(no subject)
Ok so 4 months into the Oregon thing. It's not bad. But it sure got cold fast. For weeks it was 85-95 degrees. Then all of a sudden Wham! 60-65. Of course all my cold weather clothes are still in storage. So I decided to do a little clothes shopping. Good Lord, everything is some kinda of earth tone or varying shades of flannel. I went to the usual suspects, even tried a couple big and tall shops. Unless I wanted to do that weird khaki and tucked in shirt (ugh) or the urban lumberjack look, I decided to pop in the various biker/trucker shops. Hehe they had my size and oh man, I just can't get enough
"winter wolf howling"
or "Lone wolf"
or "wolf spirit"
...seriously, what's with the wolf thing. Apparently the wolf is the new "eagle". I always end up striking a conversation with the person behind the counter.
She explained that the eagle theme used to be real big, especially after 9/11 But lately, it's been the wolf.
If I didn't have a thing against printed Ts I totally would have gotten the "lone howling winter wolf" shirt with the eagle in the background. 3 for $10 would have been a steal.
I got a Nokia 770 internet tablet http://www.nokiausa.com/770. I was looking at getting a gps for my car but after seeing what the N770 can do, I said screw it. All a car gps can do is be a gps. at $700-900, buying a unitasker like a TomTom or a Garmin seemed like a waste. The N770 was $299 at CompUSA. I got a bluetooth GPS reciever for 80 bucks as well. So now not only do I have an open source GPS, I get free maps from google, I get a full 800x480 internet tablet that does BT and WIFI. It does 85-90% of what a full time gps can do. With flite, it even speaks directions in a "steven hawking is my navigator" way. The only real drawback that I see is that routing is done by an online service rather than onboard. The developers are changing that since most of them are returning to school. So i have to kinda plan ahead or find a wifi spot. But finding free wifi in portland is pretty easy and plentiful. http://www.wifipdx.com/map/ And Since it uses a debian linux OS and uses simple .deb packages for install, it's super easy for a GUI geek like me.
Here's some pix.
The Rikaline 6033 Blue Tooth GPS Reciever (32 channels!!)
It uses the maps you see when you use google.maps. I download them to my 1 gig mem card.
The greater Portland area is about 200 megs including 3 zoom levels.
In addition to the simple street maps it can do Topo maps.
Hybrid maps will soon be supported.
The hybrid maps use a transparency layer and not a simple .png image.
Since I only needed the 0 and 3 zoom levels it only takes up 150 megs
And of course where would i be if i didn't have a cute bag to put it all in?
Since the N770 can stream audio using the normal audio streams and also use UPNP servers,
I needed better sound than the puny mono speaker can deliver.
Also I keep a couple hungred megs of music and audio books onboard.
What would be better than a simple bag but a totally hot bag with speakers!!
This was just so cute i couldn't stand it and cost me all of $10! (inc shipping!)
Sure the insides suck but ain't that the truth about most pretty things?
The sound was surprisingly decent and fit perfectly for what i wanted.
Does it go with anything i own? Oh hells nah. But If I find the right wolf shirt...I'm all set.