looked into Garmin's more detailed Topo map and that apparently is very expensive rubbish. I came to realise that the proprietary US/French created maps on Magellan and Garmin devices probably wouldn't do for me.* The usual solution is to buy software on your computer, make your map on that and then export the route to the GPS. The best software for this is on the PC, Memory Map with full OS Mapping, and on the Mac there is Route Buddy which has the (not so good for cycling) Tele Atlas Maps. But I don't want to leave my map behind on the computer and I don't really want to pay for 2 electronic maps one at home, one on the GPS.

Infact, I would rather take advantage of online maps when I'm at home, like Google Maps or Street Maps, or Multi Map, to create routes while I'm at home and focus on having the proper map on the GPS. This is possible of course, but most the options require a PDA, in most cases running Pocket PC. I do not, under any circumstance, want to run Pocket PC voluntarily, so I thought I was sunk. Then I found View Ranger. Viewranger runs on Series 60, has OS Maps, and can connect to a GPS via Bluetooth.

You can record your tracks, but you can also upload way points and routes to the phone. I tried out their custom map tool and I'll be able to buy OS maps of central Wales, London, bits of the west country and the south downs for about £35. I should be able to get a better bluetooth receiver than in the etrex for about the same again (£35-45). So hopefully I'll get what I actually wanted for rather less money.

*My intial decision was to get an old GPS, a Sportrack Pro and wait till an iPhone based solution to get digital OS maps in my hand appeared. It turned out that the Sportrack and N70 are of the same Vintage, 2005 models and around the same price. I suspect my wait for the iPhone will be rather more pleasurable with the N70 that it would have been with the Sportrack and my Motorola SLVR.

Tags: Nokia, GPS

I have on my desk an Apple Newton Original MessagePad. "A what!" you say? Have a look at 'state of the art' circa 1993.



Seeing that video makes me want to go get some batteries and try it again, but I only found it because I was doing a comparison to get a sense of the size of the Nokia 770. Here it is:

Newton OMP: 18.4 x 11.4 x 1.9cm
Nokia 770: 13 x 7.8 x 1.8cm

So its basically the same size as the original Newton minus lots of bezel. In most ways though they aren't really comparable: the Netwon was primarily a PDA, and the Nokia is primarily an Internet Tablet. However the Newton wasn't always meant to be a PDA. It was originally meant to be a Knowledge Navigator. Again see here:



LOL, futurology at it's bonkers best. It looks like it is set around now. But replace the butler guy with Google's ever widening services (calendar, scholar search, google search, writely, gDrive, gmail, maps) and is it so far off?

Isn't the 770 essentially the realisation of the Knowledge Navigator? When it came out the main criticism was that it had too low memory for doing anything. Apparently the 2006 software update has gone some way to address this.

My main use of my PowerBook is for surfing and email, and I like to surf everywhere: bed, couch, toliet! I'm also happy surfing over the mobile phone...but the screen is too small. The 770 looks ideal for surfing, because unlike other wi-fi enabled PDAs, it has full-width 800x480 screen. On the other hand, when I'm watching video or writing my web pages or documents, I plug into my 17-inch LCD. Does this mirror anyone else's experience?



So today I put in a speculative bid for one on eBay, it sold for £196; in the end more than I was expecting, but still affordable...in this context: I am thinking that when the time comes to replace my PowerBook, I'll get a Mac Mini instead. That plus a 770 and I'll be set to go!

Or am I missing something here? Do you have a 770, what do you think?

Tags: Nokia