spring cleaning

[mouser]

holding it by hand??

I mean even if it's not quite as fast on the draw updating my progress as driving, it would still be better than stark raving terror I have now!

i'm confused.

[TaoPhoenix]

holding it by hand??

I mean even if it's not quite as fast on the draw updating my progress as driving, it would still be better than stark raving terror I have now!

i'm confused.

-mouser (March 15, 2015, 09:14 AM)

Sure! Nothing stops a GPS from working just because it's not attached to this boxy thing with at least three wheels. So let's show you the use case first and then answer your second question ...

Use case 1:
I'm finally releasing my ye-olde-towne-with-four-roads roots and getting out to explore NYC. Problem is, it's a set of area 1000 times bigger than I am used to. But I could still manage it in places like downtown-ish Manhattan as long as it stays on the grid, or my section of Jackson Heights in Queens.

But let's use an easy case... behind the hospital is a grid ... canted forty five degrees! So let's say after whatever you were doing there, you go get a pizza, then you make a few more turns to look at a cool shop, then you stop at a Duane Reade pharmacy to get some stuff, ... and then you discover that you have no idea where you are. Because besides forgetting what roads you took, if you try to "fake it by heading directly home" ... you're totally wrong because your guess of where home is, is wrecked by that 45 degree cant.

And then in places like the Village with its five way intersections none of which is a 90 degree angle, ... well, pretty soon that becomes nowhere land!
 

So you just punch up the GPS, and it WILL figure out where you are. Then you punch in home, and it WILL find a route. So your first move is guaranteed to be right direction home.

Use case 2:
So there you go, let's say you are headed home, and (making this up) you successfully turn on to O'Malley street. Which is five hundred feet long. And you're facing a V-Neck intersection of Cody Street and Mouser Way. At walking speed the GPS might not be fast/accurate enough to tell you which to take. So you just randomly pick Mouser Way. At some point it WILL finally notice you're actually on the wrong road. But then it *recalculates* and tells you the new correct direction from there is Obscure Drive. So you take that. And then I don't even need it all the way home. I just need to get to the midtown manhattan grid and grab the train I know. So yeah, you burned a few minutes with a detour, but it WILL get you home.

[mouser]

Good enough for me, message me your address and i'll send it off.
I'm send you the whole kit, that way when you tire of it you can give it to someone else who might need the car mounts.

[TaoPhoenix]

Good stuff. Message coming in a bit.

A couple of quirks:

The city runs heavily on its trains, so an interesting error is not always to point it straight to home, because that could give you some freeway route or something. But you can use a little finesse and for example point it to an address exactly at 6th Avenue and 14th Street, which is one of the lowest of the "sensible grid" train stops. (Not all trains are created equal. I live in Queens so an A train does nothing useful for me.)

And I think I remember on a couple of occasions the Mio was off by a street just because they were all so close together, but then you can "hopskip it" and point it to something like 18th street and it's still off by a street but the point is to get out of the Rat's maze of the village, not quibble over which block you are on. So eventually because the route is longer, it does notice something eventually ... by which time you are home free on 14th.


Tech that speaks Shakespearean English plus your quirky tv character's sideways thinking will work. Just like some crazy TV show. Heh if that ever happens to me I may make a thread styled like a show.

[TaoPhoenix]

More mumblings...
I went to a tour of Washington Heights NY yesterday, and my geography is so bad I didn't even know the Harlem River existed!


But to get home, there is no single train! But same kind of trick as above, you get help from a local asking which train to take and then an intersection, so that gets you the first leg. Then you get off and since you're another four streets away somewhere, at the half way point you ask where the best place to get a 7 train is, and punch that in. Then you can get home.