Real-time GPS tracking

For a while now, I've been looking for good real-time GPS tracking options that work with my Android phone.  I want to use this technology for the following things:

• When I'm away from home, to let my family know where I am.
• If I go running or hiking, to let others follow me online and in real-time.
• For fun and safety while paragliding, also in real-time.

Some criteria that are important to me:

• low battery consumption
• possibility to view everything live in Google Earth
• preferably allow customization of the time between two track points
• ease of use

These are the current solutions that I came across, together with their advantages and disadvantages:

1. Google Latitude: advantage is that it falls back on mobile phone or WiFi networks for the localization if GPS is not available.  Battery consumption seems also ok.
2. Gaggle with LiveTrack24: seems nice for paragliding, but looks a bit overkill for simple running or hiking.  Rumors indicate that it has a high battery consumption...
3. InstaMapper: haven't tested this one yet, but might be an option for running...
4. WiaTrack for GPS-Trace Orange: haven't tested this one yet.

If you have other (preferably Free and Open Source) suggestions, please let me know!

Kortrijk Loopt 2011

Yesterday, a lot of recreational runners gathered at sports centre De Lange Munte to participate in Kortrijk Loopt, a quite commercial running event here in my city.  I was one of those participants and decided to go for the full 11km, just to check the status of my physical fitness and to have a reference race for future comparisons. Here are some pictures of state-of-the-art running-action:

Unfortunately, Murphy stroke me again... after a full one and a half minute of racing, the battery of my Garmin Forerunner 305 decided to give up... so there I was for the rest of the race without the technology that would deliver me all the statistics that a scientist could ever dream of! Luckily, there was a backup solution: the electronic time recording setup by the organizers. However, big was my surprise this morning when I found myself classified as a 'Did Not Finisher' in the end results! Of course I finished! Of course I would not give up on a stupid 11km race like this! Who the hell did they think they are, putting me in the DNF status!

I immediately emailed the organizers and after a few minutes got a friendly reply saying they were looking into it. And yes, a few hours later, they seem to have corrected my result. I am now listed 85th out of 929 starters of which 914 finished the race. I have squeezed the 11 km in 46m03s, which gives me an average speed of 14.34 km/h or 4m12s per kilometer. The complete results can be found here. The organizers assured me the correctness of my result with the following email:

Dag Bart, 

Deze uitslag is 100% zeker en geregistreerd door onze computers.

Normaal gezien moet je over 2 aankomstmatten lopen bij de finish. Deze liggen net achter elkaar, het tijdsverschil is dus haast nihil. De gecombineerde registratie levert je resultaat op. Als 1 van beiden ontbreekt, vissen we je resultaat op door de jouw registratie op 1 van beide matten op te zoeken. Deze uitslag is betrouwbaar en correct en bewijst het nut van een dubbele registratie aan de aankomst.  

Vriendelijke groeten, 
Lien

I guess this means I can be 100% sure of my result... *fwew*... Murphy didn't strike that hard after all!

Spring cleanup: basement part 1

Today, Tine and I decided to do some spring-cleaning.  Our goal was to tackle a small part of our basement and be happy with that... the rest of the basement is planned for later ;-)  After a few hours of cleaning up dust and reorganizing things, this is our result:

 Notice the nice spot for my paragliders on the left, and the mathematical subtlety by which everything is organized!  We are doctors after all, aren't we! :-)

Demolition Day!

From now on, Friday June 10th 2011 will be known as Demolition Day!  At noon, my collegue Bert and I decided to join forces and get ready for some reinforced concrete pole demolition action.  Bart decided to go for the hard work...

... while Bert preferred the more subtle steel cutting action:

After less then 30 minutes, the job was done...

...and we decided to reward our efforts with some nice French fries from frituur De Beke.  Yummie!

Perfect sky

People sometimes ask me what the best weather conditions are for paragliding.  Whell... today, I think we got pretty close:

The gray building you see is where I work.  The picture was taken at 17h43.  Observe the nice, little, white and fluffy clouds.  At the bottom they are flat (that's cloudbase).  At the top they have more irregular shapes.  These kind of clouds are perfect indicators of rising air: they show us where the thermals end.  All we paragliding pilots have to do, is circle around underneath them and hope that we will go up :-)

The other nice thing about the cloud-formation in the above picture, is that the clouds are quite close together, forming nice cloud streets.  Paragliding pilots try to hop from the bottom of one cloud to the other, thereby trying to fly as far a distance as possible.

