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What the World Searched for in 2014.

Byrichard
Reading Time: < 1 minute

Not the most inspired year in search.

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Experimenting With Traccar

Experimenting With Traccar

Byrichard

Traccar is an open source fleet management solution that allows you to track vehicles and devices via a self-hosted server without using Google, Apple, Garmin, Suunto or other brands. If you setup your own server you can track as many vehicles as you like, and even track their live movements.

Options

I did not use it as a vehicle tracker. I used it as a personal GPS tracker, as I went for my daily walk yesterday afternoon. The tracker allows you to set how often it refreshes based on time in seconds, distance travelled in meters, or course changes in degrees.

Granular tracking

If you’re tracking a drive from Switzerland to Spain or from Lausanne to Geneva you might set it to refresh every 5 minutes or every 5 kilometres. If you’re going for a bike ride you might set it to note every 100 meters, and if you’re walking then you might set it for every two hundred metres. It will then track your walk, bike ride or other using your mobile phone.

The Server

The server is light. It uses OpenStreetMap and other mapping solutions. As you add mobile phones or other devices they are displayed on this map and can update whenever the device sends a new location. In my case I installed the traccer client apps on an android phone and an iPhone. I use a local machine for a server via homeassistant.local:8082 to connect. It should be available via TailScale if I activate the TailScale VPN on my mobile devices but I haven’t bothered because they will time out and I will lose the link eventually.

Mobile Buffering

With the mobile Traccar client there is the option to buffer data, to be uploaded once a connection is re-established. If you shut down the app will persist. It only shows the most recent updates so if you go for a one and a half hour walk but see a few minutes of data this is normal. When the buffer is sent to the server once you are on the home wifi network the data is available.

The Daily Walk

The walk or route you just travelled will be displayed as a set of beads connected together by a string. Occasionally you will see the GPS leap as you pass under a bridge or as the signal to telecom towers is lost but on the whole you get a comprehensive track of your journey.

Fine Tuning

As I mentioned earlier tracking is granular. With Suunto, Garmin and other solutions you can choose between fine, battery saver and other options. With this app you can choose to be precise down to the meter, the degree, or the minute. Usually my devices tend to be within three meters so that’s as precise as you really need to get.

Reports

The Web interface has reports where you can see route, events, trips, stops, summary, chart and replay, as well as scheduled reports and statistics. The most interesting option for me was replay because it shows you a map based representation of the trip.

Contrast to Google Maps

According to traccar I traveled six and a half kilometres but according to Google Maps – Timeline I walked 8.2 kilometres. Map traces are similar. Google Maps is more accurate.

A Google Latitude Replacement

Traccar is designed as a fleet management tool. It is useful for the post office, deicing crews and more. It is not designed to be used as a walking app. If you are worried about Google or Apple having access to your location data this is an interesting alternative. Your data goes straight from your phone to your server, once you’re home, and not before. You keep control of it.

Some people want Google to delete map data, and I want them to stop threatening to destroy it. Map data is useful. Quite a few years ago I receieved a speeding fine, but thanks to Google Maps I could see that it wasn’t me driving the car. I paid the fine, with a clear conscience that my own driving was not the problem.

In this scenario Traccar is great. Any time you drive you have a track of where you were at a specific time. It’s easy to clear your conscience.

Battery Use

On an iPhone with a battery health of 80 percent Traccar used about 8 percent of battery despite running for 19hr24 in the background. The app is battery friendly

And Finally

I thought that Traccar could potentially replace fitness trackers but it can’t. It doesn’t give enough control for that to be possible. It’s a fleet and mobile phone tracker. It makes it easy to see where a car or phone is in close to real time, but not much more.

The Replay is a nice feature, to see where you have been on a specific day. The chart functions are nice but they would be more useful if we could say “show data from time A to Time B, rather than for the entire day. it’s hard to reach these charts when they show an entire day of data.

This could be a Google Latitude replacement, rather than a GPS watch replacement. I use the term Google Latitude, as a legacy name.

