King of the Mountains

As if the incomprehensible emails weren’t enough, I’ve now had five or six "people" attempt to add themselves to my instant messaging service. "People" in inverted commas because I’m not aware of any legitimate individuals who use a single digit as a callsign and have addresses like "ktr-jkh8". The stupidity of scammers never ceases to amaze me. If they honestly think I’m going to click "accept" when confronted by an email address I don’t recognise and have had no prior contact with then they really need to grow a brain…

For ages, I had that incredibly rare thing. A spam-proof email address.

I have no idea how I managed this. It could be that I did not use a recognisable name or name of a person, it could be that I wasn’t daft enough to leave my address publicly visible. But now I’m getting spam. Not a deluge, one or two every few days.

The really puzzling part is trying to make sense of the spammer mindset. Do they honestly expect people to respond to messages with subject lines that appear to have been filled in by opening a dictionary at random? 

If you want to be a mildy successful con artist, at least learn the language. What part of the world these bizarre messages hail from is anyones’ guess, however they have clearly yet to learn that merely spouting random English words will not get you much in the way of response from the West.   

As Garmin seem less than enthusiastic about offering a USB charge/data cable for the otherwise excellent Foretrex 201, I decided to do something about this. Note that this device will probably void your guarantee and I take no responsibility for any adverse effects. It worked for me however!

Firstly, obtain your parts. A cheap USB A-B device cable and a 0.7mm/2.5mm DC power plug (I bought mine from Maplin - their code L43AY). Cut the "B" end off the USB lead and strip about 1cm of the outer insulation from the now bare wire. You’ll find four wires wrapped in foil and wire shielding.

Pull the shielding away and separate the wires. Two of these are 5v power, the other two are for data transfer. Cut the data wires and shielding away, then bare the ends of the live and neutral wires. In my cable these followed conventional wiring colours with the live being red and the neutral black. If in doubt, check with a multimeter. Pinouts for USB plugs can be found in many places on the internet.

Before you go any further, dismantle the new plug and slide the housing over the cable. Make absolutely sure that this has been done before soldering the new plug in place, as failure to do so can lead to scorched fingers, swearing, and more work than you really need to do.

The Garmin charging cradle is wired so that the centre contact of the plug is the live, and the barrel neutral. Solder the wires in place - red to the terminal in the centre, black to the terminal at the edge. Then bend the cable grip "horns" to clamp the wires in place. Note that they won’t go around the outer insulation! After checking that there is no chance of a short circuit, screw the housing onto the plug and give it a test.

All done. You can now leave that bulky mains adaptor at home and charge your GPS from your laptop (admittedly you will need the laptop power supply, but you still have one less adaptor to lug about). This should also work with those devices that plug into a car cigar lighter socket and provide a USB socket for charging MP3 players.