About Hikes
Hikes indulges my passions for walking and being uncontrollably geeky. I love recording a walk and then looking at it in Google Earth. It's a great way to get context for a walk that isn't always obvious while you're wandering around.
I started the blog with a pretty complex setup. For a hike I'd take my Magellan eXplorist 500 GPS and a point and shoot digital camera (currently the excellent Canon PowerShot SD700 IS). After the hike I'd use a program I knocked up to compile stats from the GPS track log, and GPSBabel to convert the track log to Google Earth KML. Then I'd resize images and write a blog post.
This works well for longer hikes but it's a bit painful for shorter ones. I've got an AT&T Tilt phone which has a pretty decent camera and GPS built in, so over the Christmas holiday this year I wrote a tracking application for the phone. This app is now available as freeware (Catfood Tracker). As well as tracking your location it also generates a KML file and hike statistics at the end of a walk. Perfect. See Golden Gate Park Loop for a hike recorded entirely on the Tilt.
With an easier tracking option available I aim to blog about more hikes in 2009. I've also added an interactive map to the blog, which shows all the posts in Google Maps. This page is generated from the blog RSS feed, with a marker placed on the map at the first track point of each hike.