The SUUNTO SPARTAN SPORT WRIST HR BLUE
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The SUUNTO SPARTAN SPORT WRIST HR BLUE

Byrichard

I have logged 799 activities with my Suunto devices. This includes hikes, via ferrata, climbing, swimming and scuba diving. I like Suunto devices because their battery life is good enough to last through entire days of hiking and the battery lasts for weeks between charges when used as a simple watch.

Spartan HR

I like to track my heart rate but I often feel self conscious about putting the heart rate monitor belt on. With the latest Spartan watch I no longer need to worry about the belt. At the same time as I start the activity I will be able to keep track of the heart rate. This is especially good for group activities when you do not want to keep people waiting and in winter when you’re wearing layers of clothing.

I like that devices like the Fitbit Charge 2 can be worn at almost all times and track heart rate effortlessly when at the climbing gym and during other activities. I look forward to the same simplicity with a Suunto device. I especially like that Suunto devices survive swims and showers.

I like that the Suunto Ambit 3 tracks how many steps I take during the day. It’s a shame that the step count is not logged and visible on Movescount. I like to see how energetic or lazy I have been on a daily, weekly, monthly and yearly basis. It’s not unusual for me to go from a 21,000 step day to a 6000 step day. It depends on weather, work and other factors. If you go for a bike ride your step count will not be high.

I will wait to see whether they apply this technology to the Suunto Ambit watch collection. If they come out with the Suunto Ambit 4 Wrist HR then I will be tempted to upgrade. With 799 tracked activities I believe Suunto devices have demonstrated that they are reliable.

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Invisible without a website

Byrichard

Having a website is essential in today’s media landscape for one simple reason. You don’t exist until I can hyperlink to a website containing examples of your work and describing what you do. This is particularly true in today’s new media landscape. For the minimalist among you a facebook or myspace page is the bare minimum. For those of you that take your work seriously though a website is more efficient.

There are a number of reasons for which having a website is essential. The first of these is visibility. If you’re going to an event and you take hundreds of pictures then no one will notice them unless you share them publicly. You don’t need to be published to get your big break. That’s the point of viral marketing. Produce some content. Make it public and then mention it in a few places. If it’s good then others will advertise that work to friends from now on. You are now visible. That’s in an ideal situation.

Yesterday when I went to the protest (which event? Describe it in a few words and link to it) I met two friends, one is a well established photographer whilst the other, is, as yet a relatively anonymous face in the crowd. With the established friend it was easy for me to link to his work because he has a high quality site. It’s something concrete, easy to see and assess. For the second person there is not much I can do to demonstrate their worth except mention their name but is of limited value, without a link. Why? Because there is no action to follow a “plug”.

The plug is a term used to describe how one person promotes their work through another person’s content, whether it be in website form, podcast or other. As you are talked about more frequently, your visibility increases and, with it, people’s interest in what you do. John C Dvorak of Dvorak.org/blog is the best example. Anytime he can, he will mention his website and, although for the first ten times you may not react, you will go to the website, eventually. He’s got another reader.

Whilst you’re surrounded by new media people everyone has a blog, a website, possibly a podcast and more. Leave this group, though, and most people are “invisible”, except, for young people, facebook. Most of them are shown in their bikini, at drunken parties or in other situations that would not reflect well within more traditional work environments. That’s why facebook should be kept private and personal, confined to a group of friends.

When you apply for a job online, you’ are one of a thousand applicants. It must be a nightmare reading all those applications. I am taking as an example the work I did for blogwise, a human moderated database of websites. Each day several hundred people would apply for their blog to get through. As you look at the first ten your mind is clear and you’re interested. After several dozen you’re tired and by the time you reach several hundred you skim through. The same happens when you’re applying for work – boredom sets in.

When you think about how much time people spend looking for content and entertainment on the web you begin to understand why and how important it is to have something to show. When I worked on my dissertation I looked online and found an interview of Jacques Yves Cousteau a matter of minutes after he won his Oscar for Le Monde Du silence. I needed, for a documentary, a soundbyte of Rupert Murdoch speaking about Myspace – and after several months of searching we found the key clip.

That’s also how a documentary maker found my content for use in a documentary that will be on ARTE television in Spring 2008. The point is simple. In the past when you created content and you wanted people to notice you the best method for visibility was to be mentioned in physical examples, whether magazines, DVD or on the air.

