Recently finished reading, and thought I’d be worth logging it here, to ensure I don’t forget:
Amazing read when it comes to the words and sentence structures used (I assume that’s only true when read in its original form, with reasonable Swiss German language understanding), but Jeremias Gotthelf (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremias_Gotthelf) really likes to philosophize (and sermonize), which makes the whole read much less enjoyable.
Wanted to generate a gif to create a rotational view of an object for a different project. Thought I’d document here how easy this is:
#1 take lots of pictures of the object, while rotating it slowly
#2 In gimp, File > Open as Layers
#3 In gimp, Save as… filename.gif (check the ‘animation’ checkbox)
I’ve quickly done this again (without much image optimization) with my gold plated Gundam MSN-06S SINANJU (a project I’ll write later about 🙂 here’s the result:
What an epic book. Just finished https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Karenina – and am quite impressed. It’s challenging to capture the impression, but I seem to most like the holistic storytelling. Long, but totally worth the read, also because it takes the reader back into a time long ago in Russia.
Looks like raspberry has come quite a long way. headless (no monitor/screen, no keyboard, no mouse) and wireless (no ethernet/wired connection) setups are as easy as creating a wpa_supplicant.conf with your network settings:
country=us
update_config=1
ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant
network={
scan_ssid=1
ssid="NAME_OF_YOUR_WIRELESS_NETWORK"
psk="PASSWORD_OF_YOUR_WIRELESS_NETWORK"
}and an empty ssh file in your root partition (right after flashing, just remount the disk again by removing and re-adding it)
After having attempted to read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_4-Hour_Body (https://tim.blog/category/the-4-hour-body/) before, and stopping half way through, I finally found the time to read the second half of the book as well.
Seen as a guide to various health and fitness related aspects to dive deeper into, I think the book does a reasonable job. – There are a couple of things I hadn’t heard about before (and a couple which are so far out of my horizon, I don’t think I’d ever have learned about them, if it weren’t for the book (baseball..)) providing a reasonable increase in knowledge spectrum.
Ah, how awesome. Looking forward to see these land in Switzerland. Would love to try one out. (Uncertain about the exterior design, but it certainly has the potential to turn into a classic 🙂 #LibertyElectriCityMobility
https://www.citroen.ch/de/die-citroen-welt/concept-cars/citroen-ami-one-concept.html
If you want to create your own heatmap – but lack a webserver – I’ve updated the script shared earlier to allow generating content to run on jsfiddle.
How to plot a heatmap of your Garmin tracks on Google Maps JS API:
#1 request all your data from Garmin: https://www.garmin.com/en-US/account/datamanagement/
#2 download https://github.com/musings-hub/garmin-fit-to-heatmap-js
#3 run it: python3 fit-to-js-threaded.py ./Garmin/fit/
This will generate a file named “heatmap-datapoints.js“.
#4 open heatmap-datapoints.js and copy the contents into jsfiddle (see screenshot above).
#5 update the javascript to include your own API key for Google Maps API (see https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/get-api-key for how to get such a key if you don’t have one already).
#6 click “Run” in jsfiddle.
#7 admire the heatmap of your location based activities 😊
Based on a recommendation, I’ve finally read Anna Rosling Rönnlund’s, Hans Rosling’s and Ola Rosling’s book “Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World — and Why Things Are Better Than You Think“.
I remember Hans Rosling from some of his famous TED talks (like https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen, https://www.ted.com/speakers/hans_rosling) but wasn’t aware of the book until a couple of weeks ago – and to be honest, I only now made the connection between Dollar Street (https://www.gapminder.org/dollar-street/matrix, https://www.ted.com/talks/anna_rosling_ronnlund_see_how_the_rest_of_the_world_lives_organized_by_income) and Gapminder (silly me, in hindsight it’s too obvious).
The findings shared have been transformational for my worldview, and how I navigate the world today. If you need to kill some time, I recommend to at least watch the TED talks – after which the book is a bit of a repeat and you could skip to Chapter 11 right away.
I have a bunch of friends over at swisstopo and I always considered them artists – little did I know about the true level of artistry that goes into their beautiful maps:
https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/for-decades-cartographers-have-been-hiding-covert-illustrations-inside-of-switzerlands-official-maps/After further scouring through my data export from Garmin Connect (see https://www.musings.ch/2020/02/22/all-garmin-tracks-on-a-map/), I found ${username}_${index?}_summarizedActivities.json, which contains all activities I ever recorded. 😃
That one contains 468 usable startLongitude/startLatitude elements, which fits nicely into kml as Placemark and renders well on https://www.google.com/mymaps.
The resulting map:
Which also works well zooming in:
Again, drop me a note if you feel I could help you with any of this.
Today I had some fun exporting all my recorded Garmin tracks and plotting them as a heatmap on Google Maps.
After having wanted to create a map like this for ages, I finally found some time to hack together the toolchain needed. If you want to do the same, the easiest way I’ve found was:
#1 Ask Garmin for an export of all your data: https://www.garmin.com/en-US/account/datamanagement/
#2 Use the fabulous https://github.com/polyvertex/fitdecode to extract the lat/longs of your tracks.
#3 Use the Google Maps heatmap API to plot the data: https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/reference/visualization
Alternatively, drop me a line, and I’d be happy to help 🙂
You might wonder how to plot all your tracks on a map – which is what I initially started with. However, with 346 recorded activities, using kml to plot them (through various platforms) I found it difficult to navigate the result. – If you’d like to get your fit files converted to kml to play around with them, also drop me a note, I have a converter for that too.
A close up view (without adjusting radius, maxIntensity,.. so not optimal):
Update: I’ve uploaded the script to generate a javascript include on github: https://github.com/musings-hub/garmin-fit-to-heatmap-js 🙂
Update: I’ve updated the script to generate content to run on jsfiddle: https://www.musings.ch/2020/02/26/garmin-tracks-heatmap/