GPSLog Labs Blog

HTTPS!

Mon, 31 Dec 2018 01:00:00 GMT

GPSLog Labs is now using HTTPS!

Thanks to Let's Encrypt we were finally able to upgrade the site to improve your security and privacy.

Unfortunately, some third-party services we were using aren't using HTTPS yet so they've had to be disabled. In particular:

The pop-up feedback form can no longer be used, please visit the feedback page directly.
The cycles map layer is also unfortunately not available over HTTPS and has been removed.

If you notice anything that isn't working properly, please contact tom@gpsloglabs.com.

Persona Shutdown November 2016 [completed]

Mon, 25 Apr 2016 02:00:00 GMT

Update: Mozilla Persona support has been removed. If you haven't associated an alternate login method with your account, please contact tom@gpsloglabs.com.

The Mozilla Persona project has indicated that they are going to be shutting down in November 2016.

In preparation GPSLog Labs will no longer allow new accounts to be created using a Persona login.

If you login using Persona you will be advised to add alternative log in details to your account.

As with previous OpenID changes, if you have any difficulties (e.g. you see a new empty account after logging in), please contact tom@gpsloglabs.com and I'll fix it up.

Updates for August 25th

Tue, 25 Aug 2015 02:00:00 GMT

Yet another long gap between posts, but there have been lots of updates to GPSLog Labs in the interim. Here's a brief summary:

Keyboard shortcuts
- f View fullscreen maps/graphs
- q Open quickfind
- escape Close full screen map/graphs and quickfind popup
The keyboard shortcuts make all these features much more useful as they're only a keypress away.

A neat feature is if there is more than one possible graph/map to view in fullscreen, an overlay is added and you can press a number to select the one you're after.
Tag, place and route lifetimes

A new visualisation attempts to indicate which tags, places and routes are still in use and those that are "retired".

This information is also used to hide suggestions for tags and places you are probably no longer using and gray out the retired tags from the add tag popup and quick find popup.
Distance and speed vs heading graphs

These graphs have been made prettier and easier to read with the graph now rendered as a circle with ticks for the compass points.
I've added axis labels to all the graphs, which will make all the grade 6 maths teachers out there happy, as well as making the graphs much easier to understand.
The goal, route and split detail trend graphs tabs have speed and heart rate histograms on them too now, which helps spot the trends better at a glance.
The embedded graphs you can share on your own sites now support speed and heart rate zones backgrounds as options, and also let you specify the text for the axis labels.
Laps graph

There's a new Laps tab on route split detail page that compares performance across sessions on activities with multiple laps, e.g. hill intervals or laps around an oval.

Merging Routes

Mon, 25 May 2015 03:00:00 GMT

Routes have always been between two different places. If you wanted to compare activity along similar routes between nearby places, you had to create checkpoints to generate splits along the common sections.

I've now changed it so that a route can start and stop at one or more places.

This is particularly useful if you have a commute and have moved house or jobs. It works best if the places are still fairly close together. If they're not, then the altitude profiles, distances etc. are not likely to be as useful, but it depends on what you are trying to compare.

There are two ways to create these new routes:

When selecting a route, choose Show routes for all places from the Change filter dropdown.
If you have had to create multiple routes already and now you want to combine them, you can select Merge Routes from the Routes page:

Or from the bottom of Route detail page:

That will open the Merge Routes page which allows you to select the two routes you want to merge.

This will combine the activities and stats for the two routes.

The new route detail page will list all the start and end places:

Markers for all the from/to places will be shown on the map:

Route stats will be broken down by the pairs of start/stop places used by the activity:

Best effort comparisons will be available for the matching start/stop places and also all the activity in the Route:

Should you need to reverse this process, you'll need to recreate the second route and select it for all the activity it applies to.

Once a start/stop place is no longer used on a route, you can remove it from the edit route page:

Updates for May 25th

Mon, 25 May 2015 02:00:00 GMT

As noted earlier, now that GPSLog Labs has been migrated to the new server and updated to newer library versions, there has finally been some time to add new features:

Sharing Routes between multiple places.

See the next post on Merging Routes for details.
View best efforts in crossfilter.

Tag crossfilters have got a bit more powerful and can now include best effort times.

For example, to answer questions such as "what's the fastest I've run 1km when doing long runs?", select the distance from the Best Efforts Splits filter:

This will add Split Duration and Split Average Speed/Pace graphs to the dashboard and table:

You can filter using the charts to select just "long" runs and "fast" best efforts:
Suggested edits.

This one is a little experimental and I'll be refining it I'm sure. The idea is that GPSLog Labs will remember the edits you make to your uploaded activity (fixing unmatched places, assigning routes and tags) and speed up the editing process the next time by providing suggestions where it can.

When GPSLog Labs can provide a suggested edit, a button will be displayed next to the activity:

Selecting an option from the suggested edits will apply updates to the tags, route and start/stop places as necessary.
Activity feed projections iCal feed.

The Activity Feed on the home page displays dates you're projected to hit various milestones (distances, counts and goals) but it's pretty easy to overlook something interesting that's coming up.

Now there's an iCal feed url you can add into your calendar to see these projections on your phone or somewhere else convenient so you can get a little kick of motivation when you're about to pass the milestone.

Updates for March 29th

Sun, 29 Mar 2015 01:00:00 GMT

GPSLog Labs is now running on a new server - hopefully you'll notice it's faster!

In the process, the code has been significantly updated to take advantage of improved capabilities available in the new versions of the libraries it uses. (I made approximately 240 commits over the last 5 months!)

