martinlittle.com:thinkThin

OK, I've been really slow to post about this, but I've been busy! After a few chats with Matthew following his GPS Running post on Mobitopia and a good amount of price-checking, I splashed out on a Garmin Forerunner 201 from amazon.com, for about USD 130 delivered (~67 pounds) to a US address. [Note: I didn't do this to avoid tax, just because amazon.com won't ship internationally with a UK credit card; the value is underneath the threshold for bringing goods into the UK.]

My first problem was that it didn't come with an international power adapter (it only handled 110V, instead of 220V). A quick visit to Maplin solved my problem for GBP 20 (still over GBP 30 cheaper than I could buy the watch directly for in the UK!). Second problem was that I tried to start the timer when I was still inside, which it just didn't like -- it needs 30 seconds or so with a good view of the sky before things start. Basic user error...

The Logbook software from Garmin isn't very exciting, but does provide an XML file output of each run, which is pretty cool. My grand plan was to write a small app to upload these files to a database and do something interesting with them. It might have taken me a wee while to actually get it all sorted, though. ;-)

Via somewhere I ended up at this Phillip Torrone post on Engadget which links to a few interesting sites. USAPhotoMaps sounded cool, but a bit ... US-specific, plus there is a download. GPS Visualizer sounded incredible, but too good to actually be true. After outputting my Sunday run to XML, I ran the upload to see what would happen. To my genuine surprise, I got a superb map of exactly where I ran, along with elevation data.

The map is in Scalable Vector Graphic (SVG) format, so you'll probably need to grab the free viewer from here and restart your browser before you can see it. Here's a link to the map (this may not work, yet; I'm still getting to grips with SVG) (150k map, it will take a second to load; more thanks to Adam for helping me set up my Web server.) That is magical technology! Tomorrow I'm going to have a further play about, and see what other wonderful things it can do. UPDATE: Here's the map as a JPG.

Please let me know how you get on with the SVG file, as I plan to post more maps of my runs and if it isn't going to work in SVG, there is an option to use basic JPG.