Yesterday arrived my GPS receiver, an Acer v200 Travel Companion, which I bought through eBay. On the evening, I read the manual and walked around some streets near my place, logging my track.

Today, I found out that in order to convert my trace (saved in a .dat file) to GPX format I had to use the very latest version of GPSBabel (1.3.5, released just three days ago -- wow! I've been lucky). It's not in Debian yet, but it compiled without any hassle :-)

First opening of JOSM was somewhat frustrating, but PerroVerd was very helpful, explaining me the basics. In no time I was creating objects and labelling them. Just a while ago, I submitted my first upload.

Not a lot of chance to map new areas this weekend, but I did mange to grab track logs of my journey from Swansea to Witney and back, as well as a trip to Kingston Bagpuize which has resulted in one new road (Rectory Lane) being added, but there is more of it that I didn't manage to get a track log for, so someone else will have to finish that off.

Yesterday evening I wondered through Gelli Hir Wood with the aid of the official (so far as I can tell) map from the Welsh Wildlife web site. It seems that its not very accurate though as some of the paths seem to have moved since it was produced. There are still several more to investigate, so I'll go back again at some point and finish that off.

I also took a look around Mill Wood and found various interesting items to map there as well. Again I need to go back at a later date and map the remaining paths of which there seem to be a number.

Some new ways and tracks.

-knottytom

Added:
*) Bebenburgstrasse
*) Nell-Breuning-Strasse
*) Von-Hirschberg-Strasse
*) Martinskirche (and ways around)
*) Am Schiessanger

-knottytom

Went for a longish bike ride today and on the way took in the village of Little Thetford, just west of the River Cam between Cambridge and Ely. Though only small, it is significantly the only settlement along the A10 not mapped until now between the two cities, which means we now have complete mapping all the way from Saffron Walden in the south to Littleport in the north (a distance of some 65km) and from Melbourn and Papworth in the west to Newmarket in the east (some 45km, though it narrows down a lot at the northern end).

On the other side of the river, after following the already mapped NCN11 from Ely to Wicken, added the fen drove road between Wicken and Swaffham Prior via the little village of Upware also completes a nice big section - I had already plotted this road approximately from NPE (and it wasn't far off), but I had no detail for Upware itself - not least the Five Miles From Anywhere pub on the riverbank where a pint of Guiness went down a treat on this beautifully warm and sunny day.

Found deleted Roundabouts in the Area i was mapping exclusively for the last weeks. After i put them in again i found more bogus edits tonight. Foot/Cycle/Waterways which are definitly not there. Footways without any connection although i know there is one etc.

The user seems to just map from memory and using potlatch. He is not really carful doing edits and i already tidied up a bit by deleting points and ways without any tags and connections etc.

Now i'd like to contact that user but there seem to not be any standard way to map a username to an e-mail address

... and the area around it.

-knottytom

Gaiganz, Ermreus, Regensberg and Rangen.

-knottytom

Lots of new streets, Sportinsel, cementaries, Wiesent, footways,
railway and tracks.

-knottytom

Winter is over. Tracks start to get dry. Time
to tag them...

-knottytom

I tried to map some of the footpaths in Vleuterweide today using Trackr! (www.trackr.nl, www.trackr.eu) on my mobile phone. While this is generally fine when mapping roads by car, it seems this is not accurate enough (and with enough track points) for small scale footpaths in urban area's. I will need to walk the same track agiain, but now with my Garmin GPSMAP 60C. Oh well...

* All tram lines and tram stops.
* All of the touristic gnome statues.
* Cycle ways and footpaths.
* Some roads around Stary Miasto. Bounds would be approx ulicy Długa, Legnicka, Poznańska, Nowy Świat.
* Any bus stop that I see.

My aim is to make the map useful for non-drivers.

I was wondering who is actively mapping nearby. There are quite a few roads and features laid down in Wrocław.