Ekiga.net and Android... mobile VoIP without tears!?

Now that Skype has fallen into the hands of Microsoft, I am exploring the VoIP market for more open and free video-chat solutions.  Without doubt, the alternative is SIP.  If you support the Open Source philosophy, you quickly end up finding Ekiga a good SIP-client because it is free and works for both Linux and Windows.  Consequently, you create yourself an Ekiga.net account.  I have such an account, and now I want to start using it with my Google Samsung Nexus S smartphone, running Android 2.3.4 Gingerbread.  My most important goals are:

• being able to make SIP video-calls
• doing this from behind my wireless router or NAT
• being reachable at my ekiga.net SIP-address

Getting things up and running seems not so easy, especially because I do not only want voice, but also video.  Within this post, I will try to summarize my findings concerning Ekiga.net and Android-based smartphones.

Interesting to know is that most of the times, I'm behind a wireless router with all the NAT-trouble that comes with it.  So quite frequently, when my Nexus S connects over WiFi to the Internet, it has a local IP-address within the 192.168.1.X range.  For SIP, this often seems to be the bottleneck...

Android 2.3.4 native SIP-client
If you are behind NAT, then with this client you will not be able to register and get a `606 Not Acceptable' answer from the ekiga.net server. This problem is also nicely described at http://www.jitsi.org/index.php/Documentation/FAQ#ekiga.net

As long as Android's native SIP-client does not support some kind of NAT-traversal technology like STUN, ICE,... you will not be able to register.  See also the feature request at http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=15685

Sipdroid 2.2 beta
Registering with Sipdroid works just fine.  However, to traverse the NAT, you must enable the use of a STUN Server under the Advanced Options.  The name of the STUN server is stun.ekiga.net and the STUN Server port is 3478.

I have been able to make voice-calls with this client, but no video-calls.  If anybody knows how to do it, please let me know!

CSipSimple
With this client it is currently not possible to make video calls, but support seems to be on the way, see http://code.google.com/p/csipsimple/issues/detail?id=112&q=video

Jitsi
This client has no port to Android yet, but according to http://www.jitsi.org/index.php/Documentation/FAQ#android this is planned for 2011 or 2012.

Digging it flat

Today was the day: I was going to spade the garden and I was going to do it fast!  The plan was to get started this morning and see how far I could get.  While I was digging my way towards hallucinations, Tine closely followed me with a rake to fine tune the result of my intensive labour.  At 19h30 local Belgian time, the end result is something we are both very proud of:

 

Seems like it's getting time for a call to Mr. Gardener!

Concretely getting rid of concrete

In one or the other way, I have to get rid of 5 reinforced concrete poles in my `garden'.  I was able to dig them out, but now I have to somehow transport them to the dumping ground.  Because these things are quite heavy, this is a difficult task for a man without a car.  I think I have two options:

1. According to this page i apparently have the right to get one free (big) garbage collection from the city of Kortrijk.  I could use my free ticket for this year to get rid of my concrete poles...
2. I could use a grinding disc, cut the 5 big ones into smaller chunks and drop the chunks myself at the dumping ground.  The only problem is that I don't have a grinding disc :-(

If anybody can help me out with my poles, please contact me!

Killing the buxus!

It has been almost 3 years now that we have this big, fat buxus in our garden.  Tine liked it, i didn't.  I wanted to get rid of it.  After I finally convinced her that removing this damn thing was like the best thing we could do to the world, today was D-day: time for destruction!  This is the sucker before I attacked him:

This is how the bastard looked like after a few strokes with my saw:

And a few more cuts later, he didn't seem to be too happy anymore:

The final struggle to the root was damn hard, but the battle was won by me and I nailed the damn thing.  Look at him crying for his mommy:

Of course, I could not have done this without the help of my brave son, who's always ready for some buxus-destruction:

Thanks, Jenne!

Airtour 2011 cancellation

Yesterday, I decided to withdraw from the Airtour 2011 hike-and-fly paragliding
competition.  I do this for personal reasons and because my family is of the
uttermost importance to me.  My cancellation might come as a surprise to the
people who know me and who know how higly motivated I was to take part in this
race.  Deciding not to compete was quite difficult, but I know for sure that it
was the right thing to do.  My family needs me and i want to be there for them.