Importing and Editing Routes in MapMyRun

Sunday, 27 September, 2020

The free version of MapMyRun has a great route planner built in that I’ve found to be based upon some of the most reliable base mapping and can auto-follow roads very well. The elevation estimates also seem to be fairly reliable. Once you’ve finished your route you can download it in KML or GPX format for your device which is all great.

MapMyRun won’t let you import route files (i.e. tracks without timing info) so if you are given a new route to follow and want to edit it first, there is no easy way to go about doing this. After a little convoluted searching I’ve found a way around this limitation.

  1. MapMyRun expects timestamps in the tracklog, so the trick is to spoof this information to allow you to import it. GOTOES has some really useful Strava Tools, one of which is the “Add or Adjust Timestamps” which does exactly this
  2. Login in to MapMyRun and upload your new Workout
  3. View the Workout and at that point MapMyRun will automatically create the Route. Just go to “My Routes” to see it and edit it!

All in all a very useful way to work with route data

Bryton Rider 450: Desired Features and Bugs

Friday, 3 July, 2020

This will be a “live” list as things come and go, but I thought I’d start putting down some things that would be good to add or fix:

Desired Features

  • Reverse a route: I’ve planned a route one-way. It would be handy if you could reverse the route once you get to your destination and then follow the navigation back. Maybe too much to ask.
  • Read full notification: notifications only show you the first ~11 characters. Would be good to see an entire message
  • Join tracks: I’ve accidentally stopped and then restarted a track when I’ve been recording it which is irritating as your stats are then calculated separately for each one. The ability to join tracks together.
  • Download Data: would be great to be able to download the raw data from Bryton Active
  • Navigation Screen: you can tailor the bottom row of the navigation screen to show any of the data fields available. If you are not following a route, then speed is shown in the top-right, if you are following a route then it changes to “distance to go” in the top-left. It would good to make the top row configurable.

Bugs

  • Distance to Go: if you are following a route, then the map page shows you distance to go to the finish, however it overestimates this by 15-20%. Quite why I’m not sure as I know the route length from the route planning application and when I get to the end the distance is the same
  • Turn By Turn Instructions: if you are following a route and switch from a data screen back to the map page, the next turn instruction will be out of date and won’t update until the instruction refreshes at the next turn.
  • Lap Timer Error: I’ve set the auto-lap to give me a time every 2km, however if the auto-pause kicks in (e.g. at a junction) then this isn’t subtracted from the lap giving a timing error. The correct time is produced after the ride so it’s clearly correct when the stats are produced, but not during the ride itself.
  • Max Number of Lap Times: I did a 300km ride a few weeks back I when I got to auto-lap 130 (2km each) it stopped recording them. Is this an in-built number of laps it can record?

Bryton Rider 450: route planning tips and tricks

Friday, 19 June, 2020

I recently took delivery of a Bryton Rider 450 which, whilst not as polished as the offerings from Garmin or Wahoo, is significantly cheaper. The 450 sports GNSS support across 5 different satellite systems, on-board OpenStreeMap maps, and ANT+/BT connectivity. The specs are certainly up there, but parts of the product are a little rough at the edges.

bryton_rider_450.jpg

This post provides a number of tips for working with mapping on the 450. In no particular order:

