Geoff Jones

Inveterate dabbler in business, travel, gadgets & life

Category: Products

Geoff and his Twitterings

After reading the history of Twitter over at @Dom‘s blog  140 characters and how it was conceived “We happened to be on top of the slide on the north end of South Park.
It was sunny and brisk. We were eating Mexican food. His idea made us
stop eating and start talking.”

Thought I would check out my Twitter stats on TweetStats since I joined in November 2006.


Interesting I’ve never gone above 209 tweets per month. Even though I can use it on the iPhone. My most used iPhone app. is gpstwit with 112 tweets. Least used is Twinkle at 43.

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Ascent and Everytrail

After my post bemoaning the fact that the only way I had of importing trails from the Garmin Legend HCx on the iMac was through using Parallels and the Garmin software (PC only!).

Euan pointed me in the direction of Ascent for the iMac which can take in data from the Garmin and is Mac based software. Works beautifully and very fast! However, for some weird reason Everytrail wouldn’t display the track, even though it was visible in Google Earth.

Great news from Chris at Everytrail is that he has found and fixed the bug (VRM in action) so now Ascent will display the trail in Everytrail with the photos, geotagged by Houdah, and downloaded from Flickr.

Here is an example of a walk that  Sally, Ellee and I did with the Cambridge Ramblers C for codgers group last Wednesday a far cry from pounding the camino in Spain doing 25mile days in temperatures of 30 degrees. But an interesting day anyway 🙂


Stretham walk take2

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Apple screws it up.

MacBook Oct 2008
MacBook Oct 2008

In the beautifully illustrated tear down of the new MacBook at iFixit there is the discovery that the new MacBook contains an astounding 96 screws of which 56 hold down the keyboard. It must be an assemblers / BOM nightmare with 13 different types of screw mentioned in the break down. Plus it must add to the machining costs all those blind tapped holes in the casing. Lets hope the poor Chinese women don’t strike for better wages 🙁

Just had a play with one in the Apple store here in Cambridge. I found the new mouse pad quite hard to use as the downwards force to activate the switch seems quite hard, obviously designed that way to stop inadverent pressing when using the glide pad.

The machine does look beautiful though. 🙂