Using Google's Latitude widget, your friends and family can track our progress and current location on rides. A few caveats:
- I (or at least my Droid) must be on the ride.
- My Droid must have GPS turned on to be super accurate (I may have to turn GPS off on long rides to conserve battery).
- With GPS turned off, it triangulates location based on cell tower proximity (not super accurate and I usually keep it in this state when not riding - after all, you don't need to know I'm at the Smoke shop getting more Spice for the after-ride party...oh woops!)
- We must be within Verizon's coverage area to maintain up-to-the minute location.
If you click on the google.com/latitude link you can add the Latitude widget to your google home page. This will allow you to zoom in for a more accurate view of our location. If you already have this installed, add me (symetriic@gmail.com) to your list of friends you follow.
If your phone is Latitude compatible, you can also track us there, too.
This would be fun for your friends and family to track our progress in near real-time. And who knows, it might be useful in an emergency.
Leave a comment and let me know if you use it (and if it worked!) and what you think.
Matt Syme
Well, not knowing how to contribute an article I wanted to share some information. I use a social website called dailymile.com It is a great way to keep track of your miles and creates a good sense of how you are doing compared to others around the world. The other day a friend of mine a CAT 4 racer from New York posted this article:
ReplyDeleteA Belgian woman and Riding a Straight Line
http://thewgnews.com/2010/06/how-i-learned-to-ride-a-straight-line/
also another great tip from the same guy:
http://spokepost.com/news/story/1216/
If you are interested in my progress and joining the dailymile, I usually post a small write up of every ride here:
http://www.dailymile.com/people/JeremyBowen
The site auto syncs with facebook too.
Checked out the links they have some good info!
ReplyDelete