Geek · Ten Feet Square

Satellite Communicators

Beam me up, Scotty.

Into the Unknown

TL; DR: I’m in the process of migrating old posts from my three existing blogs into this blog. I’m also starting to write again.

I’ve been searching for a blogging platform that fits my needs for the better part of a decade. I started off on Blogger, now Blogspot, which worked, but was clunky. From there, I checked out a variety of other solutions, eventually settling on Ghost. Ghost wasn’t perfect, though, and I wanted a solution where I could write and publish straight from my computer. I tried out Wordpress, which integrates with Word, but writing posts in Word isn’t really where my heart is.

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Garmin Woes

I’ve had this problem a few times now: I’ll record an activity on my 310XT, go to upload it later, and the sync agent fails to pull the activity. My suspicion is that there is a bad block in the flash memory on the watch, and the watch hardware is old enough where it can’t work around it. I had this problem with the old Garmin ANT+ Agent under OS/X, and I just experienced it under Linux, with Garmin Forerunner 610 Extractor, a Python script that does a similar job to the ANT+ Agent. What’s interesting is that the new script always downloads all of the activity data, so I’ve been keeping the old activities around, and I now know that the error occurs somewhere between 540k-584k of memory usage, and that the value equates to 24% of the watch’s memory, based on what the watch says. So it’s a good guess that the watch has about 2 megs of memory on board.