Order of the Bath

Advent GPS 400

1 Feb 2006 15:42 by Rick

There is virtually no information about this device anywhere. I’m sure that there was a promise of a support web site when I bought it, but there is no sign of anything. The Dixons group (Dixons, PC World and Currys) are the only retailers in the UK and they know nothing about them nor do their parts/accessories agency, Partmaster. There is not much about this device on the various GPS forums yet either.

The Advent GPS 400 is made by Medion as the, now discontinued, PNA 400 re-badged. Their web shop has some accessories including the external antenna and a Traffic Message receiver which I presume work OK with this model.

The box says it uses Navteq software but in fact the software is Navigon 5 (I think v5.1) but with a few modifications, mostly cosmetic; the maps are by Navteq. The only features that I can see are missing are the on-screen qwerty keyboard, signpost information, the info bar and speed limit display and some that would only apply to a PDA device. There is an upgrade to v5.2 on the Navigon download site but I don’t know if it would work with this device. Similarly they have maps available (at a price), including North America, and I imagine these would work with the device. Navteq only sell maps direct for manufacturer’s in-car systems.

Performance

This is not a comparison with other devices, only having used a hand held GPSr before. Some of the faults may be unique but others may be common to all such systems.

The physical device seems to have been designed for a left-hander. The battery bulge/hand grip is on the right and the stylus withdraws from the back left. If you use it the natural way around your index finger tends to switch the screen off or eject the memory card.
There is very little in the documentation about the external buttons. Some of the functions are obvious but others are not. The sockets for headphones and external power are close together and very similar, fortunately the plugs don’t engage in the wrong socket. A full set of connecting cables, a windscreen mount and a carry case are provided.
Getting started proved very easy following the large format idiot’s guide enclosed.
Entering destinations is pretty straight forward so long as you know the full address. It only accepts partial post codes and if this covers more than one village or district then you need to select one before going on to enter the street. In some cases the best bet is to get close and then use the map.
When navigating, the directions given are clear and there is plenty of volume from a voice we have dubbed “Sat. Nav. Lady.” Perhaps she says “Please” a little too often but otherwise there are few problems. There is no choice of voice but the volume is adjustable. The use of the phrase “Bear left/right” is sometimes ambiguous meaning either to turn off or just a bend in the road. I think that this is because the system has no concept of priority at road junctions. The A4137 junction with the A48 on route from Hereford to Monmouth was not announced at all.
It is very good and quick at recalculating routes if you make a mistake, or deliberately overrule the instructions, and she doesn’t complain either <g>
There is a tendency on twisty roads for the apparent position to wander off the road. This can lead to delayed or completely incorrect instructions; in the worst case to “Make a U turn when possible.” I am hoping that this is down to the poor reception behind our metallised windscreen and an external aerial will solve it.
The currency of the (UK) map varies. Some very new features are there but some older ones are not. A few junctions are missing altogether (e.g. Sussex Place junction in St. Paul’s, Bristol) and it doesn’t acknowledge mini roundabouts at all. The weakest aspect of the maps is the POI (Points of Interest) data. Many of the petrol stations and garages are incorrect; either missing (from the map), wrong or closed.
There doesn’t seem to be any recognition of the quality of roads beyond their classification and sometimes speed limit. Examples are: the A5 between Llangollen and Bangor is very twisty, narrow and slow despite its trunk designation. It is preferred over the A55 Expressway on a journey from Shrewsbury to Holyhead. It also likes the A466 Wye valley road. All routes from our house in Redland to the M32 seem to use Brookfield Lane, a very minor residential road which I wouldn’t dream of taking a car down unless I had to, and then turn right onto the busy A38!
Possibly for the same reason, the ETAs given are rather optimistic. It expects you to be able to achieve the designated speed limit at all times and no allowance is made for negotiating junctions. Some adjustment seems to be made for built up areas and the target speed reduced to 20 or 25mph but even that is not enough with modern traffic. I would allow at least 10% extra time for any journey and more if the traffic was likely to be busy.
It thinks that the quickest route from Bristol to Bromley is via Central London, ignoring both the M25 and the South Circular. As this was our first use of the device ,we chickened out and don’t know exactly which route it was planning to use. I thought that we had said avoid tolls and expected it to not go into the Congestion Zone but we may have got it wrong. Similarly it has no qualms about taking us over the Severn Bridges in either direction.
It comes with the UK maps preloaded and street level maps for the rest of Europe on CD. Together with the large 512MB removable memory card this gives it more potential than many devices on the market. It also runs one of the PDA versions of Windows and a copy of ActiveSync is provided giving the potential to run other software. It comes with an MP3 player which we are not particularly interested in but it may have an afterlife as a picture viewer when the navigation features cease to be useful.

