Sometimes I see blog posts where the writer hasn’t posted for a while and they talk about the why’s and wherefore’s. I’m not going to do that.

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I have a Garmin Instinct 2. The feature set is fantastic but I’m well aware I don’t use some of them as much as I anticipated. I make use of the compass, altimeter, climb features and GPS tracking the most frequently. Stuff for hiking more than those features for running.

Recently, Garmin introduced Connect Plus. Extra features behind a paywall. Is this the beginning of enshittification? Will free features slowly disappear behind the wall? Fair enough on one level that Garmin starts to charge for what is a pretty good platform that up until now has been free. But what if my data starts to become less accessible? That is a problem.

Last year I bought a second-hand Garmin Etrex 30x. In light of the above I’ve been thinking that should I get to a point where I no longer want to, or can’t, rely on Garmin Connect, I have tracking data from the Etrex freely available to me, without it being mediated through someone else’s platform.

Just recently I’ve dusted of my Python gloves to see if I can extract data from the Etrex’s .gpx track files. Of course I can. There are a couple of modules available to manipulate gpx data. I’ve been using gpxpy and it’s pretty straightforward to extract all sorts of useful data. And because .gpx files are human readable anyway, at a push I could look through the file to find some of the data manually.

Which leads me onto the other thing I’ve noticed about Garmin. Some of their newer handheld units are now using .fit files. I have no experience of these but apparently they are encoded, if that’s the right term. Not human readable. I believe they can hold a lot more in terms of health data but is this just another step towards limiting user’s ready access to their own data?

I bought the original yellow Etrex nearly 25 years ago. It’s very basic but it still works just fine. The Etrex 30x has more features and allows me to move files between the unit and a computer, albeit with a cable. I hope in another 25 years both units will still work (assuming GPS will still be a functioning and freely available system) and my own data will still be freely accessible.