I have been looking for an off-road navigation solution when I stumbled across GPS Tuner. While TomTom is great for car navigation, it lacks many features such as track recording and support for custom maps. We now have the option of using the newly released mobile Google Maps and mobile Virtual Earth, these programs require a constant Internet connection and can be slow to use (especially when hiking in remote locations with poor cell phone reception). Its often much more convenient to have the needed maps pre-loaded and configured on the hand-held.

When I gave GPS Tuner a try I quickly realized that I have to spend a lot of time making my own maps. Luckily, there are a number of free online mapping systems (tile servers) such as Google Earth and Virtual Earth that can provide the base images for maps. The problem now is downloading the maps (in fine resolution) and piecing them together. Since I’m too lazy to do this manually, it was time for a little scripting to automate the process.

Google Maps and Microsoft Virtual Earth work by asynchronously downloading tiles of the map depending on the users desired map zoom level. With a little hacking, I figured that I could put together a script that will download any section of the map in any available zoom level and automatically put all the tiles together into one large image. The biggest challenge there is finding out the indexing scheme used for the tiles (i.e. given a lat/long coordinate and a zoom level deterministically determine the corresponding tile on the map and the URL to fetch that tile). The following articles on Via Virtual Earth gave me a great head start and even some sample code. All that was left to do is write a loop to download all the tiles between two lat/long coordinates and save them into one continuous image that can be loaded into GPS Tuner.

Here is the code and a sample image of Manhattan made from about 100 tiles.

Happy Navigating.

Just got a new M700 to replace my old phone (Motorola MPx220) and PDA (iPaq 3900). On first impression, this is a great convergence device but its takes some time getting used to. The Eten Users Forum was a big help in working out the kinks and getting everything setup.

Caveats

• Static Navigation: The GPS receiver has static navigation turned on by default. This limits position changes to about every 50 meters and makes the device unusable for navigating on foot. Use SirfTech to disable this option (be careful). Refer to the following thread for details.
• Battery Indicator: The battery seems to continue charging indefinitely (even when the indicator shows 100%). The charging light does turn off an hour later… this is “normal.”
• ETEN software: For lack of a better word, the ETEN software sucks. Replace it with another vendor’s version if you need that functionality. The device runs faster and with less “hick-ups” once the ETEN software is removed.

Key Applications

• TomTom Navigator - This is the best navigation software that I found. Just copy the maps to your SD card and you are ready to go. (make sure to get at least a 1GB card)
• GPS Tuner - Great for off road navigation and making custom maps.
• Tube II - Transit maps and city reference.
• Resco Explorer - Powerful file explorer, registry editor, network browser.
• Resco Photo Viewer
• SPB Pocket Plus, Diary, and Weather - Convenient today screen plug-in and task manager. Great for one handed navigation of PIM data. Note that the current version has a problem with the Glofiish which causes stray lines to be drawn on the today screen tabs.
• Pocket Informant - Comprehensive PIM manager.
• HiCalc - Comprehensive calculator
• Lexisgoo - Great dictionary.
• Windows Live Search (still in Beta)
• SK Tools - I didn’t believe the hype at first but it actually does make the device run faster.

After several years of using the MPIO FL100, my trusty old MP3 player was starting to show its age. It was time for a change and I decided to go with Samsung’s YP-T9. At first glance, this is a great player. Sleek design, 4GB of flash memory, great battery life, video, mic, and it has an FM-Tuner as well. The only kink in the armor is that the device only supports MTP file transfers. While this may not be an issue for most casual Windows users, it was a problem for me because I predominately use Linux. I was really starting to miss the FL100’s SD card slot.

First I tried libmtp which, at present, is the only library for MTP support in Linux. While this library already has support for dozens of MTP devices, support for my Yepp is still experimental. At least one user was able to successfully connect to his YP-T9 using this library but experienced problems with the last few bytes of each song being truncated. Since Amakor, my Linux audio player of choice, already had support for libmtp, I decided to give it a try. Being able to connect got my hopes up at first but I was soon greatly disappointed. The transfer crashed after each song, the songs were truncated by a few byte, and the songs did not appear in the player’s playlist (only in the file browser). Although I could live with some if these problems, transferring one song at a time is unacceptable. Updating the firmware didn’t help. I ended up having install the software that came with the device on my spare Windows laptop and reformat the drive because playing with libmtp left the filesystem in shambles.

My next attempt was to connect to the player from a Windows installation that I had under VMware on my desktop. I was able to browse the content of the device without any software or drivers (which some people online mistakenly though was UMS support) but as soon as I tried to copy a file to the device, Winblows crashed (no surprise there… thats why I use Linux). I think it was something to do with an address conflict between the host machine and VMware when connecting to the USB. I can connect to other UPS devices so I don’t know what made this one so special but, since the behavior occurred every time I tried to connect to the device, I decided to give up on the VMware approach. Powering up a virtual machine each time I wanted to connect to the MP3 player would have been a hassle anyway.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find any solutions to my problem online. However, there were a couple claims online that people were in fact using the YP-T9 as a UMS device. So, before sending the player back, I tried one last thing… flashing the firmware with the Asian version. Miraculously it worked! Appearantly, only the US version (YP-T9JAB) uses MTP while the equivalent device overseas (YP-T9BAB) is UMS. Even better is that the menus are still in English. Note that if you are going to do this, make sure to get the right firmware version (Samsung has a number of these players with different capacity and with Bluetooth support).

Now my YP-T9 is behaving beautifully and I definitely recommend it to anyone looking for a quality MP3 player. Hope this helps someone in a similar predicament.