Here is a script for zsh that finds out. Just copy and paste into your terminal:

OSM_DATA=$(date +wrocław-%Y%m%d.osm)
WROC_BBOX="17.003574,51.090046,17.074814,51.124536"

wget osm.org/api/0.5/map\?bbox=$WROC_BBOX -O $OSM_DATA

# IFS variable must be set to a newline character.
# This is why the quoted string continues over the line.
IFS="
"

for person in $(grep user= $OSM_DATA | sed 's/.*user="\([^"]*\)".*/\1/g' | sort -u)
do
echo $person "\t" `grep user= $OSM_DATA | grep $person | wc -l`
done

And the results for today are:

Adrian Siemieniak 68
Bart Vanhauwaert 8
Jan Górski 2282
luk vanhauwaert 34
Marc Schütz 1
pavel 33
Slawek Janukowicz 620
xjr 4

Put in a pre-order for a Genie GT-31 a week ago. Seems like Locosys have slipped a week on shipping the units. They are due to arrive on 13th of May. Tiels from StorageDepot has been very helpful with my order. I can't wait to get cracking on OSM. It's also only about a month before I'm due to leave for Bike Tour 2008, so I don't have much time. Can't wait!!!

Jetzt hat doch tatsächlich jemand beim Vervollständigen der B311 in Mengen, das Teilstück zwischen Krauchenwies und Mengen gelöscht.
Mit Podlatch kann man das alte Teilstück nicht zurückholen. Geht das mit JOSM? Muß ich wohl doch das Teil endlich installieren und mir das Manual reinziehen.

Cycled NCN_20 over the weekend. The GPS is still playing up and I missed some big chunks, but fortunately they were all on bits already mapped. I think the route is now complete except for through Brighton and through Crawley, where the signs are very poor and non-existent, respectively! :(

I just noticed I copmleted the northern half of my home village today. Ok, I got all streets, there are still some plenty POIs missing. And southern half is half-mapped ;)

Not bad, for just one week. Not bad, for that there was just one street (and that even was wrong*) here before I started...

---

*) I wonder how someone managed to tag 5km of L598 as B535.

Two comments from an hour-and-a-half's mapping this balmy May evening:

"'Scuse me! 'Scuse me!" - angelic little cherub.
"Hello?" - me.
"He" (pointing to second angelic little cherub) "says my ass is really fat. Is it?"
"Errrrrrr"

(On railway phone) "Oh, hi, yeah, this is the duty crossing keeper at Clay Mills. Hi. We've had a suicidal male reported. No, I've not seen him anywhere. I've got two police trapped the other side of the crossing. No, no sign of him. It was his family phoned up, said he might be heading this way. Ok, well I reckon we just lift the restriction."

Ah, Burton. There's nowhere like it. Apart from perhaps a big steaming pile of shit next to a river somewhere.

Rupesin sit sahailemaan Hämptonin pyöräteitä kun tuossa tuli käytyä Voudissa yhdellä. Kai näistä pitäsi pitää jotain kirjaa, mitä on fillaroitu ja mitä ei. Ehkä kaupunginosa kerrallaan pyöräteiden etsintä voisi myös palkita.

Lienee turhaa, mutta tulin käyttäneeksi surface -tagia myös pyöräteihin, koska niitäkin näyttää vielä olevan päällystämättöminä.

After a 64km bike ride at the weekend, trying to find somewhere new near my home to map, the sum total of my efforts is about 2km of fresh tracks, and a few new points of interest. I think that next time, I shall have to plan my route to try to take in some more white space on the openstreetmap maps, and try to aim for streets that are mapped (due to the aerial imagery), but not named yet.

It was also the first long ride out with a Nokia N95 doing the logging. The phone is good enough, but the battery life isn't enough for a 3.5 hour session of tracklogs, continuous music playing, and lots of geotagged photos. I have got a Freeloader solar charger, which managed to keep enough juice flowing when the phone battery was running low. It would be interesting to note how much longer the Nokia battery lasts when not playing MP3s. I'll have a few more long runs before the London to Brighton ride.

Looking at the tracklogs from the Nokia (the phone was just in my pocket), I can easily see when I reached to get it out of my pocket, because the fix wobbles around lots. According to the documentation with the phone, it gets it's best fix with the phone slider open; so maybe I need to work out some sort of handlebar mount. Getting nice clean tracklogs is less important where the areas are already mostly mapped, and you're just taking geotagged photos; so it's probably not that important for the London to Brighton run, the main route of which got mapped last year.