I just discovered that Scheduleworld stopped their free contact syncing service. Although the service worked fine, I didn't think it justified the $30 USD/year subscription service for just my personal addresses.

So it's time to look for alternative solutions. I've looked at several alternatives, that satisfied the following requirements:

• It should sync my addresses from my iphone 'over the air', without the use of iTunes or another PC solution. My opinion still is that the iPhone is a internet device that should not be connected to a computer to make it work.
• It should sync my Thunderbird (addressbook) contacts in some way with my iPhone in a 2-way direction.
• Preferably, the contacts should be stored by a well-known, free or cheap online service, but I'm also willing to set-up a web-application myself if it's not available.

For now I settled for both ZIndus to sync my thunderbird addressbook with Google Contacts, and I use NeuvaSync to sync between the iPhone and Google contacts.

To set it up:

1. Apply for an account with Nuevasync, and set it up to sync with google contacts. You must do this explicitly. I used NeuvaSync before for syncing my google calendar, but I initially forgot to turn it on for contacts as well. Do this by logging on to the NeuvaSync website, and you can see what you enabled.
2. Install the Zindus Thunderbird Add On, which can be found on the  ZIndus Webiste.

One of the drawback I've seen with this approach, is that the address given in Thunderbird cannot be synced in a normal way. As an alternative, Zindus makes some embedded XML out of it. The result is that the address is readable from the iPhone, but it is surrounded by some special XML code. This makes entering addresses on the iPhone difficult to impossible, but you still can sync telephone number and other items. So you should use your Thunderbird addressbook to enter the addresses.

On the possible side, the set-up comes close to 'free' as in beer. Zindus is open source (MPL), and use is made of the free Google Contacts service, which will probably continue to be free for quite a while. So as long as the NuevaSync account will also be free, we have a very nice solution.

After some successful scating last week with Surf, Today we did a tour with Ronald and Erik-Jan. Reasonable to perfect ice conditions made the 25km trip a wonderful afternoon in Nieuwkoop.

See the picture above of a trace of my GPS during the tour.

See the photo album for some pictures of the trip as well.

Today, Surf & I did some ice-scating about 10 km north of Utrecht in Molenpolder. We did a tour of 14km and ice quality was generally quite good.

See the picture above of a trace of my GPS during the tour.

See this photo album for some pictures of the trip.

 Hopefully the weather stays cold the coming weeks...

Very short because my fully typed blog entry just did a
"session expired: on me :-(

See following entry on the technical issues, ubuntu bug #114565:

Make following entry to give permissions to user in Ubuntu Hardy:

  /etc/udev/rules.d/45-garmin.rules

SUBSYSTEM!="usb", GOTO="garmin_rules_end"ACTION!="add", GOTO="garmin_rules_end"
ATTRS{idVendor}=="091e", ATTRS{idProduct}=="0003", MODE="0660", GROUP="plugdev"
LABEL="garmin_rules_end"

There are two kind of interfaces:

• Native USB interface (mostly supported, specify usb: for instance for gpsbabel)
• Serial interface using kernel's garmin_gps module

There is also a discussion going on over the Forerunner on Ubuntu Forum

Following linux tools:

• Viking (works directly with usb-babel but cannot import google maps as it should) 
• qlandkarte
• gpsbabel (command-line), outputs garmin XML format
• pytrainer (looks promising but version 1.5.0.0.1 looks like it's missing some essential garmin importing and file importing options)

Update: pytrainer seems to work OK, just use the version from Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon in my Hardy Ubuntu. If you get the error "Cant open garmin device" Make sure to make the following modification to get the Garmin working with Heart rate monitor (the one without works): (following is a patch file, you can also manually change the line with the '-' into the one with the '+'.

 # diff -u /usr/share/pytrainer/plugins/garmin-hr/main.py.orig /usr/share/pytrainer/plugins/garmin-hr/main.py--- /usr/share/pytrainer/plugins/garmin-hr/main.py.orig    2009-01-01 15:03:34.000000000 +0100+++ /usr/share/pytrainer/plugins/garmin-hr/main.py    2009-01-01 15:08:05.000000000 +0100
@@ -29,7 +29,7 @@
 tmpgpx = "/tmp/reg.gpx"
 dummy = 0
 
-if not os.path.exists(options.device):
+if (not os.path.exists(options.device) and not options.device == "usb:"):
     f = os.popen("zenity --error --text='Cant open garmin device. Check your configuration or connect the device correctly.'");
 
 else :

One thing I'm still looking at is importing all my track at once.

To get the Garmin forerunner working under linux (Ubuntu 8.04 in particular) take care of the following:

There are two different drivers to access it:

• A native usb driver, for tools like gpsbabel specify usb: as device
• A serial-to-usb convertor driver, supported by a kernel module called garmin_gps. Note that this module is blacklisted by default in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist (See bug #114565)

To make sure your GPS program can access the usb port of the garmin without being (or acting as) root, install the following udev-rule:

Create /etc/udev/rules.d/45-garmin.rules file:
SUBSYSTEM!="usb", GOTO="garmin_rules_end"
ACTION!="add", GOTO="garmin_rules_end"
ATTRS{idVendor}=="091e", ATTRS{idProduct}=="0003", MODE="0660", GROUP="plugdev"
LABEL="garmin_rules_end"

The following program support some GPS functionality:

• viking (managed to import directly from Garmin, but was unable to import google map data as well)
• qlandkarte: Did not manage to import from Garmin
• pytrainer: Looks promising, but seems I'm using a version (1.5.0.0.1)where some functions are missing like importing from file or from garmin.
• gpsbabel: Command-line tool that was able to import and show the Garmin XML format.
• www.bikexperience.de : Not yet tested, screenshots look okay.