GlobalSat BT 335 GPS Logger

by Gary
(Washington, DC)

This device will talk to your laptop and tell you where you are at the moment. They all do that, I guess. This is a logger, though, so you tell it, by distance or by time, how often you want it to log the lat/long/time/altitude. It's smaller than almost any cell phone, and just has an on/off button (plus a bluetooth light (which unnecessarily flashes all the time, unless you're downloading), a battery warning light and a light to show you when you're getting a good fix).

I've been using it for a little over a month, including 20 days in India. (The vacation was how I justified buying a new video camera and this device as well. But I just spent $70 on this gizmo, with no ongoing costs whatsoever.) It stores 60k entries so I haven't even filled half of it in a month, despite moving all over the place day after day.

Maybe I'm the only one in the world, but I look forward every evening to downloading the log (bluetooth) and seeing where I've been. Sometimes, as in India, it actually told me something I didn't already know, like the route of a train or a taxi or just figuring out where my hotel was in relation to the sights.

Unfortunately, GlobalSat's software lets me display the points and the track, but doesn't pop up time stamps, or let me retrace the path.

If nobody else has done this, I will. But surely somebody has created and published a utility that will let you download the log, and annotate it. We're getting closer, I suppose, to cross-referencing any lat/long with a business name or street address, but what I have in mind, however laughably solipsistic you may find it, is to keep a permanent log like a diary (no, it is in fact a diary), and be able later to answer questions like what time I usually leave the house or how much time I really spend at the office or how often we go out in the evening.

What I envision is three or more panels on the screen, with a slider that lets you move back and forth through time, and then enter notes for every time you stopped moving. In other words, it would be a super-accurate diary: 8:14 left for work, 8:45 arrived, 1:15 down the street for lunch, 1:55 back at work, 6:30 drive through McDonald's, 7:45 Saw Juno, 10:50 home. As I say, from that database it would be possible to quickly answer questions like "How often do we go to the grocery store? How often and when do I go to the gym, and how long do I stay?"

I am very excited about this. I would bet that almost every cell phone sold will have this feature in a year or two. I realize that some people go places they shouldn't, and they would be positively scared by this. There's a privacy issue in that you can just toss it in the back window of your kid's (employee's??) car (though it seems to work fine inside my pocket or even a backpack) and then read the log later, including maximum speed, for instance.

The main downside for me so far? I have a huge pang of regret when I leave it at home, or I forget to charge it. (Anticipating this, I did buy two extra $10 batteries.) For three different days I have no record of where I was! Oh no! Disappointment from something like that is clearly another sign of insanity, right?