Ottawa Foodies

If you have one of these new-fangled automotive GPS devices, it probably allows you to enter custom waypoints or points of interest (POI). This can be useful for deciding where to eat. If you create POI entries for all your favourite restaurants the GPS can show you which ones are near your current location.

So how to do this? You need a nifty utility called "GPSBabel": www.gpsbabel.org

You will need Google Earth. And you'll need some way to get a waypoint file into your GPS. If you have a Garmin Nüvi, you need the "POI Loader" app: www.garmin.com

Now, here's what you do...

1. Bring up your profile on this site. We'll use your "Favourite Vendors" list for this example.
2. Launch Google Earth.
3. For each vendor in your favourites list, type its name into the "Find Businesses" box in Google Earth. When the correct entry appears in the results list, right-click it and say "Save to My Places".
4. Under your "My Places" folder, create a new folder called something like "Favourite Vendors".
5. Drag each of the vendors from "My Places" into this new folder.
6. Right-click your folder and choose "Save Place As". Give it a sensible filename and specify KML format (not the default KMZ).
7. Launch GPSBabel, and for "Input Options/Use File", locate your KML file from step 6.
8. For "Input file type" select "Google Earth (Keyhole) Markup Language".
9. Set an appropriate output file name and type for your GPS. (I use "GPX XML" for my Garmin.)
10. Transfer this file to your GPS. (I use the "POI Loader" app for my Garmin.)

I have a separate POI collection for my Favourite restaurants and my "To Try" restaurants. This really streamlines decisions about where to eat. Saves gas too!

P.S. I thought about trying to automate steps 3 through 6 within Ottawa Foodies (it's a little painful to do manually) but there's really no reliable way to do it.

Fresh Foodie - Don't have GPS, but this is a really cool idea for those that do. Please continue to provide techno-savvy ideas, it makes part of belonging to this site so interesting! (and educational)

Thanks for posting this. I bought a Nuvi 350 awhile back and don't know where I'd be without it (literally!)

I haven't dabbled with POIs yet so this is a good excuse for me to start.

I just purchased a Nüvi 260 (on sale for $270 at Best Buy). It's the cheapest unit that speaks street names.

Incidentally, the reason the workflow I outlined works is that the *names* of vendor entries here are all checked against Google's lookup. In other words, when someone adds a new vendor, I ensure that it resolves to a location in Google Maps before I approve it. Sometimes I have to do funny things to it to get this to work, especially with ethnic restaurants and those containing ampersands. I draw the line, however, on the former "Great Wall Restaurant" which Google knew as the "Grade Wool Restaurant." LOL ;-)