Sky’s Blog @ The Dalai Lama Foundation — Spreading the word in a networked world

The ways I choose to get regular exercise are hiking and biking. I never could stand “going to the gym” and doing an indoor workout. It always seemed to me that there was little point in getting in the car, driving somewhere, parking, going inside to exercise on machines, getting all sweaty, then back in the car, and driving home again. And running was always hard on my feet and knees, so although I did run for a few years (up and down San Francisco hills), it didn’t really last.

I find that hiking 10+ miles with a 20-lb pack gives me an opportunity to clear my mind for 3 hours, see some of the city (or the surrounding territory), work off a thousand or so calories, take a few interesting photos, and see people doing a lot of silly things.

This iPhone app EveryTrail goofed me up last weekend when I hiked the Headlands in Marin County and it completely lost all of my data - after 10 miles of recording. So today I did another urban hike, down to the Ferry Building, around the Embarcadero to near Pier 39, then back down Van Ness Avenue and up Market Street to my starting point. This time its recording was quite good! There were a few of the usual GPS glitches (it’s hard for the GPS to see enough satellites in an urban setting with hills and skyscrapers around), but by and large it recorded my track pretty well.

I’m comparing the distances against the Nike Plus Sportband, and the EveryTrail app always reads about 10% higher than the Sportband, so I’m not sure which one to believe yet. I think that probably half of the difference is due to GPS inaccuracies, so I’d say that the Sportband (for me) records about 5% lower than my actual mileage, and EveryTrail probably records 5% higher than actual.

The EveryTrail widget (see below) is giving me a little trouble, but try clicking “Full” and then double-click to zoom in on San Francisco and you’ll see how it recorded my route. There’s gotta be a way to get the widget to zoom in automatically, but I haven’t figured it out yet, sorry.

(If you have Google Earth on your computer, you can download this KML file and see my trip in Google Earth - I absolutely love this!)

SF loop

Widget powered by EveryTrail: GPS Geotagging

I was amused and delighted by the topic, but a schedule conflict prevented me from attending a meeting at the Institute For The Future (IFTF) about “the quantified self” a month ago. The topic, however, is completely intriguing to me as I find my life increasingly digitized - as if it weren’t already. (See The Quantified Self Group.)

I picked up an iPhone app called EveryTrail, and have been testing it against measured walking/running courses all weekend, and also tried to use it to measure a walk from my house to the Ferry Building and back on Sunday (it was way off due to GPS inaccuracies in the skyscraper canyons of downtown San Francisco, but it’s spot-on when the GPS satellites are unobstructed, such as on the waterfront).

Here’s (below) a Saturday hike I did from Crissy Field to the Golden Gate Bridge, then back along the Embarcadero to Pier 23, with a return to Crissy Field - a little more than 10 miles. You can double-click to zoom in on the map, and you can drag it to see the kind of detail this app records. The iPhone has to remain on (not sleeping) the entire time in order to record the GPS data, and I ran the battery down below 20% over the course of almost 4 hours. I was also wearing new shoes, and I can hardly walk today my feet are so raw. But it was a lot of fun.

Crissy Field, Marina, Embarcadero

Widget powered by EveryTrail: GPS Geotagging

I have Ubuntu 8.04 running on an old Toshiba “tablet PC” whose touch-screen no longer functions (and Windows therefore malfunctions), and yesterday Ubuntu 8.10 was released so I jumped right on the bandwagon to try to install it so I could test it out.

My choice was to install using VMWare Fusion on Macintosh OSX, so I downloaded the Ubuntu 8.10 distribution, burned a CD, installed VMWare Fusion’s 30-day trial version for OSX, and then first installed 8.04. That installation went without a hitch, as Fusion detects the CD and the version of Ubuntu and goes right ahead and without any problem installs a virtual machine that seems to run flawlessly.

Installing the 8.10 distro, however, was odd. Fusion first warned me that it was a pre-7.0 Linux distribution, but allowed me to move forward.

Once installed (which I let run overnight because it just was a terribly slow process), 8.10 did run, but “VMWare Tools” didn’t install. So I found the VMWare Tools install volume and ran a “manual” installation from Terminal. It required (automatically) recompiling a lot of modules for the (upgraded Linux) kernel. Following that process, I was able to reconfigure the screen to greater than 800×600, which I guess means that the tools were successfully installed. I installed a few plug-ins (such as Flash for the browsers) and they work just great. A bit scary, but looks like it was a success.

I didn’t need to refer to other sources, but look around if you find you need help.

In my quest to find better ways to deliver training and learning around the world, a suggestion from a colleague has turned into a unique distance-learning solution.

We’ve put about 6 hours of video recordings from our teacher training session onto an iPod Nano in MPEG4 format, and the Nanos are being carried to teachers in countries where Internet connectivity is thin or doesn’t exist.

And we’ve added a couple hundred photos, and videos produced by our first year participating schools.

In a subdirectory on the Nano, accessible from a computer, are copies of various documents that may also be useful to teachers and Project Happiness leaders.

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