Sabbatical Diary: Week 14

The calendar year started with some sysadmin work. Had to get devices reconnected to eduroam and Internal-CL Wi-Fi networks which was happily quite straightforward.

Research work was primarily getting a bit more seriously started on unexpected work mentioned previously looking at digital support for HVAC control—a better “Digital Plant Room” if you will.

I also did some recreational coding around various family duties which was nice :) I used to use EveryTrail to record GPS tracks while out walking. This became AllTrails and (at the time, not used it in years) got worse and probably wanted me to start paying. About a decade ago I switched to ramblr—but unfortunately that has also degraded over time, with their website setup and app bit-rotting as far as I could tell, while also reducing the free functionality and forcing users towards their paid service.¹

So I decided the time had come to extricate myself. Due to the aforementioned bit-rot of the ramblr app, some time ago I had found a reasonable if comparatively basic iOS app for recording GPS tracks, GPS-Tracker Pro,² but wanted some way to display and host the tracks online nicely with photos included. It ended up being straightforward to automatically extract the ~188 tracks from ramblr, I’d already got those from Everytrails when I switched away from it, and GPS-Tracker Pro makes it straightforward enough to share GPX and KML tracks out to e.g., cloud storage.

So I’m now partway through a simple Python script to visualise them using GPXPlotter and Folium. Much more straightofrward so far than I thought it might be. More to follow—it turns out coding is fun and I enjoy it, so I plan to do more… :)