Sunday, March 29, 2009

Using GPS (Karachi Maps) On My N-79



I don't understand why Nokia does not includes Pakistan in it's official map releases? (routable version) Hello a humble request to Nokia Pakistan people, apart from all the marketing and nice working you people are upto, Kindly get us a place in Nokia Maps, N-Gage and other places, It hurt to see India there but us Pakistani's being ignored.


So coming back to the topic, I recently got myself a N-79 and like many other smart phones out there it comes with a built in A-GPS (Assisted GPS) to help you navigate. Now i presume more than 80% of the users don't even use this functionality and think its useless, well on face value it is useless since there are no maps available for us to navigate on, but if you willing to spend sometime and do some khuwari (okay i will be a nice person and cover most of the khuwari topics for you) and you can get a working GPS with routable map on your GPS enabled phone.


The credit goes to wonderful people at pkmaps (http://pkmaps.freeforums.org/) a small community who believes in doing the hectic work of plotting a working map to use with Garmin GPS devices. The first action of the day would be to hand over to their forums, register yourself, pass a friendly hello to everyone and download the latest map for your city (As of now Islamabad, Karachi, Lahore are supported).



Second step would be to head up to Garmin's website and get yourself a copy of Garmin XP Mobile ( http://www8.garmin.com/support/collection.jsp?product=010-11034-00 ). Extrect the archieve and copy the content of GMobileCard to the memory card, Once you insert the memory card in your phone (i.e. if you have taken it out, the way i did was to connect my phone in mass media mode) your phone automatically ask you to install the application, if it doesn't than don't need to panic, simply browse to your memory card and install the provided sis file (garminxt.sis) just like you install any other application, so far so good.


Now come the tricky part, the software allows you to connect to external GPS unit via Bluetooth and will only allow you to use the internal GPS once you purchase it ($99) well i didn't purhased it (although this piece of software would be getting my hard earned $, its worth it i believe) so i had to rely to other ways which are oftenly frowned upon, Search for a keygen and enter your Unit ID (Once you start Garmin XT, select "Use External GPS", tools, About and it should display you the unit ID) get the key and that should sort things out and you would be able to use the internal GPS.

The map of your city which you downloaded would be named GMAPSUPP.IMG you need to copy this file to your memory card in Garmin folder. Start Garmin and click on map and you should be able to navigate once the GPS connects (if you are indoors it can take some time otherwise go outside and wait for 2-3 minutes till it connects).

One problem i faced was i kept getting Europe map instead of Karachi map (i also installed the base maps along with the simple Garmin application) and a friendly person at pkmaps told me a handy way to sort things out, i went to my phone's GPS data settings and checked my current location, once it locked my position i shooted up Garmin and it was able to pin point my location on the correct map.

As of this blog post the map has2600 points of interest pointed out on the map and more than 14500 roads and the map keeps getting updated very regurarly so do keep checking the forums, again hat's off to PK MAPS people.

Friday, March 6, 2009

All Pakistan Bloggers Meet # 2

Oh well i was a little bit late but that's better than not coming at all i guess? right? ahan! so well we are discussing how us bloggers here in Pakistan can make an impact, and darn people are full of ideas and suggestions, few of the points we discussed



1. Posting images of Pakistan, beautiful places from around the nation to improve the image of our nation.


2. Using good key words to improve google rating.

3. Showing our nation's flag proudly on our blog.

4. Should not have negative attitude towards our nation, If we need to talk about something negative than use it in a language which should not destroy our countries image.

5. Proper tagging of items posted and images posted.

6. Should not be about making money but for the nation.