Generating a GPX file for Strava after the tech let me down

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 8 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

This afternoon was glorious. The sun was shining and, even though it was a work day, the company I work for had arranged an afternoon out for staff at Cannock Chase (Go Ape). High ropes, Forest Segway, or Mountain biking activities were all available – right up my street!

I decided I’d like to Segway but I was in the second group (which meant waiting around for an hour or so), so I took a bike out for a little ride whilst I was waiting. Unfortunately, I didn’t have my Garmin with me and my iPhone’s attempts to capture my movements on Strava were woeful.

Shortly after setting off on “Follow The Dog“, I lost the rest of the group (whilst messing around with Strava!) and decided that I would rather come back and ride another day with my son than ride on my own and (potentially) miss the Segway opportunity. But I still wanted to capture the details of the (admittedly short) ride…

Generating a GPX file to upload to Strava is straightforward enough – I used Mapometer for that. Unfortunately though, Strava won’t allow GPX files without time information to be uploaded.

The workaround is to estimate some time data and insert it in the file – which is where the excellent Gotoes site helped! Goetoes has several utilities for Strava and Garmin Connect including:

  • Combining FIT, GPX or TCX files
  • Merging heart rate and position files (FIT/TCX)
  • A bookmarklet to export GPX from Garmin Connect
  • The ability to upload to Strava via email

and…

Using this with an estimate of my time, a known distance (so an estimated speed) and Gotoes’ ability to work out what my speed might have been at different points on the route came up with something approximate to put into Strava. I’ve hidden it from leaderboards – because it’s “fake data” – but it’s enough for me to track the distance and the fact I did go for a little bimble.

Strangely, the iPhone’s GPS performed OK for the Segway ride (which I’ve recorded as an eBike and alse hidden from leaderboards):

Short takes: Shrinking Outlook OSTs; locating and removing “stale” Yammer users; editing GPS tracks

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 10 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Some more snippets of blog posts…

Reducing the size of your Outlook offline store

Tim Anderson commented recently that he’d noticed how recreating his Outlook offline store (.OST) file was more effective than compressing it.  I decided to give mine a go (especially as my recently shrunken Inbox means there wouldn’t be much to re-sync).

Unfortunately, my IT admins appear to have locked down my configuration via group policy so I couldn’t disable/re-enable cached mode. @p3rfact came up with a suggestion that worked though:

As it happens, my file was not that large – although recreating it did reduce the size by around 25%.

Clearing out users from Yammer

Yammer  networks can be synchronised with Active Directory using Yammer Directory Sync but ours is not (for various reasons). There is a pretty simple workaround though for clearing out users from Yammer who have left the company (credit due to @AlanPurchase for working this one out):

  1. From the Network Admin view in Yammer, export a .CSV file with all the users in the network.
  2. Open the .CSV file in Excel and filter on the state field to show active users and on the email field to include domains that you are interested in (for example, I only wanted those in our UK organisation).
  3. Cut and paste email addresses into a new email in Outlook, then use Ctrl+K to resolve the names against the Global Address List. Anyone that isn’t in the GAL will not have their email address resolved.
  4. In Yammer, remove each of the users that are no longer in the organisation – you have the option to remove their posts or leave their posts and remove the account (more details in Microsoft knowledge base article 2820235).

GPS Track Editing

I’ve blogged before about how I log all of my bike rides, runs, etc. – it’s sad, but I like to see where I went on a map – and to know how I performed. Every once on a while, things go wrong though – like one time last summer when my Garmin suddenly decided I was several miles away and the route I was following became nonsense. The only answer was to reset the thing and start tracking again (breaking my ride into multiple tracks).

I found a free GPS Track Editor that helped me to merge/edit tracks (directly editing the XML in GPX files is a chore) and create something that at least represented the route I was on (although it does have one section that is a dead straight line “joining the gap” between my two usable tracks – it should actually follow the road via Whittlebury)!

Messing around with maps

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 10 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve found myself making quite a few conversions of maps between different formats, for different uses (mostly cycling-related).  The things I’ve found might, or might not, be useful to others… so I’m writing them down anyway!

Firstly, I wanted to see what the profile of a route was like. I had a GPX file for the route and used the excellent GPS Visualizer site to create an elevation profile.  And then quickly decided it had far too many bumps!

Next up, one of my fellow riders wanted to be able to view the route in Google Maps (not Google Earth).  This wasn’t quite as straightforward but, again GPS Visualizer comes to the rescue. Using that site, it’s possible to convert to a KML file that Google Maps can work with.  Unfortunately, the “new” Google Maps doesn’t have an import option so you need to switch back to the “classic” Google Maps (it might be enough to use this version of the URI: https://www.google.com/maps?output=classic), after which you can use the Google Maps Engine to create a map (like this one, which was stage 1 of my recent London to Paris ride):

Finally, I bought a Garmin Edge 810 (cycle computer).  After months of saying “I don’t need a Garmin, I have Strava on my iPhone”), I gave in.  And I’ve been pretty glad of it too – already it’s been great to monitor my stats as I climbed Holme Moss last week (does 98% maximum heart rate mean I’m 2% off a heart attack? </joke>) and last weekend I decided I was 20-odd miles from home and bored of my ride, so the sat-nav could show me the best way back to my starting point (even if it did mean cycling along some trunk routes…). Added to that, Mrs W has been glad to track my rides using the Garmin 810’s Live Tracking (although it didn’t work last time I was out…).

The Garmin comes with “base maps” but these are really just the main roads.  As they’re probably not the ones you want to use for cycling, it’s handy to load on some more detail. Ordnance Survey 1:50K maps (GB Discoverer) may be great (the 3D view in particular) but at a penny shy of £200 I wasn’t prepared to pay that much, with Open Street Maps available for free.  ScarletFire Cycling has made a video with an interesting comparison of the OSM and OS map options:

Downloading the Open Street Maps to a Garmin Edge 705/800/810 is brilliantly described by DC Rainmaker and Forgot has a write-up for getting turn-by-turn navigation working on the Edge 800, as does ScarletFire.  It can take a couple of days for the maps to be generated though and I did find a direct download link with maps that had been generated fairly recently (July 2013), so I used that.

Finally gave in and bought a Garmin

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 10 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Many of my cycling buddies tell me how great their Garmins are and I just didn’t “get it” but, after having to neuter my iPhone to get through a day’s riding, I decided that it was time to take the plunge.  Actually, there were a few reasons…

Increasingly, I live by the stats.  If it’s not on Strava, it didn’t happen. And I want to work on my cadence and on training in particular heart rate zones.  I can use a dongle to get ANT+ connectivity on an iPhone, but I decided to buy a dedicated cycle computer instead.

Secondly, my wife worries when I’m out and about on my bike.  Some of the recent Garmin cycle computers have a connected features like live tracking, using a Bluetooth-connected phone with the Garmin Connect app (iOS or Android, not Windows) and, after watching this video (yes, I’m a sucker for marketing), I thought that it might be just the thing to give her the peace of mind from knowing where I am (Find my iPhone was just a little too much of a pain with a complex password set on my Apple account):

There are some good deals around on the Garmin Edge 800 at the moment but that doesn’t have the connected features found in the 510, 810, and the new 1000.

Finally, I decided that, as my distances increase, riding in unfamiliar places means a map can be useful.  Whereas in the car I have a £9.99 map-book and a good sense of direction, the time had come to get myself a sat-nav for the bike.