That took way longer than I'd hoped, but now that is done I'll have some time to add some new features so there should be more frequent updates again.

OpenID Changes

The most significant change was to support a new OpenID version as Google is switching off the basic OpenID support that GPSLog Labs had used until now.

Unfortunately, because of this change it's possible your account may not be associated correctly when you first log in and you may see a new empty account.

You will not have lost any data permanently but will need to contact tom@gpsloglabs.com to have the issue corrected.

If you notice any other issues after the update, please let me know.

[Completed] Scheduled Maintenance 27-Mar-2015 10:00 UTC

Tue, 17 Mar 2015 01:00:00 GMT

Update: The maintenance has been completed, 28th March 2015 11:00 UTC.

The GPSLog Labs server will be down for maintenance between Friday 27th March 10:00 UTC and Sunday 27th March 13:00 UTC, approximately.

The site will be unavailable while this occurs, sorry for any inconvenience this may cause.

Updates for September 26th

Fri, 26 Sep 2014 10:00:00 GMT

It's been a long time since I've updated the blog, but that doesn't mean nothing has been going on. Here are a few recent updates to GPSLog Labs:

Colour scheme update — hopefully this one is pretty obvious. Let me know if you find any remnants of the old colours or aspects of the new scheme that aren't working.
Tag crossfilter tab — This one is pretty neat. It uses the crossfilter library to provide an interactive exploration of the activity for a tag.

You can click or drag a range of values on any of the charts and it will drill down and update all of the other charts and histograms immediately based on the new selection.

Filters are available for many parameters, such as the date and time of the activity, the places and routes involved.

This is a great way to answer a bunch of questions about your activity, such as:
- when was the last time I ran route X faster than 5:00 min/km?
- how many times have I run more than 30km?
- what routes do I ride on weekends?
The table at the bottom of the page shows the details of the selected activity and you can click through from there to the activity detail pages.

The columns can be switched on and off too, which is handy if you've filtered in such a way that the places or routes are not interesting and just wasting space.

There are still a few rough edges, so expect some improvements to this page as time goes on and it will be available in other areas of the site soon too.
Place altitude profile tab — a semi-useful visualiation of the altitude profiles of routes to/from each place.

The place is at the 0km point, incoming routes are to the left, outgoing to the right.
Added grid divisions to box whisker plots to help judge scale (15 sec increments for pace, 2.5 km/mile per hour for speed, 5 bpm for heart rate).
Changed goal tasks iCal file to output all day events. This is a bit less convenient in the calendar, but it avoids timezone problems.
The "At place" flag on a segment can be overridden if necessary. Click on the "At Place (x)" and click "Override and treat as a commute".
Fixed auto-detect timezone button and a bunch of other little bugs.

Updates for December 17th

Tue, 17 Dec 2013 01:00:00 GMT

Some recent updates to GPSLog Labs, just in time for Christmas:

GPSLog Labs now has a public catalog of shared logs.

By zooming in on a region of the world map, you can see activity other users have shared and use it to plan your runs, rides and hikes.

You can still choose to keep your activity entirely private, or share it with a specific group of people, but if you want to include your activity in the catalog, simply go to your shared content, edit the activity you wish to share, and tick the "Include in Public Catalog" checkbox.
You can also now download shared activity as a GPX file which can then be loaded onto your device for navigation when you're out and about.
The route detail, route split detail and selection detail pages are now using a layout with a panel on the right hand side to better use the space on wider screens.
Editing notes in the side panels now saves your changes without reloading the page.
Also, I fixed a bunch of issues unfortunately introduced by the new dynamically loaded tabs. Apologies if you noticed things that weren't working properly for a while, and if you have any other issues, please let me know.

Updates for November 10th

Sun, 10 Nov 2013 01:00:00 GMT

Some recent updates to GPSLog Labs:

When filtering a log file using a time or position filter, you can now copy nearby waypoints, rather than drawing the line each time.

Once you zoom into/select the area to be filtered, click the "Search for nearby waypoints" button.

This will list all the nearby waypoints and you can click on them to copy them into your filter.

This search uses not only waypoints you've created before, but also those created by all the other GPSLog Labs users, so you can take advantage of paths others have marked and save yourself some effort.
New forward vs reverse performance chart for routes.

This graph compares the forward speed with the reverse speed for any days where you go in both directions on the route. E.g. a commute to and from work.

The shading on the graph represents the 25th—75th percentile of the data, the red line indicates the median speed.

Points in the bottom-right represent fast forward direction with a slow log in the reverse direction, while the points in the top-left are slow forward and fast reverse. (Note, this description is flipped for pace formats.)
Download places as waypoints in a GPX file that you can load into your GPS to assist with navigation and route planning.

The Places page has a new "Download" menu that lets you generate a GPX file containing waypoints for each of the places you have created.

You can choose to get all your places, just the active places or just your favourites.

This menu also incorporates the CSV download option which will get all your place information into a spreadsheet.
Downloaded zip files now have modified dates of the files set to the current date/time.
The tabs on various pages around the site now load dynamically, so you'll notice a little "Loading..." message after the tab is clicked. You can then quickly switch between the tabs without waiting for the whole page to load again. This is very handy when comparing the heart rate graph with the altitude profile or speed graphs, for example.
And lastly, a little tip:

Set a place radius to 1m to prevent it being used to cut activity without having to mark it as inactive. This will still allow you to select the place as a start/end point manually.

This can be handy if you pass by a place on a regular commute and don't want to have to remove the stop from your processed activity.