I have now used the forerunner for a couple of rides, and two rides on the same course.
Using the Garmin Training Center I had configured one of my rides as a course. This is probably the closest comparison between the Forerunner 305 and the Ciclosport Hac 4, as I used the Hac 4 for a similar ‘virtual partner’ feature that the Forerunner 305 provides.
First off, selecting a course is much easier on the Forerunner. The courses you want are named on the device. On the Hac4 I had to remember the date and time that I last did the course. I can see this as a benefit in the future as I will probably have 3 courses saved for riding, one for no wind, one for a north wind and another for a southerly breeze. My riding times are greatly effected by the wind as I am quite exposed on some parts of my course.
Once a course has been selected the three screens of active information on the Forerunner is increased to six. The extra three screens are related to the course, and provide some interesting information. On the whole there are only 2 screens that I am interested in, my configured cycling screen, with HR, Cadence, Speed and Current Time. The other screen that I am interested in is the virtual partner screen. Unfortunately the 2 screens are 3 presses of the up/down button apart.
While riding I spend most of the time looking at the cycling screen. On the bike it is easy to review all the information displayed on the screen, as the bike and my head aren’t moving around much. The screen is clear and easy to read. Occasionally after going through tunnels the computer beeped to let me know it was back on course.
The Virtual Partner screen is in my opinion a bit of a waste of screen space. At the top of the screen is a ‘visualisation’ of my current position and the virtual partner position. In reality this is two bikes on the screen with no scale. The bottom of the screen is useful as it display how far in front/behind I am against my Virtual Partner. It uses the same white text on black vs black text on white to let you know if you are ahead/behind. Personally it would be great if I could display my heart rate and cadence at the top of the screen instead of the visualisation. As far as I can tell the Virtual Partner screen cannot be configured.
Out on the ride the system works well. The only thing that would be nice is if the virtual partner could pause when I am stopped at lights. Once I load the history on my computer the system can display my ride with the pauses taken out, however out on the course the virtual partner keeps riding while you are stopped at the lights.
The other thing that I would change with the virtual partner is that I think the time you are in front of your virtual partner is more useful that the distance. While running distance is fine as your pace doesn’t change to much on the ascents and descents. On the bike there can easily be a difference between 60kmh and 15kmh on the steepest hills. If you are traveling at 60kmh, 100 meters isn’t very far in front, but at 15kmh the distance is actually a larger gap time wise. It might be that I am just use to how the Hac 4 displayed its virtual race distance.
On the whole still extremely happy with the Forerunner as a Cycling Computer.
May 12th, 2008
Just got a Fujitsu ScanSnap S510M scanner. I got this to get rid of the mountain of paperwork that is piling up on my desk.
Setup was supremely easy, basically get all of the bits from the box, through away the US power plug and install the software. Three CD’s later I had Adobe Acrobat, an OCR app, and the ScanSnap manager software. The Adobe Acrobat update software ran the first time I opened Acrobat and that took ages to install.
The use of the scanner is incredibly easy. The scanner automatically turns on when you open the front of the scanner. Insert your document (upside down) and press the scan button, and the software is automatically invoked on the computer. The scanning is super quick, the pages spitting out in a couple of seconds.
The only hiccup I have had so far is that my older desktop computer is a bit slow to perform the OCR functions, and more often than not I am waiting for the computer to catch up with the scanning. An error dialog popups if you scan to quickly.
Apart from constantly thinking that it is a SnapScan instead of ScanSnap I have found it to be an excellent machine. It works intuitively and is really easy to use. The pile of documents is decreasing rapidly!
May 8th, 2008
I just got my Garmin Forerunner 305. I have been looking at this running watch for a long time, and finally decided it was the right one after Garmin released the Forerunner 405. I bought the 305 for two reasons, the first as a motivational tool for my running and as a replacement for my aging Ciclosport HAC4 on my bike. I have had the HAC4 for nearly 8 years now and two functions are invaluable. The first is the ability to download this information to my computer so I can review it after the exercise, the other function that I used all the time is the ‘virtual race’ function. Basically if you record a bike ride, and then do that ride again you can see how you are performing compared to your previous ride. This gives you a readout saying how much time you are ahead/behind your existing ride. I found this is a great motivator to increase my speed on the regular rides.
The HAC4 is designed as a bike computer first and foremost, and uses the speed of the wheel to determine the distance. It could work as a running computer but would only give out a heart rate reading while running. The Forerunner uses GPS and therefore gives a similar function while running.
My first impression of this device is that the Forerunner 305 is big. I had read people saying that it is was big before I bought, but didn’t exactly realise how big it was. Especially off your wrist it looks like a monster, but part of the watch wraps around your wrist, and isn’t as unwieldy as it is seems in the box. However if you have small wrists take heed of this as it might be too big.
On my first run, the first thing that I noticed was that it is heavy especially compared to other watches that I have. I had to tighten the strap on my watch to stop it moving up and down on my wrist. The big problem with any watch on a run is that it is difficult to read as it is moving on you wrist. I could read the Forerunner, but it was quite difficult. Once at home I could download my run and review the run, looking at my speed and heart rate. After the first run I had some useful information but nothing that I couldn’t have got from carrying a GPS data logger with me.