  • Bryton Active App: install the Bryton Active app
  • Install Maps: maps come pre-installed but if your locale isn’t already on there, head over to the Bryton Support area and then click on the “Download” menu item on the left and then click “Map” (on the left menu). From here you can download all of the maps, along with instructions for installing them
  • Route Planning: Bryton provide their own route planning tool both on the Bryton Active website, as well as in the app. They’re both a little clunky and not as good as alternatives such as RideWithGPS or MapMyRide however they do work reasonably well once you’ve got used to their foibles
  • Route Syncing: remember that the app syncs the route to the Bryton Active website. You then need to do a “Data Sync” on the 450 which will download the route
  • Sync a Route: if you are planning a route in the app, then remember to hit the “up arrow” in the top-right corner to upload the app to your Bryton Active account. You will then see the route under “My Routes” (in the app) - tap on it to show the route, then hit the ellipses in the top right corner and select “Download routes to device”. You can now do a “Data Sync” and it will appear on your 450
  • Syncing on the Go: if you are route planning when you are away from house wifi then the 450 won’t be able to do a wifi sync. The workaround is to set your phone up as a wifi hotspot and connect the 450 to it. It will then be able to do a “Data Sync”; it does appear to do this over over bluetooth but it doesn’t seem to be as consistent
  • Undo Button:frustratingly there is no “undo” button on either the app or Bryton Active website for planning a route, however the waypoints are in the list on the left hand side (hidden in a pop out panel in the app) and you just need to delete the last point(s) to edit your route as you go. It works!
  • Importing Routes: if you use RideWithGPS there is account syncing built in to the app (although Ive not used it), whilst you can import a GPX or FIT file from any site that can export them. MapMyRide (which seems to have more reliable road routing) exports GPX. The USB import is the most reliable way to get these files on to your PC: plug the 450 in to a USB port then copy the file to the “ExtraFiles” folder
  • Turn by turn navigation: The easiest way to guarantee this is to create the route on the Bryton Active website. It works well although is reliant on the quality of the underlying maps. It can work with third party maps but depends on the ability of the export so your mileage might vary.

What makes the above mildly frustrating is that none of it is complicated and could be made so much easier with a decent manual and forum. The manual is mediocre and there is no forum to address these, although the Facebook page is pretty active. The 450 is a great device for the money so get the best out of it!

ISO 3166-1

Wednesday, 2 October, 2019

ISO 3166-1 just trips off the tongue, however it’s one of those standards that underpins a fair amount of daily geospatial traffic that is undertaken on a daily basis. Yes, I’m talking about country codes which Wikipedia helpfully defines as:

ISO 3166-1… defines codes for the names of countries, dependent territories, and special areas of geographical interest

This is important because it is used in so much analogue and digital data exchange between countries, although don’t for a moment think the ISO is the only organisation that defines country codes… but that’s a whole other blog post!

What gets in included in the list is interesting… the criteria for inclusion include member states of the United Nations, a UN specialized agency or a party to the Statute of the International Court of Justice. Becoming a member state of the UN is clearly helpful, although what makes a country is interesting in itself, as well as highly politicised. Palestine is an obvious example, but just look at the UK. The UK is a country, but should Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland also be included? For example, they are included for FIFA. The UN loosely uses Article 1 from the Montevideo Convention which outlines four qualities a state should have: a permanent population, a defined territory, government, and the capacity to enter relations with other states.

Anyway, once you are on the ISO 3166-1 list you get 2 and 3 letter codes, along with a 3 digit numerical code. These are maintained by the ISO 3166 Maintenance Agency and, given the above, change regularly. You can view the current list here and subscribe to official updates.

At the RGS we are a membership organisation and take online international payments, so having up-to-date country codes is important. Rather than subscribe to the ISO, we use the UK government Country Register, which includes an update service. It has the ISO-2 letter codes, although isn’t necessarily identical (as it’s countries the UK recognises).

Open Access UK Unit Postcodes

Thursday, 29 March, 2018

The Ordnance Survey released their Code-Point Open product a few years ago that has the OSGB centroids of the unit postcodes. It’s very useful but is only points - if you want the postcodes areas as polygons then you need to license Code-Point with Polygons (snappily titled!). A number of people have derived unit postcode areas using Voronoi polygons including more recently Mike Spencer with some intro at his Scottish Snow site. It’s worth noting that Voronoi diagrams equally partition space between points and nothing more - they are not equivalent to unit postcodes (which can be arbitrary) but are a reasonable first guess. One dataset worth having for your arsenal of spatial data!

Waldo Tobler

Tuesday, 6 March, 2018

I was sad to see that Waldo Tobler passed away last month - a lifetime geoscientist he contributed huge amounts to computational cartography but will be best remember for the First Law of Geography. Some more details at GeoLounge and in the original paper.

