Mobile on Nanikore

All the Kurviger(.de)

Mon, 24 Aug 2020 06:07:50 +0000

TL;DR: In this post I’m taking a look at why I use kurviger.de map and route planner, and why you should give it a try because it creates some fantistic twisty routes.

Route planning is often the unsung hero - or villain - of a day out, as we curse missed turns, closed roads or things simply beyond anyone’s control like a road sliding away, or being blocked by a tree.

There’s a wealth of sites, devices and applications available for us to find the best way to get from point A to point B, and potentially a few points in the middle. However, many of these sites and applications make this bizarre assumption that you want to get there as quickly as possible on the straightest roads. How very bizarre. One that I find myself using quite often is Kurviger.de.

Why Kurviger? Well, let’s take a look at it.

It’s a map and routing site based on the OpenStreetMap map base, with a few sub-versions available. It has all the usual functionality of a start, end, mid points, extensions, points of interests, petrol stations and all those kind of things - it also has as a nice list of GPS coordinates of your set points which is nice too.

One of the fun features is how you can ask it to calculate a route for you - as fastest, fast and curvy, curvy or super curvy road types. The latter really is a fun thing to try - a lot of turns, often going a longer, more scenic way also.

Here’s a simple example from here in Japan, where Kurviger makes hugely different routes depending on which algorithm we ask for - straight, or super curvy.

As a motorcyclist, I like this kind of feature, partly to find new roads to places I know, but also for just creating something fun to ride.

The site now also has an account system so you can create your route and save it on their server for the next time you need it. You could also technically just bookmark it, as much (I suspect not all) of the data is in the URL you’re looking at. I currently export mine as a gpx track, which I can also upload later if I want to do another version of it. I then use these gpx track files in my smartphone OSMAnd+ app to use as a navigation file. One other way to find routes on the site is via ’tourcodes’ which are rides created or recommended by various magazines and journalists.

Kurviger themselves also have a mobile app, although I haven’t used it that much so I can’t give a full review, but it does seem decent. They also have a forum if you have questions, which I’ve used a couple of times, and found the response to be quite and helpful.

So this is all well and good as a website to mobile app, but what’s it life in real life? As you can likely imagine, when we get to super curvy, Kurviger is going to find some small and real backwater roads. Better to say ‘ways to go’. A few times I’ve been down real agricultural dirt tracks. Once I ended up on a basic concrete service track just a couple of metres wide, riding a meter above some rice fields, which narrowed as it got to the real road. It was a beautiful ride, with my only fear being someone coming the other way! Another time I ended up in a road in the hills so rarely used there was debris all over it which was a fun hour clearing a safe path for my road tyres. Yes, it would have been quicker to back, but where’s the fun in that?

These are not a Kurviger issue, but highlights it will choose any road it has in its system. If you’re of the right mindset though, it’s a great way to find some interesting routes and server something up if you’re drawing a blank on where to go that day.

Over to a Nexus 5 and a Thinkpad E440

Sat, 27 Sep 2014 13:06:40 +0000

My mobile setup doesn’t change very often. My iPhone 4 was three years old in August, my old Core Duo MacBook (2006) died last year, and I was saving to replace it, having borrowed the netbook from the kids as needed, so it was time to move over, to a Nexus and a Thinkpad!

The iPhone’s button and battery were both on the way out, and the iOS7 mandatory upgrade had slowed the thing to a crawl. Having had a Nexus 7 for a couple of years, I wasn’t wed to the iOS ecosystem, and SoftBank’s LTE based plans for the iPhones all carried big price increases per month over my 3G plan. I shopped around and found virtual carrier Y! Mobile (what was WillCom and E-Mobile, and ironically piggy backs off the SoftBank network) was cheap, and had the LG Nexus 5 phone for a smaller monthly fee than my current 3G plan with a 3GB cap. As it’s an unlocked phone, it’ll also make trips outside Japan a little simpler with SIMs, which will really help.

