Update your Garmin maps for free

I live in a rapid growth area of town. That is saying something for living in San Antonio these days. Streets, highway exits, and new routes to old destinations are everywhere except in my 9 month old Garmin Nuvi. Garmin is a business. They are supposed to make money. But it would be neat if they sold their devices at a much cheaper price point because they still gouge your eyes with updates to their maps. AND if you want to go international but you bought the US version, well tough, cuz all you get is the US map. However, these maps are not tough (even for the novice GIS/GPS hobbyist) to create. And because they are really nice people, they post them online!

Last year i had a visit scheduled for Toronto so i was super excited about my new garmin nuvi. I started off my programming career in GIS/GPS 8 years ago but i had never owned by very own traveling GPS device. It was a huge let down when i discovered it didn't have any data North of Niagra Falls though. A few google searches later and i found the Open Street Map community of users who were creating their own maps for anyone to use. They have some some very technical instructions to download all or any part of their map data and merge it with your existing Garmin map on your device.

Doing some research for this post i did find some easier maps to use at GPS TrackLog

Setting up a home computer lab

Switching ISPs from Roadrunner to U-verse, i was puzzled why my personal router wouldn't connect to the network as it had with Roadrunner. But the problem soon dawned on me.

The big honking gray modem att provides is the 'residential gateway' (RS). It IP address is usually gonna be 192.168.1.254. As I suspected, this was the same address that my router was setup at the factory to use. This is a private (or local) address meaning that if you connect to that address then you will be connecting to something (in this case your own gateway) within your own network be it at home or the office and not a some remote server. Script kiddies, you have been warned! Keep in mind, that some models may have a different network IP range like 10.x.x.x or 172.16-31.x.x which i suspect my roadrunner modem had.