However I love the CSISS Classic which was a tongue-in-cheek experiment with Peter Gould on geocoding. Read it because its wonderfully powerful way of showing students about geocoding. Hopefully we’ll see an anthology of his work in the not too distant future.

QGIS 3 features

Monday, 5 March, 2018

QGIS 3 is well and truly out now - download your copy here. And the good folks over at GIS Geography have put together a list of QGIS features that are in the new version. Some of the highlights include 3D (1), coordinate reference bounds (5), geopackage (7), background processing (8), new print composer (13), refined graphical modeler (25), but they are all worth taking a look at as it might just be a solution to the problem you have!

QGIS3 Beta

Sunday, 24 December, 2017

QGIS 3.0 is well and truly on its way with lots of updates, modifications and new features. Here is a great 24 days of Christmas list. Don’t forget to download the beta, play and report bugs back.

Roger Tomlinson’s PhD Thesis

Thursday, 12 October, 2017

UCL’s Department of Geography have digitised Roger Tomlinson’s PhD thesis from 1974 and placed it online (see James Cheshire’s blog post). As the grandfather of GIS it makes compulsive reading - although disappointing UCL haven’t placed it on EThOS.

!Get Banging!

Wednesday, 11 October, 2017

That would be DuckDuckGo Bangs by the way! A fantastic way to quickly redirect your search/query to another service - I use !w (wikipedia), !g (Google) and !yt youtube lots. Last year I requested one for my favourite mapping engine Streetmap and lo-and-behold they have release it.

Just search !smap

Links Thursday

Thursday, 30 March, 2017

A couple of recent links that are worth a punt…

20 FREE Satellite Imagery Data Sources: once you’ve waded through the ads, a really useful list of free satellite imagery sources

London Cycle Lane Map: following the London underground map meme, one in that vein but very pleasing.

OSM then and now

Friday, 3 March, 2017

Quite astonishing what 10 years of volunteered mapping can do…. wonderfully exposed at OSM Then and Now. Use the slider and be amazed!! Ive centred upon Bletchley, a suburb of Milton Keynes, and home to Bletchley Park and the home of the codebreakers.

xkcd’s bad map projection

Thursday, 16 February, 2017

The timezone world according to xkcd

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Geosheets tutorial

Wednesday, 4 January, 2017

GIS-Geography had a nice geosheets tutorial just before Christmas which is worth a look-in. Geosheets is not a service I had seen before and operates as a plugin for Google Sheets, adding functionality to geocode spreadsheet data and plot on a basemap. Of course ArcGIS Online and, indeed, Google MyMaps. However Geosheets offers you the ability to create within Google Sheets itself using some simple syntax. I wonder if they have enough to survive (don’t complete with Google or Esri!) but, in the interim, it’s another toolbox for geoenthusiasts.

Journal of Maps Best Map 2016 (FREE to view)

Tuesday, 20 December, 2016

It is with great pleasure that I am able to announce the award of the 2016 “Best Map” to Bernhard Jenny (RMIT University), Johannes Liem (City University London), Bojan Savric (Esri Inc) and William M. Putman (Goddard Space Flight Center) for their animated map visualizing a year of changes to Earth’s CO2 titled “Interactive video maps: A year in the life of Earth’s CO2”. When the map is first loaded it appears as an animated map of the world showing just how dynamic this part of the Earth system is. But interact with the map - you find it’s pannable and zoomable - all other ways of interacting with 4D data seem mundane in comparison.

The awards committee noted the remarkable interactive animation; something that both tells a story and allows you to investigate. A big leap forward for interactive cartography, drawing the viewer in and allowing them to formulate potential global implications. For these reasons it is a deserving winner of this year’s award.

A small problem of generalisation and a bigger problem of topology

Friday, 16 December, 2016

I was recently teaching a class on introductory cartography where we were using a range of different socio-economic datasets including 2011 counties and middle super output areas (MSOA) of the UK from the UK Data Service. These are (helpfully) made available in a range of different formats including the ubiquitous shapefile. These are helpful for choropleth mapping of socio-economic (census) data, use as location maps and when clipping other datasets for including topographic data on maps (e.g. Meridian 2).

