Tag: maps

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Squadrats by Bike

When I first head of Squadrats I thought it was “Squad Rats” like some sort of cool bike gang name. It is not. I think it comes from Quadrat. Anyway, it’s a web site/service that tracks where you’ve been. It could be by walking, hiking, or biking. It’s sort of a game? I don’t play though, I just like to see my own data.

Check out the rules.

  1. Leave your house.
  2. Record your activity with a phone or any GPS device.
  3. Collect squadrats.

Ride, run, walk, swim, boat, but use your own muscles, wind, or gravity. Motor vehicles (except e-bikes) are not allowed.

So yeah, it’s sort of a game like Pokémon GO I guess…

To use Squadrats you need to get your data into Squadrats. When I do a bike ride (or a walk) I use my Apple Watch to “start a workout”. Last year I started using (the free version of) RunGap to get a better view of my bike riding data than (the free version of) Apple Fitness gives me. I still use RunGap, which is great for some things. If you want to export your data from RunGap you have to pay though. (Note: You can get your data in a SQLite database if you use the “backup” feature, which is free… I should write up a post about that.)

Where was I? Oh yeah! RunGap made me wish there was a feature where I could see all of my rides on a single map so I thought about ways to do that on my own. None were easy, so I started looking for solutions and found Squadrats. Data can get to Squadrats via Strava, but I don’t use Strava. Well, I didn’t use Strava, but I do now, because it’s the way to get my ride data from Apple Fitness/Health to Squadrats… Strava is the intermediary between the two.

But Strava is weird for me, because I feel like it’s also a “competition thing” and I don’t care about competing with people, I just want my data to flow somewhere. Strava makes it look like I ride a bike really fast, but I’m just on an ebike commuting to work.

I like most things about Squadrats when it comes to displaying my ride data. It’s great to see a map of where I have been, and you can narrow things by choosing “All time”, “Last 7 days”, etc. and then look at Squadrathinos, Yards, Yardhinos, Ubersquady-somethings, etc. All the terminology is a little weird but whatever.

There is a “Leaderboard” and while I’m not out to compete with anyone but myself it’s interesting to see the data. I managed to get about two months worth of data into Strava (and Squadrats) by doing an import from Apple Fitness/Health when I signed up for Strava, but it seems like I can’t easily do that import again, so there’s not a simple way to load all my past data. (There is a way. Looks like I can do it 25 files at a time… I may do that.)

Squadrats is neat, and I do like it… But! I am working on some code to take all of my GPX files from Apple Fitness/Health and plot every ride on a map. I’ll be posting about that soon. Stay Tuned!

Update! I manually uploaded all of 2025’s rides to Strava now and they have flowed into Squadrats so my map covers a lot more area!

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Tracking Maps

Google Map

I’ve had a few people ask how I create the maps showing where I’ve been recently, so here’s a quick tutorial on the process.

I’ve got Google Latitude installed on my phone, and it runs constantly tracking my location, and the data is saved to Google’s servers. (Note: If you’re paranoid about being tracked, you can stop reading now.)

Google Latitude

Every now and then I log into www.google.com/latitude using my desktop browser, click on ‘View location History’ to get a map of my travels, and then choose the date and a time frame.

Map

I’ll often do the last 30 days (which is the maximum) but for this map I did just two days to show all the traveling I did over a weekend. (Minneapolis and back!)

Once you’ve got the date and time frame set, you’ll see your map. Just resize it, position it, and do a screen capture, and you’re all set!

Wikipedia has a good write-up about Google Latitude.

Update: It seems Latitude will be shut down on August 9th, 2013. Sorry, kids! I’ll be investigating other ways of doing this.

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Foursquare Mapping

I’ve been a fan of geohacking for a number of years, so when Foursquare showed up it seemed like it made geotracking easy and popular. Which is good for me, because I like geodata. (Some call this stuff “LBS” or “Location Based Services.”)

Foursquare I recently added a Foursquare widget to my blog. It’s in the right column and titled “recently at” and it just displays a short list of recent checkins. (It’s a simple WordPress Plugin that I was going to write, but since someone else did, I figured I’d just use theirs. Thanks Andrew!)

I’m also a believer that visualizing data makes it more powerful, so after digging around in Foursquare’s App Gallery, I found a few interesting things.

CheckoutCheckins

CheckoutCheckins is a nice little web site that mashes up your Foursquare data with the Google Maps API to show you where people and venues are. The creator is also on Twitter as @CheckoutCheckin aka @dannypier.

wheredoyougo.net

wheredoyougo.net was written by Steven Lehrburger in a Mashups class he took in school. It shows a heatmap of where you’ve been. (He’s also on Twitter as @lehrblogger and is working on something called Wanderli.st.

FoursquareX

FoursquareX is a Mac OS X native client which lets you just use your computer instead of your phone to do the Foursquare thing. It also has a nice map view, again using Google’s mapping services. (One thing about FoursquareX, the first time I used it connected to my home wifi network, it didn’t work at all. I tested at work on our wifi network, and it worked fine. So I’m not 100% sure when it will work versus when it will not work, YMMV, etc.)

Twitter was probably one of the most instrumental in leading they way showing why you should provide an API to your users, and I applaud Foursquare for making their API available, and I’m glad to see more and more services doing it.