81–90 of 98 posts
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Wireless Bluetooth earbuds cost about €10 and should fit even with a regular helmet.
If you have cheap earbuds that don't really seal out the other noise, this is a recipe for serious hearing damage.
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I ride motorcycles in cross-Europe trips for fun but prefer the GPS. My GPS will look for small twisty mountain roads with lots of elevation changes and lots of corners. Roads that are only on highly detailed local maps, and I don't want to carry 30 maps on a month long road trip. Road signage is simply not a thing on these roads as they are only used by locals. I can disable highways, B-roads, toll, ferries and on m…
Can you share what app/device you use that has all of those features like specifically picking out fun roads? I'm not aware of that feature on any major nav app.
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I tried the same thing on my motorbike in London. I had a pretty cheap android phone at the time. The 'headphone hearing protection' would make the volume too quiet to hear over the engine any time you jiggled the headphone jack. Required a screen interaction to fix. Of course if you didn't hear the audio prompt or couldn't make it out precisely, you're on your own - no way to check it or get it to repeat if the phon…
This is rather off topic, but does anyone understand how the cigarette lighter plug of all things managed to become more of an international standard than any other electrical outlet (with perhaps USB as an evolving exception)? It's baffeling to me..
There were the Hella plugs [0] in old Volkswagens (our '81 Vanagon has one), looked much like a lighter plug but smaller, and a better design. But they never seemed to have caught on except on BMW motorcycles. In fact, whenever I hear a reference to them, they're called "BMW plugs" because that's the only thing that uses them anymore.
[0] http://i.ebayimg.com/images/i/291040452525-0-1/s-l1000.jpg
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Experienced the heat issue when we did Vietnam South to North on a bike some months ago. Phone got so hot you couldn't touch it. Had to wing it in the end and stop every now and then to see how lost we were.
I thought that Vietnam, outside of the larger cities, was fairly easy to navigate. Conveniently for me it was raining the whole time, so overheating wasn't an issue. Rather, I had the opposite where I almost froze riding through the rain in Đà Lạt wearing only tshirt and shorts.
The public transportation and cycling options will become even more hidden in the app with this addition. How can Google Maps continue defaulting to car and Uber when asks for directions in ultra-dense cities with great public and cycling infrastructure (like Paris), while Google pretends helping the environment? Even when the subway directions are 10x cheaper and faster, Google Maps keeps highlighting car directions…
Only thing is, there are tons of cool cycle routes around, and I'd like to say I prefer those. It needs some safety/effort-based preferences for routing. Like, I'd prefer to ride 2 or 3km more, if it's on a dedicated bike path, rather than ride direct to my destination on busy traffic roads.
That's very cool. One time, I decided to just put the phone in my pocket and take my bike to a location. I had the ear buds in my ears, I thought, voice is enough... Oh my, was I wrong. I ended up missing most turn off in streets due to latency, some crossings made no sense over audio, a total disaster. So I got a stand to attach the phone to the handle bars... And that works great, for about 20 mins. I live in Austr…
I've managed to drive/ride and just listen to voice which worked well enough for directions.
Mostly though, I'd love gmaps to be optimised for finding me the 'fun' roads. Sort of a bestbikingroads algorithm that lets me find the few twisties in between where I am, and my destination, even if it's quite a detour.
That's very cool. One time, I decided to just put the phone in my pocket and take my bike to a location. I had the ear buds in my ears, I thought, voice is enough... Oh my, was I wrong. I ended up missing most turn off in streets due to latency, some crossings made no sense over audio, a total disaster. So I got a stand to attach the phone to the handle bars... And that works great, for about 20 mins. I live in Austr…
Years ago before a long motorcycle trip I made a nice setup to use google maps while riding for the trip. A custom mount, ran all the charging cables, NFC tag and tasker profile so it knows when it's mounted. I used it for 3 days before a guy told me to give old fashioned maps a try, and gave me a few state maps. My tank bag has a nice window slot for them, so why not use it in tandem? Within 2 hours I had totally st…
Although I do admire setups where you don't have to look down as much. That was one big drawback of a tank-bag. Felt like coming up to an intersection/roundabout, if it wasn't obvious where to go, it was actually pretty tough to glance down, find your place on the map, interpret where to go, then translate that into real world 'I need to take the third exit'.
There are times when gmaps makes things way too easy.
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I thought that Vietnam, outside of the larger cities, was fairly easy to navigate. Conveniently for me it was raining the whole time, so overheating wasn't an issue. Rather, I had the opposite where I almost froze riding through the rain in Đà Lạt wearing only tshirt and shorts.
It is for the most part. I only had a little candy-bar SonyEricsson at the time which had really limited interweb capabilities. Other guys had iPhones, but for the most part, winging it was great and got you where you needed to go.
When I got a flat tyre, I just stopped near a local, pointed to my flat tyre, and they gestured directions to get to a mechanic (not that they're hard to find in Vietnam).
I'd imagine it would be the same if you only had a paper map with your destination. Just show the map to a local and in no time they'd tell you where you are and the best way to get there.
Outside of the touristic areas, Vietnamese people are generally really nice and helpful people, who don't try and rip you off. I needed to get the front shocks replaced on my bike. The mechanic next to the hostel wanted something like 800,000 dong to replace them, so I declined. Later, my shocks blew out in Da Nang and I actually had to get them replaced. The mechanic, who couldn't speak word of English, did them for me for 400,000 dong without even haggling. I'm fairly sure that's the local price, because I can't imagine it's possible to get two shocks, plus an hour of labour for under US$20, back home the same job would cost me probably $200 at least.
What would be cool if there was a very simple low power display bluetooth which just displayed an left/right/upp arrow with a number counting down when to turn or stop. Phones don't really work mounted on a bike, but a simple display could do the job. Sort of how android watch displays an arrow, but using a low power screen.
Good news, there's a somewhat feasible looking kickstarter doing just that: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ridebeeline/beeline-mot...
