March 2008 News Posts
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| Topic: |
The
Great Outdoors |
Date: |
25/04/2003 |
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The Great
Outdoors
Spring is in the air
- at least here in the Northern Hemisphere, and it’s time to
spend a little time in the great outdoors. No matter what outdoor
activity you enjoy the most (unless you need ice or snow…) now
is the perfect time to do it.
Just because you’re
going outdoors, however, doesn’t mean that you have to leave
your cool electronic gadgets behind. There’s plenty of things
you can use it for and plenty of ways to keep it safe while you’re
enjoying your outdoor activity. In this issue of Clié
Connections we will focus on some applications geared towards
outdoor activities and, in the next, we will review 3 different
cases designed to protect your PDA in non-office environments.
Weather Manager
One of the first
things you need to determine when planning on an outdoor event is
whether or not the weather is going to cooperate with you. While the
Palm OS had not evolved to the place where it can predict the
weather, you can keep an updated weather forecast (and satellite
images too if you wish) close at hand with Weather Manager by
Tinysoft. After installing this wonderful piece of software and
choosing cities to add to your favorites list, your PDA will update
the 5-day forecast for those cities every time you hot sync. This
can be dome via your USB cradle, modem, or WIFI connection.
Tide Pool
Let’s pretend
for a moment that you are taking the family to the beach and want to
keep track of the tides. Let me give you an example. My family and I
are going to the beach this summer and plan on scheduling our
activities around the tides. During low tide we will be using our
cast net to catch live shrimp in the saltwater marsh behind the
rental house. Later in the day we will use those shrimp to fish off
the pier. Tide Pool is a freeware program that is a must-have for
anyone that spends time at the beach. If contains a database of over
6900 locations (don’t worry - you don’t have to load them
all…) and displays the low and high tides either graphically of
as a list of events. The graphical display, my favorite, displays
the tide levels and displays the times by tapping on any area of the
graph. Another really nice feature is the display of the sun and
moon above the ride graph. By tapping on the icon for the sun or
moon, you pull up a display of the sunrise, sunset, moonrise,
moonset, and the phases of the moon.
Solunar Times
I don’t know
exactly how it works but there is a wonderful folio for TealInfo
called Solunar Times. Those who fish and hunt (or other activities
that include wildlife such as birding) have long recognized a
pattern between the peak activities of the wildlife and the
gravitational attraction of the sun, moon, and the tides and such.
This effect is known as “solunar.” Solunar Times begins by
displaying a monthly calendar with symbols representing if the
activity is going to be excellent or good. Tapping on the date you
select displays the two major and two minor peak activity times for
the day. While I was not able to obtain a registered copy of this
for evaluation purposes, there is a trial version that contains the
months January - March 2003. As I mentioned before, this is a folio
and therefore requires a copy of TealInfo
in order to operate.
CacheMate
The next piece of
software may require a little bit of background material for most of
you. There is a relatively new outdoor hobby (started about 3-4
years ago) called Geocaching. For more information you can visit
www.geocaching.com but, to
put it into a nutshell, the object of the “game” is to use
a handheld GPS receiver to locate a hidden “cache” which
can consist of an actual container containing objects for you to
trade out, a “virtual” cache which is a unique location of
some sort, an event, etc. A variation of the game uses the same
tactics to locate benchmarks. Each cache or benchmark has its own
web site containing the coordinates, a description, encoded hint,
and log entries from people who found the cache. While I have had to
give up geocaching for now due to time constraints, I really enjoy
going out with my teenage sons to find them and have even hidden
several of my own.
CacheMate is a
wonderful program that will allow you store information about the
caches you have hidden, have found, or are searching for including
the ability to decode the encoded hints. When you register the
program you even have the ability to download the coordinates
directly from Geocaching.com.
I haven’t even
begun to scratch the surface when you think of all the applications
that are available for activities such as astronomy for example. If
you have an outdoor activity that you enjoy watching or
participating in, load up your PDA with relative programs and take
it with you. Next week we’ll discuss how to keep it safe while
in the great outdoors.
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| Category: |
Clie
Connections |
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