Geek toys for a better life

[rikibeth]

I was chatting with mama_hogswatch about taking advantage of the nice weather to run a couple of errands on foot instead of by car today. This is what I did for exercise -- I have been sadly deficient in exercise this past month, because for some reason my knees have been really, really complaining. One of the errands was "buy vitamin minder" so I can remember to take my vitamins AND GLUCOSAMNINE with my breakfast at work, because this creaky-knees stuff is getting annoying fast. (I may also see if switching back to the desktop from the laptop helps. Sitting crunched up on the couch with my laptop DEFINITELY is not making my knees happy.)

So, I took a wild guess about how far it actually was to the CVS, based on how long it took me to walk it, discounting for traffic lights, and then had to say "hmm, am I right? Let's ask GoogleMaps."

She said, "Have you heard about the Gmaps Pedometer?

No, I had not.

What an excellent toy!

Not only did it let me figure out how far I'd walked to the CVS and back, it inspired me to map out a walking-friendly route to Whole Foods. One that's only about a mile and a half to get there.

AND it tells you calories burned! How awesome is that?

Tomorrow is not set to be nearly as nice as today. But it's not supposed to rain until the evening.

And I don't have a large shopping run to do. We did a large one last weekend, this is more of a pickup run.

I am TOTALLY trying this out.

Comments

[suburbfabulous.livejournal.com]

I can't get the pedometer thing to work.
It has angered me.
No stupid countings. I sleep now.

[rikibeth.livejournal.com]

Did you click on the Instructions link? It will not map a route for you, you have to doubleclick your route points, and you have to put in a point every time the road bends or it won't draw the lines right, but when you do that it makes with the pedometer and the calorie counts.

[head-shrinker.livejournal.com]

Hey, that's just like www.geodistance.com, but with calorie count! I just did the same thing last weekend, went walking and decided I wanted to know how far I went.

Good luck with it! Walking outside is *sooooooo* much better than using a treadmill.

[noire.livejournal.com]

Wow! I never knew about this and I've been wondering...This could be really useful. (I know about how much I walk in a day, especially since it's a large part of my commute, but I love getting all the details. I LOVE programs like this!)

Thanks!

[shut-me-up.livejournal.com]

Oh my Goth, I love this thing.
First it only showed the US and I was already getting mopey that I couldn't use it and when I typed in "Hamburg" I kind of expected to end up in some village in the US, but then it just jumped to Germany. Win.
And actually I have trouble writing this comment because I can't stop trying out routes...
Totally awesome.

[unclebooboo.livejournal.com]

A couple of features of the Gmaps pedometer that you might not have noticed are that it can display elevation changes (so you'll know how steep the hills are on your route) and that you can save your routes and link to them later (e.g. from your blog or an email message.)

There's a whole world of stuff that you can do now with the web 2.0 technology, GPS, and the mapping data in Google Maps. I use this stuff in several ways.

1. I wear a wrist-watch sized GPS when I run, and then upload the routes to my training log at mapmyrun.com (which is very similar to the Gmaps pedometer but also offers some other useful features for runners and lets me upload data from the GPS.)

2. I've started geotagging my digital photos. I pick the location out on Google maps or record coordinates with the GPS, and then tag the photos when I get back home.

3. You can put your own custom annotations on a Google map and link to it in an email or from your blog. This can be very helpful for giving people directions to your house or an event.

[rikibeth.livejournal.com]

No GPS here, and I'm not running, just walking my errands instead of driving them when I can, but thanks for the tip about the elevations!