I’ve never been a satnav type of person. First of all, I like maps too much. I’m also probably conceited enough to figure I can work out a better route than a little black box. And then there’s the number of fools I’ve followed down the A3400, bimbling along at 30mph with the tell-tale little blue glow visible from behind.

Gah. Give me a stash of Landrangers any day.

On Friday I succumbed and bought a 3G iPad. I’d just emerged from a stressful deadline and fancied some unaffordable retail therapy (sorry Mr HSBC. Please be nice to me), and I’ve always wanted an iPhone without the voice contract. And there was the small matter of having dropped my ghastly Huawei 3G modem in the canal which, frankly, is the least it deserved.

Having bought this, I couldn’t really resist Skobbler for the grand price of £1.50ish from the App Store.

Skobbler is a satnav app for the iPhone, and thus by extension, for the iPad in screen-doubling mode. It pulls down vector data and routes from the net, rather than having the geodata storedin memory. And the interesting bit, for me, is that it’s entirely based on OpenStreetMap data.

It’s very good. Rough edges abound, sure, but this is an amazingly nifty piece of code and design. I’d say it’s the fourth great product to spin off OSM. (For the record: OpenCycleMap, mkgmap, CycleStreets.)

The perspective display is the first “wow” moment: fairly standard in modern satnavs but a first for OSM. It pans and rotates beautifully, really making the most of the iPad’s CPU power. (I think the data is being served as vector tiles by CloudMade.)

The GPS accuracy is pretty good, and getting a fix is fast, too. Routes are pulled down quickly and revised when you go off-piste. Voice directions are clear, though the “Beware – watch your speed” gets a bit grating on the M42 with cameras at every gantry, and e A444 should be either the “four four four” or the “treble/triple four”.

The best bit: the OSM data, on the two journeys I tried (Charlbury-Hanborough and Charlbury-Burton), was more than up to the job. There was only one tiny missing street which caused some ambiguity – I’ll come to that later. But even as someone who looks at more OSM data than most, I was amazed how good it was: and the visibility that Skobbler brings to “getting routing right” can only make this better still. (Incidentally, their osmbugs interface is excellent and should be a good example for the main osm.org site to follow.)

What didn’t work?

The place selection UI is uncharacteristically clumsy, with various nested dialogues that didn’t seem too clear to me. It doesn’t appear to support postcodes, either, though no doubt the appearance of OS OpenData will change this.

The routing choices are a bit odd and seem to unnecessarily penalise roads below green-signed A roads. Skobbler tried to take me through Woodstock to Hanborough, which is a bit silly, and through Chipping Norton to Burton, which is odder still. In both cases I blithely sailed on the normal way and it recalculated quickly enough.

It fairly eats battery. Charlbury-Burton swallowed 25% of the charge, even when I put it to sleep on long streches of motorway. But then, most people will be powering it off a 12V adaptor.

Motorway junctions were often announced as “bear right” when they really meant “continue straight on”. Not really a problem. My biggest bugbear is how roundabouts are announced, and this seems to be common across all satnavs rather than being a fault peculiar to Skobbler:

“Take the third exit”

What? Is that this one over here, or was that the second, and does that little service road count, or… sorry, Mr HGV, didn’t mean to swerve across your lane… yes, beep to you too… bang.

“Continue straight on at the roundabout.” Please. It’s much easier. I think you can trust me to steer round the edge rather than ploughing straight through the middle.

Two reasons why this is particularly relevant to Skobbler. The “third exit” approach fails completely with a sometimes incomplete map database. At Wellesbourne it told me to take the second exit; actually, it should have been the third, but OSM was missing the real second exit (a service road to an industrial estate). “Turn right” would have been failsafe.

Secondly, that’s exaggerated still more when the database and the signs don’t agree, as here in Burton where OSM knows one road is the A5189 but the signs don’t tell you that. We should really tag that with ref:signed=no or somesuch, but “Take the second exit for the A5189″ is really, really confusing when there ain’t no sign of no 5189 (poetry).

But in the scheme of things that’s pretty minor. Skobbler is a seriously impressive achievement and one which more people should try… and not just because then I could tag a de facto 7.5T weight limit outside our house.

