Navigon MobileNavigator Europe (iPhone)
I was looking into updating the maps for my 3 year old Sony NV-U70 and found that it would cost me around EUR 70 to get the latest maps (dated 2007, and thus also already outdated). That and the fact that the internal battery of the NV-U70 is in very bad shape (30 minutes and the battery is dead), made it and easier to seriously consider Navigon’s MobileNavigator for the iPhone (priced at EUR 74.99 till June 30th). For me another added advantage is the maps included with the application, I now finally have map data for Croatia (only 56%) but way better than the 0% available for the NV-U70 or the TomTom’s solution.
This my most expensive iPhone app ever that I purchased, but for me it was worth the price.
Overview
The navigation screen display a road map besides your current position on the map a lot of additional information.
Not all of the information is displayed at the same time, but can be easily switched between by tapping on the top or bottom bar
By tapping on the top bar you can switch between the following information:
Distance to destination: 
Estimated time of arrival: 
Current driving speed: 
Tapping on the bottom bar allows you to switch between the following information:
Current position: 
Next way point: 
Lane Assistant
When you arrive at a point where you need to change lanes/take an exit you will receive onscreen and spoken information. For the exit show in the image even the information displayed on the roadsigns matched (happily surprised).
Speed Assistant
While driving the maximum allowed speed is show in the top-right corner of the screen. We you go above the maximum speed an exclamation mark is displayed as well and you receive a spoken alert.
These alerts are as good as the data available to the application, because on my trip I used a stretch of highway that had its maximum speed reduced from 120 km/h to 100 km/h. So please be mindful of your speed.
GPS signal and route (re)calculation
During the test trip the iPhone lost the GPS signal from time to time or the location was not accurate enough. MobileNavigator will than display the text "GPS" in the top bar and in the left-bottom corner an image display a calculator and a trail of way points). As soon the new route is calculated or the GPS has a fix again the normal navigation information will be displayed again.
To test the route recalculation I ignored the instructions at a certain way point during my test trip. From the moment I had ignored the instructions it took only 7 seconds for MobileNavigator to detect that I was not taking the advised route and it started calculating an alternative route to my final destination.
Phone calls
Receiving phone call during navigation. When the phone call is finished you will be returned to MobileNavigator and it will pickup where it has left off. It looks however it is a complete restart of the application so you will wait another 30-60 seconds for the app to have fully started and navigation is working again. So hopefully you never receive phone calls when you are on a tricky part of your trip.
Issue using MobileNavigator
I had some minor issues with information stored within the address book on my iPhone.
- Since the new release of the iPhone OS (or maybe this happened even earlier) you can no longer enter a country manually, but it needs to be selected from a list of values. For most of my contacts outside of The Netherlands I still had the country information that I had entered manually into the country field. This causes in some cases MobileNavigator to think that these addresses, although foreign, are within The Netherlands. So make sure you properly update the foreign addresses you will want to use with MobileNavigator.
- MobileNavigator only allows you to select addresses within the current active group of contacts within the address book. So I have a group named ‘Hotels’ in my address book and when I had that group selected within the address book, I will only be able to selected from addresses from group when in MobileNavigator. Hopefully this bug will be fixed in an updated version. So make sure before leaving the address book you select the ‘All contacts’ group
Jippie !!
Mijn iPhone stencil is binnen
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Nieuwe switch
Netjes achter bureau geschroefd
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Cadeau
Cadeautje van de zaak
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Using Drobo and Drobo Share with Time Machine
Recently I have bought a Drobo and a Drobo Share. One of the reasons for this purchase was to be able to easily expand disk storage capabilities and have a central location to store Time Machine backups for both my Macs.
When I had installed my Drobo and Drobo Share I soon noticed that by default Time Machine does not allow NAS systems to be used as Time Machine backup disks. After a bit of research on the net I found that it is possible but it needs a little bit of work.
This blog post details the step I performed to setup Time Machine for my Macs
1) Setup your Drobo and Drobo Share and make sure everything is in working order and you have enough free space available to store Time Machine Backup data onto your Drobo.
2) For every Mac to be backup-ed using time machine create a sparse bundle image. You can create this disk image by using Disk Utility
Normally a volume size of twice the actual size of the HDD installed in your Mac should be adequate to store multiple versions of your files into the Time Machine backup. If you have enough storage in your Drobo you can make the disk image larger. After the sparse bundle has been created make sure to eject the disk image.
2) Copy the disk image to the root folder of your Drobo
3) Open a Terminal session and execute the following command on every Mac to be backup-ed by Time Machine
defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1
4) Start Time Machine and select you Drobo as Time Machine Disk. For for Time Machine to start, moste likely it will fail or just stop the prepare action as soon as it starts. If you now look at the contect of the root folder of your Drobo you will notice that one additional file is created. This file is named something like this
Atum_001debec863e.temp.sparsebundle
Atum in my case is the name of my MacBook Pro, and 001debec863e is an identifier used by Time Machine to identify the machine.
Use the first part of the name (Atum_001debec863e) to rename the temp.sparsebundle into its proper name for Time Macine. In my case that would be
Atum_001debec863e.sparsebundle.
4) As soon as Time Machine is done working you can click on the ‘Change Disk…’-button in the Time Machine preference pane and select None from the list.
5) You can now delete the xxx.temp.sparsebundle from your Drobo.
6) Now again you select your Drobo as a Time Machine Disk. This time there should be no errors and Time Machine will start backing up your Mac.
I have used to following resources from macosxhints.com while figuring out how to setup Time Machine in combination with my Drobo and Drobo Share
[1] – Create a Time Machine size limit for networked disks
[2] – Set up Time Machine on a NAS in three easy steps
Tree is blossoming
Boom staat weer mooi in bloei
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Delayed Christmas gift
Heeft even geduurd maar m’n kerstgeschenk is binnen
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Plans for UberInventory 2.0
The next version of UberInventory will be version 2.0. To make it a bit special I want to add a functionality which I have been wanting to implement ever since I started working on UberInventory back in September/October 2007.
