Sunday, 30 September 2012

Google maps, starred places and the four historical forts in Pretoria

Having stayed in Pretoria for over ten years, I thought it would be interesting to  make my children aware of some of the military history of the city going back to the time of the Anglo-Boer War. I tried to find the exact location of the four famous forts in Pretoria and then use the GPS feature on an Android phone to go and find the places. The fourth fort, Fort Daspoortrand  gave me the most problems when I had to repeatedly cross the N4 Bakwena Highway trying to find my way through Gerotek, PMP and all the military fences in the area.

When you "star" a place in Google maps, Google tries to locate the place closest to the nearest registered road. As such it moves your place from where you have marked it.
I tried to  put in a place marker for Fort Daspoortrant at-25.73305 , 28.076740 which is near the mountain north of Lotus Gardens. The "Maps" application on an HTC phone (Wildfire) seems to pick up the place marker without problems, but google maps via Firefox running on a Linux Ubuntu machine ignores the heading of the bookmark (Fort Daspoortrant) and locates the old Boer Fort on the Montana side of the Waterberg mountain! It then associates the Fort with Zander Street. This is a sure way to confuse anyone relying on an accurate place-mark to find the old Fort.
If you try and report the problem to Google, it is almost worse than trying to report an electricity problem to the Tshwane municipality: you are sent from site to site without ever finding a suitable place to report the error.
A good wikipedia article about the forts can be found at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretoria_Forts

Saturday, 22 September 2012

Cell Phone Contact Management


For manipulating contacts from an Android phone on Windows, MyPhoneExplorer has some very good features. See:
http://www.avitricks.info/2012/03/whatsapp-pc.html