Incidentally, sorry for the lack of screenshot. I haven’t yet figured how to get WordPress to upload a pic from my iPad photo library. One thing at a time…

What do people find difficult about cycling to work? Why don’t they do it?

We could ask them. Actually, because we take an interest in these things – because we already go out and talk to people – we largely know. The roads are perceived as dangerous. Where there are safe routes, people don’t know about them. Helmet hair. Nowhere to park the bike. It rains.

What should we be doing?

Look! I fixed it for you! Everyone will start cycling to work now!

What?

The usual sources are going haywire about an impending Apple Tablet.

I used to have a tablet computer. It was a beauty. It was A4 sized and had a full, moving-parts keyboard. The word-processor was speedy and yet powerful; but it was a proper computer, too. You could even program it. And it cost about £150.

Ah, Amstrad NC100 Notepad, how I miss thee.

It was such a great little machine. I’d tuck it under my arm then head off to the University Library in Cambridge to research some article or other I was writing for Keyboard Review. Then, at home, I’d connect up the serial-to-AppleTalk lead, run ZTerm, and fire the documents across. Bar a bit of search-and-replace to get rid of extraneous control characters, that was it. Done.

(The word-processing software was actually Protext, with which I was of course very familiar. Protext was the WP of choice on the Amstrad CPC, but also a ridiculously fast raw text editor. It came on a 16k sideways ROM; on another ROM I had Maxam 1.5, Arnor’s assembler. You’d write your source code in Protext then type ‘asm’, and Maxam would assemble it. To this day, the reason I indent code with hard tabs rather than spaces is Protext’s doing; a tab took up one byte; a space took up six. When you only had 38k for text, that was a big difference.

At one point I wrote 90% of the code, but only 30% of the UI, for a wizard hack that brought WYSIWYG editing and embedded graphics to Protext (CPC). It was going to be called Fidelity, after the utterly superb Durutti Column album. I never finished it but you should still buy the album.)

The NC100 used four real AA batteries, which is almost always better than any proprietary solution. (Maybe excepting Sony’s digital camera batteries.)

It had two failings. One is that Amstrad had always, from the CPC on, skimped on the keyboard decoding circuitry. If you pressed three keys together, a fourth character would also result. For the fast typist this is a real problem. On the NC100 there was one very common three-key combination (might have been I-O-N, I can’t remember) where the ghostly fourth key was cursor-up. So you’d be touch-typing at eight billion words a minute, and would briefly look down at the screen, only to see that three sentences ago you’d unwittingly ‘pressed’ cursor-up and all your subsequent text had been inserted into the previous line. This happened to me so many times.

The other failing is that Amstrad was enormously value-conscious. Which is generally a good thing, but I’d have preferred a £180 armour-plated NC100 to a £150 where I broke the power socket twice (which Rob Scott could fix) and the screen once (which he couldn’t).

If Apple were to build one of these, maybe with Mobile Safari and 3G networking, would I buy one? Hell yes.

…for they shatter the illusions of faithful happy Mac users like me that you “can just plug it in” and “boom, it works” and stuff like that. Well, it might be true that if you try to get two Genuine Apple AirPorts to talk to each other via WDS they work happily – though given that AirPort Utility frequently can’t even find the Express within 50cm of it, I doubt it. (Computers really need a “IT’S JUST THERE YOU BLASTED THING” button, to go with the “OH JUST RUDDY DO IT” one for every dialogue box.)

Getting an AirPort Express to talk to a Belkin router is, however, decidely not fun. And that’s a great shame given that the Express costs £70, but the Belkin is just £30 from Argos.

So after n hours of swearing, Googling, and therapeutic pints of perry in the Rose & Crown (now only 30 seconds from our new house – which I should blog some time, it’s much more exciting than this), we now, finally, have wifi in the barn (where the computers are) as well as the house (where the phone line is).

As ever, for the sake of any other poor unfortunates trying to do the same, here’s what finally worked. Our setup is a cheapy unbranded Chinese ADSL modem; an AirPort Express connected to it; and a Belkin G+ (aka F5D7231-4) in the next room, which provides enough of a boost for the signal to make its way to the barn via several very chunky 18th century stone walls.

To summarise, the changes that made the difference (as far as I can tell) were: giving absolutely everything an IP address in the same range; making sure that range was 192.168.2.x, which seems to be where the Belkin is happiest; preventing anything apart from the modem/router itself from distributing IP addresses via DHCP; and using wireless channel 1.