Six weeks on, as a physical device, I like it, it’s very light after the iPhone, and even with the fairly chunky Spigen case, it’s still light but solid feeling. I tend to get a case which will survive well. It feels speedy, but I accept that’s relative after the disaster the iPhone 4 became with iOS 7 (not helped by Apple refusing to let iPhone 4 users update to a secure iOS6 train release after the goto fail fiasco). There are plenty of reviews though which will do a better job than I could. I do like Android, but you’ll notice I tend to get Nexus devices, and that’s because I like that they don’t ship with the ridiculous carrier and manufacturer apps, and you’re almost guaranteed to get OS updates quickly.

For the laptop, I looked at the MacBook Air - it’s a beautiful piece of engineering, but truthfully, outside of my 80,000 yen budget (it’s almost 110,000yen with 8GB RAM, 13" screen but a relatively slower CPU). I looked around at a lot of laptops, but kept coming back to Lenovo’s relatively unsung Thinkpad E design and pricing.

After prioritizing my wants, I got a unit with 8GB RAM, the higher definition 1600*900 screen (matte), and the dual antenna ac wireless. I debated i5 vs. i3 on the CPU, which had an ~8,000yen price differential, but since the only difference appears to be the turbo on the i5, and since this is mainly a movable writing rig, I went for the lower CPU. For a decent review of the unit, stum.de did a great review, especially on the BIOS.

Having installed a 128GB Crucial MX100 SSD, this thing flies with Mint Linux 17 Cinnamon on it. The only issue I have right now is suspend is a bit unreliable, and it would appear to be the continuation of a Linux tradition; in my case it may be anything from the Intel graphics driver, to the lack of a swap space under LVM with 8GB of RAM. Hibernate is fine though.

As for real world performance, I was ripping a CD to FLAC, transcoding other FLACs to OGG format, watching a 1080p video over the N based wifi from my old Buffalo NAS with a few IRC chats, and browser tabs going, and the thing never missed a beat. I think that should cover my average usage.

Physically, it’s really nice, much more solid than I was expecting, and the keyboard is probably the best I’ve had on a laptop. I’ve been a general Linux user for a long time, so it was nice to use it on a dedicated laptop, having kicked the idea around for a while. It also doesn’t seem to get very warm either, especially near the keyboard, where the old Macbook would get a little uncomfortable after a while. I have not yet tested out the spill resistant keyboard, and don’t actually plan to.

Using the Windows 8.1 the laptop shipped with and the horrific dance it likes you to do through first boot was enough in itself to put you off - really Microsoft, that obsession with linking to an MS account before you can play with your new machine is really annoying, and the first thing I switch off afterwards anyway.

For what it’s worth, if you do want to continue using it, it comes with less crapware than I’ve seen elsewhere, and is easily removed. The fact I even had to cover that tells you something. To cover performance, the machine is very snappy in Windows 8.1, and I had no problems with it, even though it was running through a 5400rpm HDD.

In the six weeks I’ve had it, I’ve taken it on an international trip, and it performed excellently, even if it is a little bulkier than a more expensive ultrabook. I’ve dragged it around the house, sat in the park with it, and generally lugged it about, and it’s done exactly what I wanted from it.

So there we are, that should be me done for several more years. Also, this is not an Apple vs. Linux vs. Google thing. Brand loyalty is a silly thing, you should buy on your needs and your available money. For me the Nexus and the E440 are exactly what I need for the foreseeable future, and whilst I like the alternatives, they don’t represent good value for money to me.

Game Boy Micro

Wed, 07 Sep 2005 13:12:47 +0000

Today I got a look at, and play with Nintendo’s latest GameBoy - the Micro (it’s due on sale next week).

Basically, It’s a Game Boy Advance in a tiny, ‘smaller than most mobile phones’ format. (Comparative spec here). In fact, the screen is indeed smaller than the one on my mobile phone, and in the few minutes we played with one, I could feel myself squinting.

At 12,000yen, it’s not cheap either. True, it’s half the price of a PSP, but more costly in most places than the (albeit) larger GameBoy Advance SP.

