Not much to report today. I stopped by Play Coffee with a friend and added some POI tags while we were in line. There’s always something to map if you have a little downtime!

I also discovered that the building Cali Tacos is in has no POIs to speak of, so I’ll focus on adding those next, along with ever more fire hydrants. (I found some possibly interesting information about Van Deventer fire hydrants, but I’m not sure it’s enough to answer the question firehydrant.org posed about whether or not it was a company or just a licensed design.) In fact, the geometry on the map just shows one singular building, which is true, but there are individual units for each business. I think it makes sense to break them up, I just need to make sure I’m doing it correctly.

Using a phone running Android OS as a data collector for an RTK-enabled GNSS receiver, I ran into a fairly small but annoying inconvenience with getting data files from it on a Windows machine.

On Windows, you can’t mount a phone’s file system as an actual removable drive (don’t confuse that with seeing its file system in the File Explorer), so automating it with built-in command-line file tools isn’t an option. File paths to the data folders of Android apps are ridiculously long, so traversing them manually is another hassle.

However, it’s still possible to do that using the Android Debug Bridge tool, a part of the SDK Platform Tools.

After installing SDK Platform Tools, you should be able to use the adb command in PowerShell or classic Command Prompt batch files.

Knowing the full path to a folder where your data collector app (LocusGIS, SW Maps, etc.) stores files you need to download regularly, you can get a list of that folder’s contents by calling adb shell ls command with the full path to that folder as a parameter.

Downloading a file is as easy as calling adb pull with the full path to the file you want to download. This process can be made more or less interactive if you create a script that lists all the folder contents, then prompts you for a name, and then downloads the file by the name you entered. The target file name or path can also be specified as another parameter. It’s even easier if the data collector app uses the same filename every time, or if you save it under the same name.

For all that to work, you’d have to enable USB debugging on your mobile device and grant permission for the Windows machine to use it when you first attempt to utilize the adb. However, it would save you the hassle of switching on the File Transfer mode every time you want to access the phone’s file system.

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German version

Initial Situation

In the forum, a user reports that a road on Crete is not being displayed completely. It quickly becomes clear that the German style is being used for rendering.

Openstreetmap.de operates two tile servers. On both of them, the tiles are faulty. It would be quite a coincidence if this were a hardware issue or a specific data import problem. Therefore, it is very likely that the cause lies within the German style itself.

The only difference between the two road segments is that the visible part contains one additional tag, namely maxspeed:

• way/1340290929
• way/1340291113

First Attempt

In the first attempt, I added a tag, namely the surface surface, to the missing segment and forced the German server to re-render the tiles. As a result, the previously missing part of the road appeared. This brought me one step closer, but it is not a solution yet.

Second Attempt

The German style is based on the standard openstreetmap-carto style, which is used on openstreetmap.org for OpenStreetMap maps. It adopts the basic rendering but selectively modifies certain elements to make them more readable for Germans.

I was curious whether the missing road segments were also absent in the original style. Therefore, I rendered them using that style. For this, I used render_single_tile.py and retrieved the necessary information by right-clicking on the corresponding tile at https://tile.openstreetmap.de.

First, I rendered with the German style, where – as expected – the road section was missing:

render_single_tile.py --zxy 17 74577 51762 --stylefile openstreetmap-carto-de/osm-de.xml --outputfile site/rendersinglefile/1.png

Then with the original style, where the rendered tile was also incomplete:

render_single_tile.py --zxy 17 74577 51762 --stylefile openstreetmap-carto/mapnik.xml --outputfile site/rendersinglefile/3.png

From my understanding, this made it clear that the error already occurs when importing the OSM data into the database.

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Hello, guys. I am trying to map a neighborhood of León, in Spain. I need a lot of help, as there are plenty of buildings not mapped or not mapped correctly, so any help would be much appreciated. This is the note where you can see the area that I am working on right now. osm.org/note/5052568#map=15/42.59710/-5.56225&layers=N

It was another beautiful, sunny day in Orange. I’m toying with the idea of conjuring up some sort of regular Saturday mapping activity, solely so I can use the word “Mapurday”, even though I’ve mapped at least one thing every day for the last five days. I’m sure that will slow down a bit once I re-balance the other parts of my life (although I did add a bench in Riverside last night while waiting for a friend to arrive; it doesn’t take much to contribute!). I’m not sure if it will be just for myself, or I want to try to get other local mappers involved.

It was a productive day! My goal was to add more fire hydrants along Palmyra, and to catch one I had somehow missed along Almond. I can’t say it’s representative, but so far, the manufacturers have all been one of:

• Rich Valve Co. (or Rich Manufacturing Company; I’ve seen both and other variations in newspaper clippings)
• M. Greenberg’s Sons
• Long Beach Iron Works
• Clow (Valve Company)

There’s also one Van Deventer, which firehydrants.org says could be a company, but it could also just be a fire hydrant produced under license. I plan to do a little newspaper digging to see if I can learn more.

Orange Street Barbershop

I added the Orange Street Barbershop to the map. I’ve been correcting several missing or otherwise out-of-date business POIs in addition to my quixotic hydrant mapping quest. The previous salon for 120 S Orange St was long since closed, so I updated it for the new business. I also noticed that the entire building was marked as the salon (now barbershop). I switched this to an individual node because the Orange Street Barbershop is technically suite B; there’s a suite A with doors set a bit back into a covered part of the building, but they don’t seem to be for anything useful.

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YIPPIEEEEEEEEEE! I’m already at 65 edits! This is the start of something very great and beautiful. Speaking of great and beautiful, I love my girlfriend so much!