Conclusion

Despite some of the rather negative comments we rather like the device. It is easy to use and very good for travelling to places which you don’t know, just that you can usually do better if you do know the roads, however the difference is rarely more than a few minutes.

Posted in Motoring, Navigation, Technical | 95 Comments »

Scientific American Cover Art

27 Jan 2006 14:17 by Rick

This started as a short project to exploit the 40+ years of copies of the magazines that I have on my top shelf but then I started to look at some of the older editions. I only have two in my collection (one each from 1876 and 1896) but the information is available via a search. This starter article brings all of this together. I will update it if I discover anything else but, soon anyway, I will start the original project to document the covers from the mid 1950’s.

Posted in Miscellaneous | 4 Comments »

Handy tips for Laguna owners (3)

14:09 by Rick

Don’t lose your key cards!

8. If you lose a card, in order to replace it you will need your registration document and driving licence or other form of identification. There will be at least a 10 day wait while the key blade arrives from France. You will also need around ½hr. workshop time to code the electronics to match the car (this can be done while waiting for the blade).
9. If you lose both cards you will also need a tow truck or a very good car thief. You can’t get in the doors, disengage the immobiliser or the steering lock. On newer models you may have trouble with the alarm and anti-jack system as well.

The main agents have an absolute monopoly on this work as only they get the tools and training to recode the keys.

Posted in Miscellaneous, Motoring | 7 Comments »

Red and yellow and green and blue

23 Jan 2006 22:28 by Rick

It’s a nice sunny day, the sky is blue, the trees are green, the road is yellow, red, blue, green and silver—it’s playmobile land! No, the road markers have been out and the men with pneumatic drills are coming your way.

Health alert—this is a seriously anorak posting.

Yellow marks and it is Gas. If there are piles of big thick yellow plastic pipes nearby then it is serious gas and you will be disrupted for weeks with yellow diggers and men in yellow jackets and yellow hats. Everything about gas is yellow; except the gas.
Blue marks and it is water. The water boys are clever. They have ways of slipping a new plastic pipe inside the old iron one. That means fewer holes in the road.
Red marks and it is electricity. Lots of red marks with big numbers by them and it means high voltage electricity, maybe replacing a substation or something. Get in a stock of candles.
Grey/Silver or Green marks and it is communications. Silver is normally used by BT and green by the cable TV people. They can often do their job using a mole so very small holes but there will be men with a tent over a manhole cover drinking tea for weeks.
Orange corrugated pipes and it is street lighting. Expect to be going home in the dark for a while but when they have finished you will be unable to tell night from day.
Purple corrugated pipes and it is motorway services like phones and information signs. That will mean lane closures to keep you away from the hard shoulders and verges for quite some time. Look out for those 40mph cameras.
Marks like someone has been playing with the paintbox all over the road in every possible colour usually means drains work. They have to get every one to tell them where their ducts go because they dig such large holes that it disturbs everything. Expect roads to close completely for long periods. Also expect a nasty smell.

But, while they are there, you could make a note of the marks nearby. It may come in useful later when your garden has sprouted a new water fountain.

Posted in Miscellaneous | 2 Comments »

The big “small packet” scam

19 Jan 2006 17:53 by Rick

Victim: You
Perpetrator: Royal Mail

I went into the Post Office near the factory this lunchtime to post a delayed Christmas present to friends in the Netherlands. I didn’t realise until later that I had paid over £1 more than the same parcel last time (the exact same parcel, that is another story but not Royal Mail’s fault.) This is why.

When you present your parcel they put it on the scales and read the address and punch it all into a machine which prints a label (no stamps these days unless you make a point of asking for them.) What (most) counter clerks will not mention is that if you write the words “SMALL PACKET” in the top left near the Airmail sticker then the cost is around 40% less. The only restriction is a 2Kg weight limit and you can’t enclose a personal letter—put it in with the card and send it separately.

This only applies to packets going overseas, but you do need to think about it in advance. There is probably something about it on the Royal Mail website but they don’t make it obvious and it is easy to forget, as I did.

I wonder how much they make out of us each year that way?

For that matter, why the different prices, it must cost them the same amount to deliver it!

Posted in Miscellaneous | Comments Off on The big “small packet” scam

Google Talk <–> Jabber.org

18 Jan 2006 18:27 by Rick

You can now Instant Message (IM) me on my Jabber.org account rick.parsons@jabber.org from the Google Talk service.

The Google service has been running for some time and uses the same XMPP protocol, but would only communicate with other Talk users, but now they have federated with any Jabber server so can accept interconnections.

Similarly vice-versa, users of Exodus, PSI and other Jabber clients can now message people on Google Talk.

Not voice though; that is an extension built by Google which hasn’t made the standard yet, nor any of the other clients.