It was on my second run that I saw the power of the Forerunner. Using the included Mac software I was able to load my first run as a course. This adds an entry to the training menu on the watch. Once I had selected that I wanted to run against my existing course, a couple of extra displays are included on the watch. The first is details of the course (how far you are away, how long the course is etc), an altitude map, and a virtual partner. For me the virtual partner is the most useful. This splits the screen in two, showing a visual representation of the yourself and your previous in the top, and on the bottom a display that shows how far ahead/behind your are of your original course.
\The person who designed the virtual partner screen had obviously used this running, as it changes from black text on white if you are in front, or white text on black if you are behind. While running you might be able to see how far ahead/behind you are but you can easily tell if the bottom of the screen is white or black. Because the watch is using GPS the course is automatically started/finished when you go past the start/finish line. This is really useful and it cuts down the amount of button pushing you have to do while you are running.
I have also got a bike kit for the Forerunner and I will post on how well the Forerunner works as a bike computer.
May 7th, 2008
Just spent the last 3 days trying to get a MythTV box setup on Mum’s wireless network. I had everything working at home but when I tried to set it up on Mum’s machine it just wouldn’t connect to the network.
It could connect if I turned wireless security off, and it could see the network when the security was turned on but flat out refused to connect to the network with the WPA and passphrase. It turns out after much angst, upgrading of routers and rebooting of the system, that Ubuntu can’t accept some special characters in the WPA password. Ubuntu has the bug listed in their bug tracker.
I also found the command /etc/init.d/networking restart quite useful as it allows you to see the network reboot interactively and identify any issues that you might have with your /etc/network/interfaces file.
December 28th, 2007
Lirc by default creates lircd.conf files with the following headers:
name DViCO_Utraview
bits 16
flags SPACE_ENC
eps 30
aeps 120
I have found with my custom serial receiver (in this case the second one I have created) that you will find at times you have to walk right up to the receiver to get the signal accepted. A simple fix is to change the file to be (note the eps value changing):
name DViCO_Utraview
bits 16
flags SPACE_ENC
eps 45
aeps 120
And you will be set for normal remote control reception.
December 28th, 2007
I got the Lian Li TR-3 and a bunch of quieter fans for my MythTv box. The installation of the TR-3 was pretty simple and it fitted into my Antec case without a problem. Also despite mentions of it nearly being impossible to use the brief instructions (it only has 2 buttons) explain how to control the device without to many problems.
The only issue I had was with the backlight for the LCD. I don’t like bright lights next to the TV, I have already disabled the case lights on my machine and disconnected the HDD light. Lian Li has used one of those super bright blue LEDs to illuminate the display. Unfortunately this was a heap brighter than everything else in the AV cabinet and in a darkened room nearly brighter than the TV itself. Also the display has a continually moving power monitor and a HDD graphic that moves when the hard drive is in use, making it quiet distracting.
Unfortunately it does not have an option to turn off or dim the backlight of the display, and I had to either dim the display or move it inside the case and replace the front bezel. A quick look at the lit display showed that the light was on the left hand side of the screen.
Removing the screws on either side of the TR-3 bezel reveals the LCD display. The LED light and a diffuser are located on the left hand side of LCD display. I snipped both wires, but you only need to cut one of the connections. I am happy with the display not being on at all. If you wanted to dim the display instead you could put a resistor in place and reduce the LEDs brightenss.
Obviously this treatment voids the warranty of your device, and you want to make sure that it works before chopping any wires. Getting the TR-3 back together is pretty easy. Just put the buttons in the bezel and then lay the circuit boards into the bezel.
September 23rd, 2007
For all your Australian TV listings I have found Shepherd to be great.
Two things to catch beginners out. The first is making sure the channel names match up with those set in the backend of Myth TV. These need to match exactly or you will miss out on channel information.
The other is to make sure you install it as the user that is going to run the the listing as the configuration and other details are stored in your home directory. In the case of Myth installed by apt on Ubuntu this means the installation needs to point to the mythtv user.
August 21st, 2007
We have been testing making drive images made with Self Image and found that you have to make sure that you created an entire drive image when creating an image.
If you make an image of a partition then it is likely that you won’t be able to get all the parameters exactly the same on the new partition. If you have an image of the entire drive then you will restore the all of the partitions and boot settings etc. Much easier as long as your target drive is bigger than the drive that was backed up.
July 20th, 2007
I needed to find some decent backup utilities for the office. We wanted to have a program that would perform a daily backup and FTP the files off site. The other necessecity is to be able to backup and restore the entire machine quickly.
Found two good products, Cobian Backup and Self Image. Both products are open source.
Cobian backup met the criteria for backing up the files on a regular basis. It is able to perform diff backups, compress the output, and send the results to a remote FTP location. It will even deletes older backups on the remote site so you don’t run out of disk space. Unfortunately a recent post by the developer on the Cobian site says that he will abandon his software if someone doesn’t take over the project lead.
Self Image is imaging software that is able to make a disk image of a running Windows machine. The idea here is if the hard drive fails in one of the machines this will enable us to get the machine up and running with a minimum of fuss. Finally if the machine has failed it needs a host system to restore the image. Self Image is now included on the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows.
July 16th, 2007
For anyone trying to get a DViCo Fusion Dual Digital 4 PCI card working under Linux, then the following article is a great help.
I was using Ubuntu, and the following guide got me the rest of the way to a working MythTV.
July 1st, 2007
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