Just a short note on Pinetrail, a very nice tool I used today to test sanitizing GPS log files to correcting the elevation, and remove outliers and idle points. “But GPS is so accurate, do we still need that?” Yes we do, because even nowadays there is still some glitches and quirks due to mobile devices jumping to GSM transmission towers, occasional noisy signals or no signal at all, unknown app errors etc. And cleaning out the idle points also improves the visual representation.
Reason for testing in the first place is Sensing Clues, where the field rangers collect vast amounts of route data with observations and actions when on patrol. This data needs to be interpreted and there it helps to have clean(ed) data. Most probably there are also some additional rules needed but Pinetrail looks like a good starting point, also because it provides a nice report of what it does as you can see in the example above, on one of my running routes I exported from Strava (I really did not start my run with these strange figures).
If you have to clean some dirty GPS data too, head to https://github.com/sosna/pinetrail and give it a try.
Oh, and there is some more interesting news coming in a next post on my work for Sensing Clues. As we try to provide the best technical solutions on the web and mobile for the field rangers in the wildlife parks, this also means we need to be sure everything is up and running the whole time. In order to keep a clear overview on that, we need a proper full stack monitoring tool “from mobile to database”, “from network to Docker container” and everything in between.
So Sensing Clues applied for the New Relic Observability for Good program, and the approval came back almost instantly! A very interesting free program for nonprofits, charities and NGOs (or ANBIs in proper Dutch). Currently installing the first monitoring Agents, more on the results soon.