Posted in Technical | Comments Off on Google Talk <–> Jabber.org

Invalid RSS feed

16 Jan 2006 13:36 by Rick

An RSS feed is an XML document with an implicit DTD. Unlike XHTML, this DTD doesn’t specify any named character entities so the only ones allowed are &, ', ", <, and >. This means that feed generators, like the one in WordPress and other blog & content management systems should convert any other character entities into numeric form before serving the feed document. WordPress 1.5, at least, doesn’t.

As a result, the feed received by the reader may generate a syntax error. In practice, most don’t seem to notice entities in the description text and pass them straight through for rendering but some, including Feedreader, choke if there are any in the title.

Conclusion—don’t use named entities in your blog titles.

Posted in Technical, WordPress | 4 Comments »

DIY characters or Extending Unicode

15 Jan 2006 22:33 by Rick

There are a couple of problems I have with Unicode. First of all it can be very hard to find the character you want if it is out of the normal context. I am transcribing C17th documents and there are a few unusual characters that you need. “y” umlaut “ÿ” is one and a long “f” is another. The best match I have found scanning down all the alphabet groups is ƒ, a florin symbol.

The second problem that even though there are thousands of characters (glyphs) sometimes the one you want is not there. I need an “m” with a tilde over and “p” with a line through and, as far as I can tell, these don’t exist. There is, however, a range of what are called non-spacing characters which allow you to modify the preceding character, much as we used to use backspace in the old Teletype days. So “m” tilde can be created with “m” followed by ̃ to give “m̃” and “p” line-through can be created with “p” followed by ̱ (a low macron) to give “p̱”. Neither is perfect but it is the best that I seem to be able to do.

An example of what can be done can be seen on the first page of Sufferings of the Quakers 1655–86. The remaining pages will be finished off soon.

(late note: Many apologies folks, but this only seems to work in Firefox, IE6 users get a little box after each character. Perhaps IE7 will be better 🙂

Posted in Browsers, Mac, Technical, Windows | 1 Comment »

Lithium-Ion batteries

10 Jan 2006 09:39 by Rick

These are the sort of rechargable batteries found in laptops, power tools and many cameras and mobile phones. They have different characteristics to the well known Nickel-Cadmium (NiCad) rechargable and need to be handled differently. The information for this post comes from Battery University.

They only have a life of about 300-500 discharge/recharge cycles so expect to have to replace them at some time. In normal use this will be 2 to 3 years or longer for low current applications.
Unlike NiCad, the battery prefers partial rather than full discharges.
However, batteries with internal calibration gauges, such as those in laptops, do need to be recalibrated occasionally so that the gauge knows the actual capacity. They should be discharged to the cut out point on the equipment about once in 30 times (and recharged immediately so they don’t drop below this base).
For storage, a half charge is better than a full one (and keep it cool).
Check the manual, but it is often better to remove the battery from a laptop if running from a reliable mains supply. The worst scenario for a Li-ion battery is fully charged and hot, a typical situation for a mains powered laptop.
Overcharging is not a problem as they cut out when full.
They have a limited shelf life even if not in use, so check dates of manufacture and don’t stock up in advance of requirements.
Beware of counterfeits—some without adequate protection circuits have been known to explode. In fact some branded ones have had problems as well.

Posted in Technical | Comments Off on Lithium-Ion batteries

Handy tips for Laguna owners (2)

7 Jan 2006 20:39 by Rick

Battery woes. In the country you are supposed to leave the parking lights on in the dark, but if the battery is old then it will be flat by the morning.

5. If you can’t get in via the key card electric door locks either because the battery in the key card is flat or the main car battery, then there is the emergency key which the salesman told you about. He also told you that the key hole is in the passenger side door handle. It is not that easy however. There is a hole the right size but the key doesn’t go right in nor does it do anything. It is, in fact, only a slot to enable you to prise the whole of the bezel off—the service department says that they often break when you do this, requiring a new one, but it can be done with care pulling the plastic part towards you with the key firmly in the slot. When removed, a full size standard door lock is underneath. If the main car battery is flat, as in my case, you still can’t open the other doors or the boot (where the jump leads are) but you can release the bonnet catch by leaning across. If you have to get in the boot then you will need to climb over the front seats and try to release the fold down rear seat and get in that way.
6. When the main battery dies or is removed, the radio code is lost. For maintenance, I am told there is a way to preserve it (does anyone know how?) but if it is unplanned then you need to reenter it. You did write it down somewhere didn’t you! Switch on the radio and then select preset 1. Press preset 1 a further “n” times to increment the first digit to the right value. Repeat with presets 2, 3 and 4. The display now shows the correct code number. Press the button on the underside of the steering column control (the one that selects preset/list/manual). This sets the code in the system. There may be a control on the radio to do this as well.
7. When removing the battery it is best not to leave the key card inserted. It can sometimes lock all the doors either as it (the battery) is removed or when it is replaced.

Posted in Miscellaneous, Motoring | 11 Comments »

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