Cardiotrainer app for the G1

I have had a G1 for a while now, and one of my favorite apps right now is Cardiotrainer. Like Google's My Tracks and other apps, Cardiotrainer uses the GPS in the G1 to record a route. Much more so than My Tracks, however, Cardiotrainer is geared toward use while exercising.

For me the most important and useful feature is the real-time information on speed/pace, which helps me keep focused by reminding me when my pace is slowing down. You can also see a map view on the display of your phone to get some sense of where you are in your route and so forth.

Another very nice feature is that you can upload your tracks to the Cardiotrainer site to be archived for later review. You can either have tracks upload automatically as soon as you finish, or manually. Once tracks are uploaded, there are some additional options, including downloading them in GPX or KML format, or creating a link to a specific track for sharing. Here is an example of a track I ran in Ann Arbor a few weeks ago, using the URL provided by the Cardiotrainer site.

There is also a Facebook app that when installed on your account, will show a list of your recent tracks in a box on your profile and publish a line about your most recently completed track as soon as you complete it. The items include links to the maps.

Cardiotrainer also has music integration, but I haven't experimented with that. I'm not too happy with the sound quality of music played on the G1, so I just carry an iPod classic in my other hand when I am running. My issues with the music on the G1 may not actually reflect inherent problems with the G1, but rather the fact that to fit music onto my memory card, I convert it to a lower bit rate than I am used to. Also I find using a dongle to plug headphones into the mini-USB port on the G1 annoying, since the dongles I buy always seem to fail within a few weeks of use.

The people at Cardiotrainer are really committed to making their app a winner, so they have been adding features and resolving issues at a really remarkable pace. The app now is very stable, reflecting I think improvements in the G1 firmware for handling GPS as well as steady improvements in Cardiotrainer, so you probably won't have any troubles with it. If you do have trouble, the people are very responsive. They also take suggestions for additional features very seriously.

Lingoes translation tool

One more discussion of a software package...

A friend of mine in Taiwan recently introduced me to the free Lingoes translation software package. This package installs on Windows and does cursor translation, i.e. it provides a translation of whatever the cursor is pointing at, or selected text, in a pop-up window. So far it seems to work well in almost any application, though occasionally (rarely) it seems to result in Word or Wordpad crashing. Of course I use it for assistance when I am reading documents in Chinese. My reading vocabulary is sufficient that in a typical document I may be able to get 90%-95% of the characters, but of course every few lines there will be a character pair that I don't know, and all I have to do is highlight that character pair and a translation pops up. If I highlight an entire section of text, it sends it to Google Translate, and returns the results in a pop-up. This is turning out to be extremely useful because now I can actually sit down and read Chinese-language documents fairly painlessly. Before, reading for me was very stop-and-go because I had to pause every few lines to look up a pair of characters in a dictionary or by going to a web site. One of the pleasures of using this handy tool is that I actually learn new vocabulary, so for example yesterday I picked up a few things like 体现 (reflect)， 构成 (compose/make up), 输送 (transport), and 招收 （hire/recruit). In many cases I already knew the spoken words, but not the characters.

One of the neatest features is that you can download and install additional dictionaries for dozens of languages. As I mentioned, there are a wide variety of dictionaries that you can install. So far for Chinese to English, I have been very happy with the CEDICT Chinese-English dictionary that I installed. Along with English translations, it includes the pinyin for the characters you look up, so you can learn the pronunciation in Chinese as well. Many of the other dictionaries I tried didn't include the pinyin for the Chinese. There are actually dozens of dictionaries, including many specialty dictionaries, some entirely in Chinese.

Overall, this seems like a pretty neat package. It claims that it is spyware and virus free. I can't assess that one way or the other, but so far Sophos AV and Windows Defender haven't reported any problems, and I have noticed any unusual performance issues with the computer.

I think the ideal application of this package is situations where you already know a language, but not perfectly, and like me you need an efficient way of looking up the occasional word or phrase while you're going through the document. This isn't really suitable for translating a large document in its entirety, there are probably better packages out there for that. And did I mention that it is free?

Replacements for Adobe Acrobat

Yet another post that doesn't have anything to do with photography, but I thought it would be of interest to some readers...

I have been frustrated with Adobe Acrobat Reader for quite some time. At least in my experience, it loads slowly and locks up more often than I would like, even on my high-powered work machines that are running Vista. I began looking around for a replacement and after doing some searching found the free version of FoxIt Reader. This allows you to read PDF files on your machine, and is a nice replacement for Acrobat Reader. Even the free version seems to offer many more features than Reader, though I haven't explored them much. It seems to be very compact so it loads quickly, and it hasn't choked yet on any of the PDF files I have fed.

For producing PDF files, there are free alternatives to Adobe Acrobat. If you're running Office 2007 and that is where you will be generating most of your PDF files, then you can download a free add-in from the Microsoft site. To produce PDF files from other software, I installed the free version of CutePDF. So far it has impressed me as being more compact and snappier than Acrobat, with what as far as I can tell is a fairly complete set of features.

Sooner or later I will start posting pictures again. Lately I have been photographing people, including a lot of portraits, and I'm not making those publicly viewable. I'll be traveling to Korea again later in the month however so hope to come back from that trip with some nice shots to share with you.