ADSL modem/router
IP address 192.168.2.1. DHCP pool 192.168.2.2 to 192.168.2.15. (I figured it was easier just to have one box distributing IP addresses.)

AirPort Express (connected to router via Ethernet cable)
Basic settings:
- Wireless tab set to ‘Participate in a WDS network’.
- Network name set to ‘My luvverly wireless network’ (well, not really, but you get the point).
- Channel 1. I initially tried it on 12. It didn’t work.
WDS settings:
- WDS main.
- MAC address of the Belkin added as a WDS remote.
Internet tab:
- Configure IPv4 manually.
- IP address 192.168.2.2.
- Subnet mask 255.255.255.0.
- Router address 192.168.2.1.
- DNS server 192.168.2.1.
- Connection sharing Off (Bridge Mode).

Belkin (in the next room, not connected to anything)
Use as access point: enabled, with IP address 192.168.2.254 (the default) and subnet mask 255.255.255.0. After a reboot, this disables half the functionality (a Good Thing), and you can log in at 192.168.2.254.
Channel 1 (as per above).
SSID ‘My luvverly wireless network’ (again, same as above).
Wireless bridging enabled.
Enable only specific access points: ticked, and the MAC address of the AirPort Express entered.

Security (update)
Oh, I was hoping you weren’t going to mention that. The AirPort and the Belkin won’t talk WPA to each other, sadly. They will, however, talk WEP 128-bit, with the usual caveat that the Belkin’s ASCII-to-WEP key algorithm is different from Apple’s. I took a 13-character Apple-style password, set it on the AirPort, then passed it through this WEP key generator and fed the resulting hex bytes into the Belkin.

Finally, kick each item several times, and have a large drink. Or two.

After all that, the client computers (I’ve tested three) should just work happily and get their settings via DHCP.

Another one in case anyone out there is searching the Internet to fix the same problem.

I was trying to load an X11 app on Leopard (IDL) which used to work in Tiger, but getting the error message above.

It turns out that moving X11 out of /Applications/Utilities (into /Applications, say) will fix it.

Some wag wrote on the OSM wiki: “For developers, Rails means less messing around configuring and more coding.” How we laughed on our way to the asylum.

If you get

/usr/bin/gem:14: undefined method `ruby_version' for Gem:Module (NoMethodError)

when you try to run (say) gem -v, and

/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/rubygems/source_index.rb:92:in `load_specification': private method `specification_version=' called for #<Gem::Specification:0x4e65c4> (NoMethodError)

when you try to run Rails, you have two choices. Either (a) search the web to find that lots of people have come across the same issue, and their solutions always boil down to a complete reinstall, which is not fun. Or (b): sudo it.

For some weird reason, that works, even though sudo which gem and which gem etc. return the same.

I am now off to put my head through the patented Rails blender. Again.

Were it not for the fact that we already have two Pluriels, I would definitely get one of these.

Among the endearing features of 3’s “mobile” “broadband” “service” is the fact that, at first, they didn’t offer an SMTP server. At least, not one that they told you about. This I found a little annoying.

So I came up with a slightly insane way of sending e-mail, which I’m still using to this day.

I use qpsmptd to run an SMTP server directly on this Mac. The http-forward plugin then forwards the mail via HTTP (does what it says on the tin) to my usual systemed.net webspace. There, it talks to a fairly standard formmail script (obviously with some authentication).

It’s a bit hacky but it works, beautifully. I did have to use an .htaccess file to turn off mod_security, as perfectly innocent e-mails kept getting rejected.

As it happens, 3 do now have an SMTP server (smtp-mbb.three.co.uk), not that they tell you about it. It also turns out that our home broadband suppliers, Plusnet, actually provide authenticated SMTP, definitely without telling you about it. The latter is hugely useful as we’ve now switched Anna’s iPhone over to use it permanently; trying to use the O2 server used to bomb Mail without fail.

But still, I like my jerry-rigged SMTP server.

Mum’s wonderful dog Sandy was put to sleep today at the incredible age of 18.

Lovely bungalow with stunning views for sale in Charlbury, which is a smashing little town with four pubs, five churches and lots of map ninjas. Go on, you know you want to. More here.