Today we’re all part of the same media landscape. What this means is that there is unlimited time for content to be shown. But how do you stand out, to get noticed?

If there’s an event taking place and you have the time to cover it, then do it – and find where people are actively talking about it. That’s a great way to promote your work. If people see your latest video and want to find out more about you, they can go to your website, if you have one, to see further examples of your work. They read your blog to see your thoughts, they follow your twitter stream to see whether you’re a party animal, they check your linkedin profile to see who you know that they may know and, as a result, they get a better idea of what kind of person you are. You’ve just increased your chances of being noticed – and hired.

The Bomber war – Documentary and book

Byrichard

When I was in Spain I started to read “The Bomber War” because it’s a topic I do not know much about the topic. It’s interesting to read about the technology that they used for guidance, for detection and for the bombing. It’s also to read about how one thousand bomber sorties were sometimes orchestrated. I’m only 40 per cent of the way through the book at the time of writing.


While reading the Bomber War I also watched a French documentary available on curioisitystream called Bombing War: From Guernica to Hiroshima“. It is a two-part documentary looking at bombing, from the experimental bombing of Guernica and the request for bombing not to target civilians to the bombing of London, Berlin and many cities in between. It takes a look at what motivated the change in bombing tactic.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8e9ZqNWJZm0


By the end of the documentary, I thought that they should have addressed the cultural cost of bombing Europe. Plenty of beautiful old cities were destroyed in such a manner that we now travel to specific towns to see what Europe looked like before the Second World War and its bombing campaigns.


One sentence from the second documentary that may stick with you is that it was more dangerous to be in the bombers on their sorties than in the cities that were being bombed. This is due to the air defences, whether Flak, enemy fighters or mid-air collisions.


In the book, we read about the challenges of finding the way to the correct bombing site. They needed to navigate by the stars but also using dead reckoning. Eventually, both sides used beams to guide bombers to and from targets. If you’re interested in technology then the book is worth reading.


Although slightly off-topic the documentaries have some nice images from the war to give you a glimpse of how things looked at the time. It appears that some of the footage was colourised which is both a shame because it becomes a creative representation rather than accurate, and great because it brings certain images to life, making footage easier to interpret.


A topic that I had not come across until watching the second documentary is the dropping of Napalm on Japenese cities with more than 300,000 people, and then on cities of more than 100,000 people. You have images with a percentage of the cities that were destroyed by bombing.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuzCD32SAXI


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Playing with Vim and Laravel

Byrichard

I love using Atom because it’s light and fast, even on a six year old machine like mine. Github is soon going to archive atom. I will lose my favourite editor. That’s why I played with VS Code, Sublime Text and other solutions. Vim is the winner for now.


Vim is on every linux and mac machine, and can be installed on Windows. Out of the box Vim is a really simple, limited editor but if you invest the time, to find plugins, and learn how to use it then it becomes a great application.


This weekend in the process of studying Laravel I decided to use VIM and one of the best features with Vim is that when you’re following a tutorial you will get the file path given to you. Type it into terminal and you’re in the file. No scrolling through hierarchies, no reading through long lists. You go straight to the file and start working.


This is good for production websites too. I am currently in the process of taking the static content on my website and making it dynamic. This requires going to the section index page, seeing a file name and opening it. With vim I see that I want tricycle.html and I type it, and the file is open. This saves a great amount of time.


Vim can feel really slow when you train yourself to use i to insert, esc :wq to save and more, but once these are natural reflexes using Vim speeds up. I find that the more I use it, and the more comfortable I am with simple things, the more willing I am to experiment with additional features, for example option 8 and nine to jump by paragraphs to go up and down documents.


One of the biggest mental hurdles is remembering to work without a mouse, like we did in the eighties. Everything is via the keyboard so you don’t click and drag. You yank and put. You also shift V to select a line and jk up or down to select more lines. You can then delete.


I am not comfortable with cut and pasting yet but that will come with time. Vim is an excellent piece of software, but you need to invest time in learning how to use it.


I like that it’s free, available on almost all machines automatically, and that it’s resource light. There is no need to have a heavy application like Visual Studio Code running, if you learn Vim.

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