Month: August 2009

Tool in Concert

Image0026-1Tool played the K-ROCK Centre in Kingston on Aug 4th.  The opening act was Tweak Bird – who managed to generate and impressive amount of sound with their 2 primary members (a 3rd joined them for a couple of songs on various ‘odd for a heavy metal band’ instruments: flute, sax).  If you want a sample of what they sounded like check out their MySpace page.

This was the 2nd time I’ve seen Tool in concert, and this was a very different experience than the last.  The 1st show I saw was in Ottawa at the Corel Centre, a much larger venue.  Also, this time we were in general admission (on the floor) vs. in seats.

The K-ROCK Centre has a concert capacity of 6500.  It was clear from the number of empty seats that this was not a sold out show, I’d guess it was somewhere under 6000 people.Image0022-1 On the left is a picture I took before the opening act – it gives you a sense of how small this venue is and how close we were to the stage (this was 3/4 of the way back from the stage).  The general (floor) crowd did get more tightly packed once Tool took the stage, but we ended up standing closer (about 1/2 between the sound board and the stage) and there wasn’t a crazy crush around us.  To be able to see a band like Tool in such a small venue was pretty amazing.

Tweak Bird was LOUD.  Tool was LOUDER.  I was glad to have my earplugs, but don’t get me wrong – I expect a concert like this to be very loud.  Feeling the bassline inside your chest is part of the experience.  Tool put on a great concert.  For more, check out these reviews of the Toronto show.

Offline Maps on a MIDP enable Cell Phone

Sure you can use google maps on your mobile phone, but then you’re paying the potentially large data charges (especially if you live in Canada).  If you’ve got an all you can use data plan, you’re probably holding a G1 or an iPhone and MIDP isn’t interesting (or possible for that matter).  However, if you happen to be like me – you’ve got a highly capable MIDP enabled phone, and no data plan.

Inspired by mimg_2410y pending road trip to Kingston to see Tool, I figured I’d see what it would take to put offline maps on my phone.  It turns out to be pretty easy thanks to OpenStreetMap, JOSM, and Osm2GpsMid.

OpenStreetMap is sort of wikipedia for mapping data, if you haven’t taken a look at it – I’d encourage you to do so.  Some areas haven’t been filled in yet, and that’s an opportunity for you to pitch in an help out.  It is pretty impressive how complete the mapping data is.  I see that there is an oMaps application for the iPhone/iTouch.  I may have to get that the next time I’m travelling.  For the Tool concert, I’m leaving the iTouch at home.

The first step is to get some map data, and the easiest way to do that is to use JOSM – the Java based OpenStreetMap editor.  Locate the area you want to download it will only let you grab a (small) city sized area to edit at a time.  Since I was doing Kingston it fit nicely in the limitations of the editor.  Then simply save the OSM to a file on disk.

Now its time to convert that map data into a MIDP Midlet.  This is done using Osm2GpsMid, excuse the somewhat funky pathing in the command it isn’t necessary if you simply put all the files in the same directory (I didn’t).


java -Xmx1024M -jar ../Osm2GpsMid/Osm2GpsMid-0.5.00.jar ../Maps/kingston.osm

The result will be GpsMid-GpsMid-0.5.00.jad and GpsMid-GpsMid-0.5.00.jar.  Install these on your MIDP enabled phone.

Unfortunately my phone doesn’t have GPS/location services – but the search function works well.  The controls are well done: 1/3 are zoom in/out.  Keys 4/6/8/2 pan the map.  Normal cursor key does fine scrolling.   Search is predictive text style, just start typing away and it will ‘guess’ the street you’re looking for (smart).  More details on the GpsMid site.

Certainly not as cool as the iPhone app(s) – but this is pretty slick for my current cell phone.  Nice to know I’ll have a map in my pocket.