In reply to:


That way for those of us outside the US who cannot find a MapsonXXX equivalent we can record/create routes we use simply and easily.

Well you could use google and find in a couple of seconds programs like
www.gartrip.de and http://home.t-online.de/home/gpsinfo/ which allow you to create tracks and routes based on digitized topographic maps by tracing the track you want to follow.

If you're from england and rather not use those german programs, www.gpsu.co.uk does similar stuff.



Yes, I realise all this, but my point is that not everyone has the same common "solution" for all countries, so there will be a lot of "home-brew" type setups out there, therefore allowing the building of routes by "driving them" is always useful.

Personally, I'm using TUMONZ (The Ultimate Map of New Zealand) which is all 100% vector based maps with route information & planning and it only costs $100 (about $USD50) and allows uploading/downloading routes/waypoints to Garmin & Magellan GPS units.
It also comes with "aerial photographs which you can "drape" over your map to allow you to merge actual aerial photos the landscape with the topography - see the opening screenshot on the TUMONZ website for an example.

Considering the price this is pretty amazing stuff.

But, you need a Windows PC to run it, and its not much use to anyone outside of New Zealand (unless you're Mark Lord and want to plan your next mountain expedition).

In reply to:



Writing to the disk is writing to the disk, whether you use a filesystem or write the blocks yourself. i.e. you could create a single large file without holes in any given filesystem and as long as it doesn't change it size the access is equivalent to writing to a raw device.

However, it is simply the actual process of writing bits to the disk that is dangerous. I believe some recent IBM 3.5" IDE drive was renowned for writing even when the power was cut so it would scribble over low level data between the tracks. This basically turned the disks into a brick that could be shipped back to the factory



I agree, but my idea is only bringing up something that Mark Lord mentioned a long time ago when some form of permanent rw storage was mentioned.

While Network Attached storage sounds really useful, I am not sure of the life span of any hard disks in a mobile environment when kept powered up all the time.

Ideally we need a solution that uses solid state [flash] RAM - something like one of those USB Flash based "disk drives" would be exactly right -
but you would need a USB **master** device between that and the Empeg (This is required [to act as a master device and go-between between the USB slavees to "route/mirror" all copy data requests from empeg (on USB Slave Port A) to USB data device (on USB Slave port B) and/or "route" read requests from Empeg on Slave USB A to data device on USB slave B.)

In addition we'd need a way to get the USB ports to dock/undock reliably/easily in the car - something which could be done if there was a USB master device in a small portable chip - and thats a bit of a tall order right now.

Either that or we come up with a simple solution that can "clip" onto the rear of the Empeg and plugs into the USB port on the back and "fills up"/uses the space between the rear of the Empeg and the rear of the sled - preferably something that could take a USB flash device.
I'm thinking something sized and designed like the Nomad Muvo here [but again thats only a USB slave device].