One student wanted to generalise the polygons for the location map - thinking this would be easy he went ahead and ran the toolbox tool but end up with lots of sliver polygons as a result. Crucially, as a shapefile doesn’t store topological relationships, the tool was generalising each polygon separately resulting in a very poor output. And this was exacerbated by the fact that the borders were provided pre-generalised.

The obvious solution is to use a topological version of the data - which isn’t provided. The next step is therefore to create the topology in ArcGIS before generalising it. And whilst not difficult, it is a little convoluted to achieve! I found this page particularly helpful and it provided the core of processing (and remember, as with all computing instructions, you need to follow it to the letter!) which can be carried out in ArcCatalo. In short, the steps are:

1. Create a new geodatabase (either file or personal)
2. Create a new feature dataset within that
3. Import the shapefile into the feature dataset
4. Create new topology in the feature dataset
4a. For the topology you will need to use two rules: (a) no gaps and (b) no overlap
4b. This will throw an error where you have coastlines because (obviously) you have a gap!
5. At this point you now have built topology for the dataset and you can proceed to simplify/generalise the borders. Note that there will be multipart polygons present and if (like me) you want to delete any small islands to clean up data for use as a location map then you will need to run the “multipart to singlepart” toolbox tool.

This all proved a little more long-winded than I was expecting, but such is the price of topology! That did make me wonder if I could (easily) do this in QGIS and my initial research suggests not. Yes, the latest versions of QGIS have the Topology Checker Plugin (built-in) which checks topology (doh!) but as far as Im aware there is not an open source file format that supports topology. The grown up solution would be to use a PostGIS/PostgreSQL database but this isn’t particularly useful when you want to distribute data. If anyone knows better (or can correct me) then please do get in touch!

A tale of six maps…

Wednesday, 14 December, 2016

… and the stories they tell. The Washington Post ran a nice story earlier this month mapping the extent of infrastructure in the US. This is in response to Donald Trump’s (sketchy) plans to invest in infrastructure projects. This was subsequently followed up with a nice blog post on how they were created and, in particular, the courses of data and an idea of the data wrangling going on behind the scenes. What’s telling here is the simplicity of the rendering and that journalists use QGIS because its free, but that Photoshop and Illustrator (rather than GIMP and Inkscape) are still the graphic artists tools of choice. I wonder if this would be any different if there was GIS expertise on their teams to support the graphic designers…

Shapefile or geodatabase?

Tuesday, 29 November, 2016

A nice overview and comparison of the shapefile, personal geodatabase and file geodatabase over at the guys at GIS Geography. Its a good succinct summary and review of the pros and cons. They do note that the file geodatabase is proprietary (to Esri), but not that the shapefile is too. And whilst (quitea while ago) Esri published a whitepaper detailing the specification of the shapefile its worth noting that they have released the API to the file geodatabase as well.

Get ahead in QGIS …

Sunday, 20 November, 2016

I’ve already blogged about Steve Bernard’s excellent YouTube Channel on QGIS, well to continue in that vein, here’s a link to a series of free (and paid for) courses in QGIS over at GeoAcademy. I cant vouch for the courses themselves, but it’s great to see such variety springing up. QGIS is my goto for geoprocessing on a daily basis…

Cartography Links

Monday, 31 October, 2016

This week a selection (well list!) of two relatively recent resources which struck a chord.

1. cartographic-design: this is hosted over at Github and is a series of links to cartography sources that supported Maptime Boston’s May 2016 meetup. Its a relatively short but extremely useful set of resources for this wanting slightly more detail on a range of carto/design topics. One to refer back to - often.

2. Beyond the Core Knowledge: a blog post from Gretchen Peterson that looks at some important topics that sit outside (for example) The GIS&T Body of Knowledge. It’s interesting because it takes a concept, a dataset and the hoops to jump through to get (more or less) through to the end. And it’s nice because she covers all those inner decisions you end up making as a designer to get to the final product.