Flickr is how I learned about Open Street Map. They use OSM data for their maps. Places that haven’t been worked on can only be found via coordinates. It’s frustrating.

Parma, Ohio, for example could use some love and attention.

About a week ago, vandals began defacing the map in South Korea. Over the course of that week, I rolled back hundreds of changes, and with the help of the site’s moderators, I banned over 50 malicious accounts.

In fact, the problem arose not even a week ago, but about a month ago. Back then, South Korean media reported that one account had allegedly leaked the locations of all the country’s military bases to the public on Openstreetmap. (link)

Even then, this false media claim struck me as disgusting, but it didn’t cause any major problems. Almost simultaneously, another Korean media report about Openstreetmap appeared: allegedly, an error in the domestic mapping services NaverMap and KakaoMap displaying a river in North Korea was linked to Openstreetmap’s activities: (link)

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how do i change nodes on points

Sometimes some maps are more satisfying than others. What I did on “Cho-do” (“초도”) — Cho island — is definitely one of them!

Cho-do in North Korea is one of the largest islands in the country, and today we can proudly say that it is fully mapped on OpenStreetMap!

In this diary, I explain the small steps I had to take to achieve what I consider to be — among the various places I have mapped — the most complete area !

See it directly on OpenStreetMap!

Why an island?

I have been able to map various locations in North Korea (and a few other places), but there are few areas that are as well-defined as islands — which are not too large either — to map completely.

The idea of doing an island came to me from a contributor, @Lyokoï, who plans to map at least one island in every country/territory in the world. I love the idea, but if I were to take on this kind of project, it would be to map all the islands of North Korea 🤭!

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I worked a little more on Crowder. It may be a small town compared to my home town but it takes a lot more concentration. I don’t know the area and there isn’t as much on line information meaning I have to be slow and deliberate with how I map. I want to do right by Crowder.

I worked on two city blocks.

The #30DayMapChallenge is a social media event where map enthusiasts create daily maps based on a set theme throughout November. You can find more details on the website 30daymapchallenge.com.

After observing the challenge for many years, I participated for the first time in 2025.

I wanted to use the challenge to better understand fundamental mapping concepts. It wasn’t primarily about creating especially beautiful or eye-catching maps. Rather, I am working on a small project where I create vector tiles for small areas—mostly using free software and open formats like Shortbread and Versatiles. At the same time, I am increasingly experimenting with self-created vector tiles and custom styles. So far, I have used Tilekiln or Tilemaker for the tiles, and for styling, I used Glug for the first time. Since I also enjoy Leaflet, I include a Leaflet map wherever it fits better.

In this article, I want to experiment with my designs and work on questions that are still open in my to-do list, or simply try out something new.

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• Map yerragattu area first
• followed by bheemaram
• move towards KU X Road
• move towards public garden

It’s relatively common for various national and regional GNSS correction networks to be referenced in a CRS other than WGS84 used in OpenStreetMap. The reason for this practice is that countries and regions use their own coordinate systems, most suitable for the territory they cover.

For example, the Oregon Real-Time GNSS Network (USA) uses NAD83 (2011) epoch 2010.00, according to their website.

It means that any RTK measurement taken while receiving NTRIP correction data from such a network will be referenced to the same CRS. That applies directly to the NMEA data output of the receiver, despite it normally being implied to be in WGS84. The majority of receivers available to amateurs are incapable of being configured to be aware of that. (The only sub-$1k receiver core I’m aware of that can “understand” the NTRIP CRS defined manually is Septentrio Mosaic.)

So, unless you perform a transformation from said CRS to WGS84, your tracks are going to be completely unsuitable for submission into the OSM public tracks database.

However, there’s a pretty straightforward way to perform the required transformation. Unfortunately, it’s “a little” longer than ideal for the exact same reason that NMEA data is implied to be in WGS84, so feeding a NMEA log directly may result in the reader ignoring the input CRS override.

The key tool for this is, coincidentally, JOSM. Here’s the workflow that functions just fine in my experience:

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I look after a map style that’s designed to show rural pedestrian-focused information (hiking routes etc.). It natively supports zoom levels up to raster 24 and vector 26 (which is equivalent to raster 27), which means that small things like fire hydrants and manholes can be shown at high zooms without getting in the way of everything else. The raster and vector versions differ slightly, partly for technological restrictions (finding out “which routes this guidepost is part of” is easier on vector than raster).

A big question, though, is how do I find out what is missing? The styles evolved from an overlay for the the OSM Carto raster style in 2014 and have been added to ever since. However, the things that people map in OSM has increased a lot in that time. Sometimes I spot something obvious that’s missing, but how do I make sure that I haven’t ignored some relatively high-usage and important tag?

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As usual, I don’t remember what site got me interested in the topic, but here we are anyways.

What are mounting blocks?

They are raised platforms or sometimes even flights of several steps used to mount and dismount horses, carriages, and I believe maybe also to load luggage onto the roof of a carriage. This helps short people or people with other physical restrictions (back in the day women trying to ride their horses side saddle in dresses) to enjoy horse riding. In the UK, for example, they are protected structures. In Ireland, they are not, and I have not searched further than that.

• Wikimedia category for mounting blocks in England
• Wikimedia category for mounting blocks in Scotland
• Wikimedia category for mounting blocks in Wales
• Wikimedia category for mounting blocks in Ireland
• Wikimedia category for mounting blocks

Where can I find mounting blocks?

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Did my first edits