A courier arrived this morning and brought me a shiny new replacement Edge 305 GPS to replace the one that broke back in January.
At one month and one day Garmin are twice as responsive as Canon for repairs — last year’s warranty headache — but I’m still not really impressed that it takes that long for them to send a replacement unit, I would have thought they would keep them in stock.
Bugger, bugger, bugger; an expensive speed hump Ouch! I’ve never felt really happy with the way that the Edge clipped into its mounting bracket, the bracket always seemed a little too flimsy and the unit a little too heavy…. Well today it proved me right, coming into the Uni. I hit the speedhump and it flew out of the bracket, hit the deck and shattered the display. Hunted around and found that GME Electrophone is the local agent for Garmin repairs, so gave them a call (+61.
End of the day, a hot windy day. All manner of nagging small items lurk in the background to annoy me.
I’ve nearly got Muse and Blosxom to where I could change over to them, except for the odd double-publishing problem – and I don’t know whether it’s a bug or operator error. The Edge305 GPS hung this afternoon, first time in months. Maybe I left it plugged into the USB cable when I rebooted the PC, that always seemed to kill it when it was new and running its older software.
After only a week, another update from Garmin for the Edge305, Software Version: 2.70 and GPS: 2.60, up from 2.60 and 2.40 respectively. Fingers crossed, but I haven’t had the device hang or flatten the battery overnight since the last upgrade….
Musing on the methods of software updates under Windows. Seems that the assorted linuxes are well ahead here; Debian’s apt-get upgrade, SuSE’s rug update, not just the operating system but application packages too.
Windows has Windows Update, but every other application has its own mechanism — perhaps. Monitor the mailing lists, read the web page, click “check for update” in the application….
Today’s updates were for the Edge 305, GPS firmware update to 2.
After the problems I’ve had in the week I’ve so far owned my Edge 305 I hunted around and found who are the local (ie Australian) support.
Telephoned GME and they didn’t sound at all helpful, “Its a new device and we’ve only had them for a while, send it in and we’ll have a look at it.”
A few minutes later I found out that a newer release of the software is available, so I’ve updated it from version 2.
It hung again today. Once is annoying, twice a coincidence, three times… four times — product released before it is ready!
2006-03-24 13:00-16:00: on charger until it reported “fully charged” 2006-03-24 17:30-17:45: cycled home with it. 2006-03-25 10:00: plugged into the PC, downloaded data and restarted PC. Edge goes off and will no longer power on. Windows now reports “Replace device.” 2006-03-25 18:30: Edge finally turns on, but the battery is now flat and it turns itself off in under a second.
Yesterday’s suspicions confirmed — at least partially. Browsing through the user forums for the Garmin Edge shows that quite a few people have managed to either permanently or temporarily kill their devices. Also found useful things such as how to perform a hard or soft reset — information that seems to be missing from the manual. In fact the manual contains no fault-finding information of any kind!
Purchased Thursday, arrived Friday, broken Saturday! Saturday morning I plugged the Edge into the laptop and turned it on, it fired up the Garmin software, declared that there was no data to download (so I guess I didn’t record anything on the ride home yesterday) and then powered it off.
After that I found I couldn’t switch it on at all, and plugging it in to the laptop results in a Windows message telling me that the device is faulty and needs to be either unplugged and plugged back in, or replaced.
Garmin Edge 305, then 705, now 820 I had a Garmin Edge 305, but it fell off the bike and broke.
Then I had a replacement Garmin Edge 305, but I managed to lose it or get it stolen.
Then I replaced it with a Garmin Edge 705… until the buttons failed… but I found a FOAF to repair them and I still have it.
Then the Edge 705 fell of the bike and was run over by four cars and broke… so I sent it to Garmin for an out-of-warranty repair.
Vanity site? Technology experiment? Learning tool? Blog? Journal? Diary? Photo album? I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you…
I experiment. I play. I write and I take pictures. Some of the site is organised around topics, other parts are organized by date, then there’s always the cross-references between them.
Its all been here a fairly long time. Like the papers on my desk, or the books on the bedside table, the pile just grew… and it all grew without much plan or structure. I try not to break URLs, so historical oddities abound.
Long ago it started as a learning experiment with a few static HTML pages, then I added a bit of server-side includes and some very ugly PHP. A hand-built journal/blog on top of that PHP, then a few experiments in moving to various static publishing systems. I’ve never wanted a database-based blogging engine, so over the years I’ve tried PHP, nanoblogger, emacs-muse, silkpage and docbook before settling on Emacs Org mode for writing and jekyll for publishing. But the itch remained… I never really liked jekyll and the ruby underneath always seemed so much black magic. So now the latest incarnation is Org mode and hugo.