Here is a short list of some of the things I am planning to implement
- Highlight bags, bagslot when hovering over an item within the UberInventory frame to make it easier to locate items you are searching for. Here are some mockup pictures of how it might look like
Normal
Highlighted
- Improve look-n-feel of the settings frame (border around all of setting options within a group instead of just the indent)
Currently I am looking into all the things that need to be tracked additionally and what code is required to do some sort of highlighting.
It will be ready when it is ready, in other words I haven’t set a date when to release the new version. Hmm, I am starting to sound like Blizzard Entertainment themselfs.
Google please do not redirect me just because I am traveling
I am traveling a lot for my current job taking me also outside of The Netherlands into Belgium and Germany from time to time. Lately I spent a lot of time around the Brussels in Belgium, which is the French speaking part of the country. As a result all the searches I perform using the Google search bar plugin within Firefox get redirected to a French version of the Google pages and the search result favor web pages written in French.
Since I can hardly speak or read French I find myself constantly typing in a URL for a (in my case) Dutch localized version of Google to do my searches. This totally defeats the purpose of Firefox’s search bar.
Look for a file named google.xml. On Windows systems this file is located at C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins. On Mac OS systems the file is inside the Firefox.app. You can get to the file by right (or control) clicking on Firefox.app and selecting ‘Show Package Contents’ from the menu. Within the new Finder window navigate to /Contents/MacOS/searchpulgins.
By default (Firefox 3.0.6) the file contains the following information (except for the Image tag, data for the image itself has been removed)
<SearchPlugin xmlns="http://www.mozilla.org/2006/browser/search/">
<ShortName>Google</ShortName>
<Description>Google Search</Description>
<InputEncoding>UTF-8</InputEncoding>
<Image width="16" height="16">data:image/x-icon;base64,...</Image>
<Url type="application/x-suggestions+json" method="GET"
template="http://suggestqueries.google.com/complete/search?output=firefox&client=firefox&hl={moz:locale}&q={searchTerms}"/>
<Url type="text/html" method="GET" template="http://www.google.com/search">
<Param name="q" value="{searchTerms}"/>
<Param name="ie" value="utf-8"/>
<Param name="oe" value="utf-8"/>
<Param name="aq" value="t"/>
<!-- Dynamic parameters -->
<Param name="rls" value="{moz:distributionID}:{moz:locale}:{moz:official}"/>
<MozParam name="client" condition="defaultEngine" trueValue="firefox-a" falseValue="firefox"/>
</Url>
<SearchForm>http://www.google.com/firefox</SearchForm>
</SearchPlugin>Edit the content of the file like below (bold text indicates the changes made to the file)
<SearchPlugin xmlns="http://www.mozilla.org/2006/browser/search/">
<ShortName>Google</ShortName>
<Description>Google Search</Description>
<InputEncoding>UTF-8</InputEncoding>
<Image width="16" height="16">data:image/x-icon;base64,...</Image>
<Url type="application/x-suggestions+json" method="GET"
template="http://suggestqueries.google.com/complete/search?output=firefox&client=firefox&hl={moz:locale}&q={searchTerms}"/>
<Url type="text/html" method="GET" template="http://www.google.com/search">
<Param name="q" value="{searchTerms}"/>
<Param name="ie" value="utf-8"/>
<Param name="oe" value="utf-8"/>
<Param name="aq" value="t"/>
<Param name="hl" value="en"/>
<!-- Dynamic parameters -->
<Param name="rls" value="{moz:distributionID}:{moz:locale}:{moz:official}"/>
<MozParam name="client" condition="defaultEngine" trueValue="firefox-a" falseValue="firefox"/>
</Url>
<SearchForm>http://www.google.com/firefox</SearchForm>
</SearchPlugin>This little change ensures that you are still being addressed in English although you are still redirected to a localized Google page. If you totally want to prevent the redirect to happen you could, instead of using “http://www.google.com/search”, use something like “http://www.google.nl/search” or any other of Googles localized search pages.
Using Foxmarks to synch to iPhone/iPod Touch
For some time now I have been using Foxmarks to keep my bookmarks synchronized between several machines I am using. At first Foxmarks, as the name implies, was for Firefox only. About 3 months ago Foxmarks put out betas for both Internet Explorer (Windows only) and Safari (Mac only). The beta period is now over (February 2, 2009) and you can now download Foxmarks for the mentioned browsers from the Foxmarks site.
By just using the Foxmarks software you will be using the following synchronization setup
Since Foxmarks allows for synchronization with Safari, it is now also possible to synchronize your bookmarks with your iPhone or iPod Touch. For this you will need a MobileMe subscription. The synchronization setup will then look like this
On the Mac side you need to setup for Foxmarks and make sure the Foxmarks synching is running
and for MobileMe you have to enable the Bookmarks synchronization
On the iPhone/iPod Touch side you have to setup MobileMe synchronization (visit this page for detailed information on setting up MobileMe)
I have only had two issues with Foxmarks so far;
- Dividers in Firefox sometimes get replaced with “———-”. Normally Foxmarks does a good job keeping dividers being dividers in Firefox
- At some point in time I ended up with two ‘Unsorted Bookmarks’-folders
Both issues are easily solved and never resulted in loosing any of my bookmarks and I am almost certain it was caused due to me playing around with some settings (MobileMe and Foxmarks for Safari) on two machines.
I am only using the bookmark synchronization of Foxmarks, since I am using 1Password to keep my passwords save and secure.
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