I’ll write up some more comprehensive comments on the SPOT satellite messenger soon, but in the meantime I wanted to provide some screen shots of the SPOT web site showing what is available from the optional SPOT Track Progress service from SPOT. Overall I’m impressed by the SPOT messenger and I will be using it in my glider, particularly when flying in remote areas to automatically track my location and as a supplement to my existing McMurdo Personal Locator Beacon (PLB). I purchased my SPOT messenger from my local REI store, it is also available at REI online.
SPOT is a subsidiary of Globalstar, the satellite phone company. The SPOT satellite messenger has an internal GPS receiver and sends the GPS coordinates and message type info via the Globalstar L-band simplex data network. Message types available are an automatic tracking message, or manually triggered events - a “911″ distress alert, a less severe “help” message or just an “OK” message.
(more…)
posted by darryl at 1:48 am
So one of the neatest things Yahoo owns is Flickr. But I’m at a loss to understand the snails pace of innovation at Flickr. There is tons of stuff the could be doing with new features, tools and integration. But anyhow instead of wasting space on that I’ll just whine about Flickr Uploadr 3.0 — the down-loadable utility that is supposed to make uploading photos easier, well previous versions did, the current one is just broken.
Build 3.0.2 at least is broken on Windows XP SP2. Starting with the big one - the actual button to upload images never appears, oops bit of an oversight there. And lots of sloppy UI things — like not having any rollovers/hints in the UI. And when you view Upload>Preferences but don’t change anything you still get a dialog box saying you changed preferences and asking you whether you want to apply those changes to the current photos. Dragging the main window frame out larger and smaller shows strange behavior of an horizontal scrollbar on the right panel if you resize the window enough to have a vertical scroll bar on the right panel. Don’t they know how to do basic UI QA? There appears to be other strange things going on as well. The vertical partition between the panel should be re-positionable. And on and on…
How do you mess up something so simple and then actually want to release it?
posted by darryl at 11:31 pm
