Garmin Forerunner 201 Track Overlays Using Google Earth Plus and Photoshop CS2.
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The GPS track overlay images coming out of Google Earth Pro aren’t doing it for me. One can barely see the immutable one pixel wide track on the map. What’s a hardcore geek to do? Well, break out some mad h4×0r Photoshop skills, that’s what. I invented a new process whereby I make a non-antialiased (aliased?) 4-pixel wide trace over the wonky-ass default one, and then apply a stroke and bevel layer style. So, if you have a Garmin Forerunner 201 GPS Watch, a copy of Photoshop CS2, a Google Earth Plus subscription, and run about on somedays, you should do this and put it on your Flickr Pro account. |
New Running Maps
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I created a couple of satellite overlay maps from a run in Ohio and West Virginia. You can view them here. |
Hill of Life
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I managed to run “The Hill of Life” portion of the Austin Greenbelt yesterday. Here is satellite map GPS goodness of the run. |
16th Place in HEB Hairy Man 5K
I ran 16th out of 201 people in the HEB 5K Race. I wrote some perl to read in the Word file that was sent (huh?), and output results in a sane format here.
Emma Long Moto Course Run
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I managed to run the entire Emma Long Motor/Mountain Bike Trail yesterday morning at 7 o’clock in the A.M with the famous Eric Holbrook. It’s a new experience for me getting up that early. I rather enjoyed it though as absolutely no one was up at that obscene hour. The total distance was exactly 5.00 miles according to Garmin Forerunner, but as you all know it’s rather difficult to determine a precise distance measurement when the route is sufficiently windy. |
PerlMagick+Garmin GPS Data+USGS Orthoimages
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I finally got a day off from work, and managed to write a little perl script to take my garmin forerunner xml watch data and overlay it on a high-resolution USGS Orthoimage. USAPhotoMaps will not do this nor will GPS Visualizer. So, I basically had to roll my own script to do this chore. The CPAN Perl Module PerlMagick made short work of this. I had quite a bit of trouble producing an image this big on my computers. The actual TIFF data for the satellite image from USGS was nearly 500MB. The full resolution satellite image was 16000×10000 for the entire town lake trail (which I stupidly ran on Wednesday). ImageMagick crashes on handling an image this big even though my Linux machine has 1536MB (1.5 Gigabytes) of RAM. Adobe Photoshop fortunantely handled the full-res 16000×10000 image, and allowed me to resize it to a 9000×5648 TIFF. Then, my PerlMagick read the TIFF file in, and produced the GPS Track annotation and saved it. I then used command-line ImageMagick to mogrify the TIFF to a JPEG, which is what I added to my gallery. Enjoy. |
USGS Topographical Maps Overlayed with GPS Tracks Color-Coded by Speed
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GPS Visualizer is a cool little web application that picks up where USAPhotomaps leaves off. GPS Visualizer shows you your GPS tracks overlayed on Satellite Maps, Topographical Maps, and Street Maps, and then color codes the tracks by Speed. Everyone with a Garmin watch should Paypal the creator, Adam Schneider $2.56. |
First Sattelite GPS Overlay Running Map: Green Belt to Zilker
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I finally managed to obtain a Garmin Forerunner 201 GPS watch to use when I go out running. This watch allows me to download my track points from the watch to my computer and then overlay the route onto a sattelite map. This image was taken on the southern portion of the Austin, Texas Town Lake Trail in what’s known as “The Green Belt”. I parked on Spyglass, and walked most of the way to Barton Springs because it’s a fairly rocky bit of trail to get there. I then ran to the end of the Mopac bridge and back. The whole journey was probably around 6 miles (I didn’t start the watch until about 3/4 of a mile after I started). |
