WalkLakes Blog

We discovered this week via a posting on The Register that older GPSs, satnavs, and other such devices won't be able to use America's Global Positioning System properly after 6th April unless they've been suitably updated or designed to handle a rollover similar to the Y2K problem.  read more ...

Some modern cameras, and a lot of mobile phones, geotag photos which is to say that they add the location where the photo was taken to the EXIF data recorded with the photo. Of course doing that requires that the camera has a GPS built in. Phones pretty much always do, cameras not so much.  read more ...

With some fanfare the Ordnance Survey announced this week that their subscription mapping application could now display your walks in 3D ... with our web site you've been able to for ages, for free. Here's a screenshot of it in action:  read more ...

People who buy the GPX routes of our walks are sometimes confused that the route appears to be shorter than the walk. To illustrate here's an example of an email we received today about our walk Nab Scar and Alcock Tarn. It said:  read more ...

A user of our GPX mapping software posted on our forum today. She said:  read more ...

I've been meaning to blog about this for a while but two articles on the Web this week highlighted, in different ways, the issue of over-reliance on GPS.

The first was an excellent news post by the The Mountaineering Council of Scotland. The post titled Death by GPS – how to get lost with pinpoint accuracy talks at some length about the dangers of over-reliance on GPS for navigation. It's a good article and I recommend reading it in full if you're got the time but here's the TL;DR bullet points:  read more ...