Sometimes, Nintendo just leave me confused. I think it’ll be a hit with school kids and maybe some commuters, but those commuters are keitai (mobile phone) otaku anyway, so maybe that market has gone. The question is, will the next ’new’ GameBoy be an Advance 2 or a DS 2?

PSP vs. DS (Part 1 of many)

Thu, 30 Dec 2004 16:52:08 +0000

I’ve been kind of avoiding this topic as the office has been buzzing with it for weeks.

I’ve played with both for a couple of hours each, and as many have pointed out, they’re both great, but for wildly different reasons.

The PSP has a great single screen, and is virtually a portable PS2, it’s only drawback being a weak battery, but it’s swappable, so that’s not too bad. Video playback on my friend’s PSP he downloaded to MS looked good, but where is the ability to record to the UMD, or connect to the web via Wi-Fi?

The DS, despite it’s wrong-headed ‘Game and Watch’ (too old to catch many I suspect) design has 2 screens, one being the touch screen, which is gagging for RPGs and some dodgy mahjong games. Also, an oft overlooked feature of the DS is that it can hold a GBA and a DS game at once, so effectively having 2 games in there to play at any time - that’s a lot of Zelda.

Personally, I judge a console by games, not spec, and so far there’s nothing I want right now - Ridge Racers bored me in handheld format after about 10 minutes just like every other version of it. Same goes on the DS … Mario 64, great. I finished that on the 64 and learned hiragana in the process.

In summary, I’m waiting to see what new games come out, and how each company tweaks their hardwares’ feature set. I think the PSP has the sex appeal, but the DS is just so odd, it might pull out the more interesting games, after all, a great home game may not make a great mobile game.

As for Microsoft, the X-Pod will be out next week, dual Pentium 4 with er…40gb hard drive built in, ATI X800XT graphics and er…a gig of RAM but if you buy another mobile console before then you can’t buy an X-Pod. They’ll be designing this to look like a novelty VCR too.

AvantGo back again.

Sun, 24 Oct 2004 09:47:48 +0000

About two years ago I stopped using AvantGo even though I was big fan of it from 1999 till then, and in fact it was the software which made me decide to make a ‘mobile’ version of the brightblack site - offering lighter versions of many of the pages. Unfortunately, AvantGo decided to become much more enterprise based, and even dropped any support for the MacOS X system, so I stopped using AvantGo and finally settled for Plucker, which I think has a lot of advantages still, to get web info on my Palm on a daily basis. The only thing is though, is that I know quite a few people use AvantGo to view my mobile site and I was concerned that I may accidentally serve a broken or ‘odd’ version of the the site. This meant that I really needed to see that AvantGo version through my Mac.

At first I tried Mark/Space’s Missing Sync which advertised AvantGo syncing (I actually wanted the SD mount-ability and the image viewer in that package too) but the problem with that software is that it wants to use your Mac as an internet sharing gateway to sync, and I didn’t want to do that.

So I went looking again, and found MalSync, an open-source sync solution, but I just never seemed to get round to trying it out. Today I finally did get around to installing it, and I have to say that it works fabulously. Just install one piece of software of my mac, and follow the simple readme, and put AvantGo viewer back on my Palm, and there we have it - fully functioning AvantGo syncing.

This ties in nicely with a response from AvantGo (or iAnywhere judging by the mail address) about changing the image they carry on the AvantGo channels page for my channel (search for ‘brightblack’). So I suppose the AvantGo train is pulling out again as far as I’m concerned.

I’m hoping they pay more attention to small providers like me again, as another reason I pulled ‘official’ support for AvantGo before was because of the very terse messages I got from them a few years back asking for up to USD1000 to allow having brightblack as a channel I said I couldn’t and wouldn’t pay for what is essentially a search listing, and that they could delete me if that was their position. They never did, and I’m glad they seem to be a little more open to content providers. So, I’ll be updating my sync info on brightblack and thank MalSync for such a great piece of software.