What do you use for navigation?

Ever since moving to Seattle, I find it's much too large and far too labyrinthine to spontaneously find "bicycle friendly" streets(And, this city is crowded with cars on 'main ways', of which there are many everywhere) so I needed something to navigate. What do you guys do to navigate?

I just recently purchased a $260 netbook(A miniature laptop with a 9 inch screen, weighs around 2.3 pounds and has a 5 hour battery life. Sports a 1.6 ghz processor and 1 GB memory, so good enough for everyday XP tasks.) and added a touch screen so that it's now truly ultra portable as it can be easily used standing up. Needing a map of this entire city and thinking how accurate google maps is, I went to investigate: Apparently, using google maps as outlined at http://www.metacafe.com/watch/1073912/g ... arge_maps/, you can save extremely huge google maps to whatever size you need. It seems google maps usually displays 640 by 480 or less maps which can be less than exciting for a map for the whole city, but upping the resolution to street-level so I can actually read street names(and it's the hybrid satellite/road form so I can see actual buildings and parking lots, too!) and increasing the map size to 8,000x20,000 did the trick! Of course, it seems the map took forever to load(It took about 40 minutes) and I had memory issues as it consumed around 2 gb in memory on my 1 gb RAM machine, but I eventually got it to work(Despite the 2 gb in memory consumption, the actual data is only 100 mb in size). So, I know how a portable map of the entire Seattle area with satellite imagery and road names, and I can easily access it wherever with my ultra portable netbook. Now, I can navigate around Seattle without taking rather risky routes. I just need an umbrella that I don't have to carry with my hands to use it anywhere, any time in Seattle(It rains often enough).

(Now I need to manipulate the data on a more powerful computer at school so that I can chop it down to a more CPU and memory friendly form.)

One problem I seem to be having is that FireFox's ScreenDrag doesn't seem to particularly like 8000x20,000 images as it seems to freeze when requested to save the page so it's currently in offline html form, which doesn't appear to be so kind on the memory(I think it heavily uses algorithms to recreate the image, which consumes a bit of memory for larger maps).

I usually use a printed paper map and dividers to make myself a cue sheet.
Whenever I try following routes designated or suggested for bicycle use, I inevitably get lost. Not lost lost, just lose the poorly marked "bike routes".
From experience I know the more "bike friendly" routes through my usual territory than what are designated as "bike routes" on the maps.
My last trip to a new destination had cues for the "bike route" that would have avoided a rather nasty narrow stretch of a major feeder route. I missed the turn and ended up pacing the cars downhill at 58 KmH. The speed limit is 50 so most of them are doing around sixty. I took as much of the lane as I needed and was likewise ceded that much room by overtaking vehicles moving partially or fully into the second lane. Given the time of day, it was a better ride than getting there earlier when the scuds were cheek by jowl clawing their way down the hill.

i use my "brain". when that fails then i bust out the iPhone 3G with its built-in google maps. it's nice to rely on other peoples' smoothly-working implementations of smoothing and downloading the appropriate resolution of map tiles rather than trying to hack together something as you're doing.

I used to do orinteering in Highschool, so I got used to memorizing maps. now I spend some time on google before a ride, memorizing routs, and whats around it incase I get off track a little. spending some time on street view and satilite view helps "pre-run" the course.
I don't take anything with me when I ride, although I've considered buying a compass

Toshi said:

i use my "brain". when that fails then i bust out the iPhone 3G with its built-in google maps. it's nice to rely on other peoples' smoothly-working implementations of smoothing and downloading the appropriate resolution of map tiles rather than trying to hack together something as you're doing.

Click to expand...

At the expense of 3G! But you've moved beyond undergrad, so the money moves more freely, no?

swbluto said:

Toshi said:

i use my "brain". when that fails then i bust out the iPhone 3G with its built-in google maps. it's nice to rely on other peoples' smoothly-working implementations of smoothing and downloading the appropriate resolution of map tiles rather than trying to hack together something as you're doing.

Click to expand...

At the expense of 3G! But you've moved beyond undergrad, so the money moves more freely, no?

Click to expand...

i've moved beyond grad school, too 8) . yes, the money "moves more freely" in exchange for the $130,000 in loans i have accrued, no joke.

Sometimes I'll bust out Google Maps on my Treo (conveniently paid for by my employer), but usually if I'm going somewhere unfamiliar I'll plan my route in advance with the bike maps.
http://www.seattle.gov/transportation/bikemaps.htm
http://www.kingcounty.gov/transportation/kcdot/Roads/Bicycling.aspx

Cool. I'm getting a kind of "grand plan" with this map imaging data. Since I don't have access to the internet 24/7, I need to be able to store pertinent information offline and it'd be nice to know where some commonly used businesses and services are nearby just in case I'm in the area. To that end, I'm thinking of overlaying the hybrid map with extra data that can be turned on and off by request. A most straightforward way to do this would be w/ photoshop and its layers, but it'd be nice to have some programmability control like to serve up relevant bus schedule times depending on the time of day. Businesses and services would be like nearby banks, bicycle shops, favorite restaurants, electronics stores, commonly used bus stops and bus routes, pedestrian shortcuts and "no gos", things like that. I could also add on information from the King county bicycle map, as well and what over else information I feel like decorating the map with. Further programmability coolness might be I could tell it where I am approximately and it can determine how quickly I could reach a given point(By walking or by, say, electric scooting) and than it could alert me when I should start heading towards a desired bus stop - this'd be neat for those buses that have 30 minute or 1 hour intervals and I don't like thinking about trip durations and determining when to leave.

Anyways, the following is information for segmenting the entire Seattle area into sizes Mozilla's "ScreenGrab" can work with and I can piece them together later(with 4 segments, it shouldn't be hard or tedious).

Ok, I downloaded the entire Area of seattle at z=15(The most zoomed out part where each street name is still attached) and stitched the images together and it turned out to be roughly 8500x16000 pixels and the corresponding jpeg is around 65 MB(It's a hybrid image - Satellite+names), which is apparently too big for the common file sharing systems I use. At the most zoomed setting of z=19, the same amount of area would've have contained 2^4 times as many pixels per dimension, so the total amount of pixels would've been 2^8 or 256 times as much and the corresponding JPEG would've been around 65*256 = 16.6 GB. My netbook couldn't handle that much!

Since it's a freakishly large image, it needs a special viewer to view it as it can easily bog down regular viewers that load the entire image into the computer's memory, so I went searching and abortively tried to install some client-server software and eventually found a flash-based program called Zoomify that acts as an HTML viewer that processes images and navigates much like google maps does, so it loads quickly and runs quickly.