A rant about password security on the NIH Commons...

This has nothing to do with photography, it is just a rant about dealing with the NIH Commons site, in particular, the measures that it takes for password security. In addition to a fairly reasonable requirements that a password include numbers and special characters, the site has an annoying and I think short-sighted policy of making passwords expire at fixed intervals. Setting the new password is a hassle because the site forbids re-use of an old password (which means they are archiving all of the passwords I have ever used there!) so it usually takes several tries to come up with something that for personal reasons is easy to remember, but satisfies all the requirements, and has been used before. And because it is a new password that I don't use anywhere else, inevitably I promptly forget it, and end up having to go through the password reset process a few weeks later. Right now NIH Commons is the only site I deal with that makes passwords expire at fixed intervals and forbids re-use of old passwords, and it is a PAIN. I think I would be much safer with a single, very long password that I can use indefinitely, than a series of passwords that I will forget unless I write them down somewhere.

Generally, I would really like to see an overhaul of the NIH Commons... It is great that it is there, but it is very 1.0, they need 2.0 features to ease navigation.

Mobile computing, security, and photography

I wanted to write about two applications I use heavily for work-related computing on the road, but which are also handy for photography. Right now I travel with a laptop purchased several years ago that for all intents and purposes I treat like a netbook. I only have the usual browsers, Microsoft Office, and a few other applications installed on it. Photo-related applications included BreezeBrowser Pro which is very nice for browsing, sorting and winnowing photos, and the free GIMP for doing basic editing.

More importantly, rather than storing anything locally on the machine for any length of time, I use LogMeIn Hamachi for a personal VPN that links together my office and home machines. I access shared folders on those machines, and leave most of my documents, media, and data there, to be accessed and worked with remotely over the VPN. Hamachi in my experience has been extremely robust, and folder sharing across the VPN works very smoothly in Vista and Windows 7. Folder sharing was more erratic under XP but I think that was a problem with XP, not Hamachi.

For photography, my workflow when I am on the road is to go out and take pictures (that is the most important, of course!), get back to the hotel and download to a local directory on the laptop, and then winnow the photos in BreezeSys. Usually I end up keeping about 5 to 10 percent of the photos I shoot. Once I have completed the review, I copy the survivors to a directory on my home machine that I am accessing remotely via the Hamachi VPN. Depending on how much time I have, I may also do some processing of the JPG in GIMP right on the laptop and post to Smugmug via Send to Smugmug. More commonly, I accumulate the photos on the home machine and then when I am back home, do RAW conversion with Adobe Lightroom, and geotagg with Robogeo. The home machine has automated backup.

If I need to access any applications I don't have installed on my laptop, for example, Lightroom, I do that via Windows Remote Desktop over the encrypted Hamachi VPN connection.

Following this process, I am fairly well insulated against the risk that I might lose photos or for that matter important data or documents if my laptop is stolen or damaged while I am on the road. Also by not keeping anything locally, the risk of media, data, or documents being viewed surreptitiously by someone with access to my laptop is somewhat reduced. Obviously I am not too worried about anyone seeing my photos, but I do want to protect my work-related documents and data.

The end result is that my laptop, which was quite expensive when I bought it, is acting as little more than a thin client.

For added safety, I have taken two additional precautions. One which I highly recommend for any laptop is that I have encrypted the hard drive with TrueCrypt, which is a free, open-source encryption utility. It allows for encryption of an entire drive, requiring a password to boot. This is very nice since it means that if your laptop is stolen, whoever has it will find it almost impossible to access anything on the drive, unless they also have you along with the laptop and can persuade you to give up the password. It should also be protection against drive cloning, for example, if you leave your laptop in the hotel and while you are out on the town, someone from the security services comes in and gets your laptop and pops the drive out and clones it using a purpose-built device they have brought with them and then replaces it, when they get the cloned drive back to their offices, it shouldn't be very useful to them. You can also encrypt removable storage, external hard drives and so forth with TrueCrypt.

For deleting files permanently on the laptop, I use Eraser, an open-source data removal utility. Remember that when you delete files there are still traces left on the hard drive, and a utility like Eraser should wipe them out completely.

All this emphasis on security is certainly worthwhile if you use your laptop for work and have any sensitive documents or data on it, but I suppose it may sound like overkill if all you are doing with your laptop is storing photos while travelling. But it is worthwhile. Certainly if you are a commercial photographer or a very serious amateur you should take measures to protect your work. But even if you all you are doing with your laptop is piling up vacation photos, I think it is worth doing. If your laptop is stolen or lost, do you really want complete strangers poring through your family photos?

Pandora stations

I created some stations at Pandora with music to accompany my pictures. Right now, I have two stations, one based on late nineteenth and early twentieth century classical composers, the other based on contemporary electronic/minimalist/techno. I have selected the artists for the latter on the basis of their successful combination of minimalism and accessibility. These aren't random clicks, blips, and bleeps that will make you wonder if your internet connection is on the fritz.

I recommend listening to the electronic/minimalist/techno station when viewing my favorite night photos, or my favorite photos of deserted walkways and corridors. The music suggests the desolation, loneliness, and alienation that I intend to convey with those photographs.

The widget below should let you listen to my stations, or you can visit my profile at Pandora.