Nikon D4 + Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 200mm — ¹/800 sec, f/22, ISO 5600 — map & image data — nearby photos
Still Searching
for a Garmin product that doesn't suck
at the Shogunzuka Overlook (将軍塚), Kyoto Japan

I hate to have any negative articles on my blog, much less two in a row, but wow, it's difficult to count how many ways Garmin's products are so much worse than they need to be, from devices designed for the pocket but without a way to lock the buttons from being bumped in pocket, to worse-than-nothing “features” you can't turn off, to memory-card slots buried behind batteries (really? How does one screw up something as simple as a memory card slot? Ask Garmin.), to any number of additional “what on earth are they thinking?” observations.

From hardware to software to support, they have mediocrity covered. It seems apparent that you don't have to bother with common sense or quality when you don't have much competition.

Anyway, this blog post is for the search engines, to help folks with the same problem I had.

In short:

If you formatted your Garmin flash drive on a Mac, and now you get “The update file is corrupted” when using Garmin's WebUpdater, even though you've borrowed a Windows box to redo the format with FAT32, and even placing a new GCD file seems to be ignored... the solution is to format using the method described here.

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 24mm — ¹/500 sec, f/2.8, ISO 360 — map & image data — nearby photos
Bell
at the Nishi Hongwanji Temple (西本願寺), Kyoto Japan

As per that page, I used the “rmpresub” program, but finding the download link is difficult among the waterfall of ads. The download link I eventually got to is this one, but to find it yourself visit http://www.rmprepusb.com/ and then in the left-hand nav select “Latest RMPrepUSB versions + downloads” then scroll down a bit until you see a list. It's the second one.

Find a Windows box and run that program while your unit is plugged in, and adjust the dialog as per the method description. Then unplug the Garmin device and plug it back in, and now you can run WebUpdater.

If this doesn't work, additional help can be found here and here, but not here.

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 45mm — ¹/100 sec, f/2.8, ISO 3200 — map & image data — nearby photos
Temple Bridge at Dusk
at the Chion'in Temple (知恩院), Kyoto Japan

Garmin just sucks so bad. They advertise their products as working with Mac, but they can't handle being reformatted on a Mac, as if they don't truly understand how to work with flash memory as a disk. (It's not “as if”, it's pretty clear that they don't.)

A web search shows an ocean of folks suffering this same problem, across a wide variety of Garmin products. Yet, when I contact Garmin to ask how to fix it, they don't know what to do. At first they sent me a Windows executable to run, and when I told them that hello, I'm on a Mac, they sent me a “you need a Windows machine” reply.

I borrowed multiple Windows machines and tried their procedure, but it simply didn't work. Determined not to reward them with an $80 fee to fix a problem that arose from their ineptitude, I continued digging until I found the must-reformat-in-this-special-way procedure linked above.

If Garmin had the slightest clue, the unit would do it itself the moment it discovered that the internal format wasn't to its liking. Or, at least, Garmin's fix-it script would do that. Or, at least, Garmin would have seen the multitude of folks running into this problem and have figured out the same procedure I found. But no, they're just idiots.

I hate Garmin's inept design, but I haven't found any other location logger that does what I want (1Hz logging for 12+hours, and a display that clearly shows the time and the current accuracy). Sigh.

Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24mm f/1.4 — ¹/800 sec, f/1.4, ISO 100 — map & image data — nearby photos
Backyard
at the Seifuso Villa (清風荘), Kyoto Japan