My boss Chris and I took the train to Settle today from Portland. It's pretty nice in Business Class and cheap. I had an opportunity to hook up my new Streets and Trips GPS during the trip. A screenshot is to the right. The green line is the recommended route, via car. The blue line is the route we took by rail. We were moving pretty fast for a while there, about 75-80 MPH.
One interesting thing that I realized is that while there's no WiFi on Amtrak, there's enough stops that you can use NetStumbler to sync email using whatever HotSpot is nearby that stop. I'm not sure why I get such a kick out of that, but I sure do.
This GPS is darned interesting as well. It's cheap - I think it was $60 - but it is wicked accurate. It also speaks NMEA 2.0 which is really easy to speak to over a serial port. I talked to edjez, and I'm going to extend and mess with his C# application for an upcoming article.
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