Motorcycle blogging from San Diego to the Arctic Circle
As Phil
mentioned earlier, my brother Brian is blogging his motorcycle
trip from
San Diego, California to Deadhorse, Alaska. Blogging a long trip
is getting routine, but what's interesting is that Brian's actually
blogging from a computer / webcam / GPS setup that's mounted on the
motorcycle. Brian just finished a 10 year stint in the Navy and has
been planning this trip for a long time. He's in northern Washington now, and
will go over 17,000 miles by the time he's done. You can read more
detailed specs on his bike, computer gear, and software on his
blog, but here are the highlights:
Bike
- Yamaha FJR-1300 "Super-Sport Touring"
- 1300cc
- 145hp
Computer
- Mini ITX board
- 1GHz CPU
- 1GB RAM
- 7" Newision touch screen
- Holux Slim 236 GPS
- Windows XP
Motorcycle Home Edition
- Logitech Fusion webcam
- Cingular 8125 (aka HTC wizard) and WiFi for internet access
Software / Services
- SubText
- PostXing
- Flickr
- YouTube
- GPSVisualizer
- RSSFWD
- Primary Navigation: iGuidance (modified for easier use with iGmod)
- Trip Planning: Microsoft Streets & Trips 2006
- Frontend: Centrafuse
- Video Capture: Capture! (look on mp3car.com for more info)
- Holux Slim 236 GPS
- Logitech Fusion webcam
- Cingular 8125 (aka HTC wizard) and WiFi for internet access
I wrote some custom .NET Winform apps for him (the coolest was a
transparent scalable version of osk.exe, the Onscreen Keyboard provided in XP)
but they ended up being unnecessary due to the front end software he found.
Still, with SubText and PostXing he's got his own version of
the DotNet Rocks Road Show.
He had to fight with touch screen drivers and power while he was putting it
together, but his system is holding up well on the road. He built an extra
fan onto the case to make sure the system stays cool despite being mounted in a
motorcycle gear bag.
So far it's been a very entertaining read. A normal daily post includes pictures, video, funny
travel commentary, and quite often GPS tracks. The video clips
have been really cool - he films via webcam while driving, then edits the video
in Windows Movie Maker and speeds them up so they look a bit more like that
freeway chase scene in Matrix 2.
And now I read that there may be an on10 episode in the works about his
trip...
Interesting side note: I first tried to map the route from San Diego to Prudhoe Bay in maps.google.com, but they said they couldn't compute the route. local.live.com had no problem with it, though. Maybe it's time for me to fight my habit.google.com and check out these live.com sites a bit more...