Bugs in GaiaGPS

They are too busy/understaffed to communicate with anyone or fix any bugs, but in case anyone at GaiaGPS ever has some free time, these are issues I have noticed.

Some may be on account of the large number of tracks which I have collected.

  1. On both my phone and computer, the map at gaiagps.com or on the app will not show all of my tracks when zoomed out. Far enough out (like looking at the whole city or a big part of it) they do not show at all, and then they pop into vision when I move in enough
  2. Track names often fail to sync from my iOS phone to the web/desktop app. They show up as generic track names and I need to figure out which is which and manually rename them
  3. Both the desktop and especially the iOS version insist on showing waypoints near tracks which are visible, even when the folder for those waypoints is explicitly set to not display
  4. When exporting a folder of tracks with waypoints near them, GaiaGPS includes some of the waypoints along with the tracks in the exported .GPX or .KML file
  5. Tracks and waypoints often fail to move into folders, on both desktop and iOS. I select a track or some waypoints and put it in a folder. It may disappear from where it was previously, but if I wait a minute it will often jump back to where it was before.

None of these break the functionality of the app, which is remarkably capable for a free version. Still, it would be nice to see a good product improved by sorting them out.

Mapping and cartography

When the University of Toronto gyms closed for the pandemic, I realized and decided that I would be getting most of my exercise through walking.

All through writing up my dissertation, I broke down my life into 20 minute chunks of either thesis work, sleeping, exercising (walking), or doing anything else.

I am now up to well over 7,000 km of walking since August 2020. This had begun to produce spin-off projects: the Toronto Urban Hike Collection to identify nice nature trails, maps made in QGIS and posted to Flickr, and animation and wall-sized map projects that I am still developing.

AI that writes

Several recent articles have described text-generating AIs like GPT3 and ChatGPT:

I have been hearing for a while that the best/only way to deal with the enormous problem of plagiarism in university essays is to have more in-class exam essays and fewer take-home essays.

With huge classes and so many people admitted without strong English skills, it is already virtually impossible to tell the difference between students struggling to write anything cogent and some kind of automatic translation or re-working of someone else’s work. It’s already impossible to tell when students have bought essays, except maybe in the unlikely case that they only cheat on one and the person grading notices how it compares to the others. Even then, U of T only punishes people when they confess and I have never seen a serious penalty. If we continue as we are now, I expect that a decent fraction of papers will be AI-written within a few years. (Sooner and worse if the university adopts AI grading!)

Pastiche research

One of my side diversions during the PhD has been developing a Sherlock Holmes pastiche where he crosses paths with Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

In my experience, Lyndsay Faye is the best modern writer of Holmes stories. I have listened to her Dust and Shadow three times on Audible, and I enjoyed The Whole Art of Detection: Lost Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes. I’m presently reading the copy of Observations by Gaslight which I found at Seeker’s Books, and I found the chapters by Irene Adler and Wiggins superb.

I have assembled quite a collection of things which I ought to read before finalizing my pastiche. That would need to include William Baring-Gould’s 3-volume annotated edition of the canon, as well as Leslie Klinger’s Sherlock Holmes Reference Library. I should also read Ronald De Waal’s The Universal Sherlock Holmes; Jack Tracy’s Encyclopaedia Sherlockiana; Steve Clarkson’s Canonical Compedium; Edgar Allen Poe’s three Dupin stories; and Francois Eugene Vidocq’s memoirs.

I also have reading to do on subject matter specific to my story, notably the Pop society at Eton and more about Brunel himself.

Of course this is all a back-burner project for amusement and creative relaxation. I expect that I will have either a week or a month’s worth of revisions to make to my PhD dissertation after my defence on December 2nd, and I have substantial work to do in deciding how to sustain myself and make a difference on climate change post-PhD. I’m fine with the Holmes/Brunel project living on similarly to my space shuttle screenplay: something to motivate a bit of background research and creative thinking, but with no definite plan for completion at any time.