After the initial effort yesterday, the next street was ready to be mapped today.

Also tried out JOSM. I am not sure yet whether to use potlatch or JOSM for editing. Both have advantages. Lets see on which editor the learning curve pays out better.

I decided that Friday's jaunt to Nuthurst and Soutwater hadn't been enough exercise, so I went off on another hike yesterday [I had the day off because it was my birthday] and also do some caches in the Bewbush/Ifield area of Crawley; taking in the old mill ruins and pond at Bewbush, Ifield mill and pond and the 13th century church at Ifield were also visited.

From there I went on to Lambs Green; no I didn't get chance to stop at the pub there [or on any of the routes], before making my way back to Horsham via yet more unmapped paths; 15 miles in all.

Many people I said hello to durimg the day mentioned that it was unusually warm for May; more like July, they said. Certainly, it was very warm. Even at 08:00 yesterday it was warmer than I normally prefer for walking.

I saw loads of wildlife; rabbits, deer, herons, geese, ducks, yet more swallows had arrived and were wheeling and swooping in the sky whilst feeding on flying insects. I also picked up an unwanted hitch-hiker on this walk; a tick!

In all the years I have been walking/rambling and even as a child in the countryside of the Isle of Wight I had never been bitten by one before. Luckily I spotted it quite quickly and managed to remove it before it had gorged itself on my blood!

I decided to go out on Friday evening for a hike and geocache, so I headed out from north Horsham towards Nuthurst [as there is a cache there] via several footpaths and bridleways that weren't yet mapped.

Nice walk, although it was rather warm. I then proceeded towards Southwater to map yet more paths as well as find several caches once I finally got to Southwater, and walked past the reservoir there and the church which was very busy; some function was happening at the time.

Then back home to Horsham via yet more paths not yet mapped, I even managed to map the end of Compton's Lane in Horsham which had been incomplete for a very long time. I covered 16 miles on foot in all.

I saw loads of wildlife; rabbits, geese, ducks as well as the more common local bird-life which abounds in Sussex.

Added a few well known streets in Altlandsberg

I've had my trusty Garmin eTrex Legend for nearly 6 years now but its really only in the last year that I have seen its true benefits in terms of displaying maps and the benefits to me of having maps on it. I did have some official Garmin maps on the unit for a while but each time I travelled to a new location it was too expensive to get coverage, so for a lot of the time it was displaying only traces over the useless Garmin basmap. With Steve Ratcliff's mkgmap I can create maps easily for anywhere in the world based on the OSM data. I find that even though coverage in many places is patchy its still worth having, partly because it shows what is not mapped yet (so that you can divert to new routes to pick them up) but also because in reality I can still get from A to B, just that the route might not be the one I would take if I had a more complete version of the map.
Downloading the current OSM map data for the wider West Midlands I find I'm now downloading a 200+MB file from Osmxapi which takes quite some time (hours), perhaps I'll need to consider using the planet file soon. For now, the end result is a 6MB image file for the Garmin which is close to the limit for the 8MB of storage that the old Legend has available for maps. Upload to the Legend is also very slow over the Serial connection, which means that the total process from starting the OSM data download to heading out with current mapping is up to 4 hours. A bit long really. I can improve the process by upgrading to the latest eTrex Legend Hcx, which I guess I'm going to have to do sooner rather than later.

Added the footpath around this little body of water, including the bridges and access road to the private house that lies in the middle of this beautiful area.

GPSBabel 1.3.5 was released a few days ago, and for those of you using the popular NaviGPS units I am pleased to be able to say that the new release of GPSBabel includes native support for the NaviGPS.

This includes both direct access to stored tracks, routes and waypoints via the USB cable as well as the ability to decode waypoints and tracks copied to the SD card if you are using a recent release of the NaviGPS firmware that supports that.

The code has been tested with my GT-11 unit but should work with the BGT-11 as well, and will hopefully work with the new GT-31 and BGT-31 units when they arrive - please let me know if you manage to test with one of those.

The name for the new driver is "navilink", so to recover waypoints over the USB cable on linux you would do something like:

gpsbabel -w -f navilink -i /dev/ttyUSB0 -F gpx -o waypoints.gpx

Any problems, give me a shout...

As a first experiment how this works, I have started to map part of the area where I live. The first session basically adds the Stadtbachstrasse and some access roads with a few features nearby.

Such a fine afternoon I thought I'd continue with some cycle training in preparation for the London to Brighton Bike Ride next month. 43km later and I have Handsworth Wood (B20) mapped. Nice area and some interest when I cam across a young couple blatantly having sex in one of the parks.

english below

Ich bin heute mal durch meinen Block in Bochum gelaufen und habe POI und fehlende Straßen eingefügt.

I took a walk around my living area in Bochum, Germany and added POI and missing Streets.

Barton Mills - did village green area and footpaths around Grange Farm.

Fordham - added last missing through road. No cul-de-sacs, estate roads or footpaths have been done in this village. This brings Fordham to a consistent level of detail in which to leave it.

Added missing road SW of Tuddenham. The inter-village road network is now complete to the west of Tuddenham and Herringswell as far as Fordham, Isleham and West Row. That brings the area to a consistent level of detail in which to leave it.

I may grow the area at that level of information if I am going in that direction but I will be concentrating on finishing Barton Mills and then moving into Mildenhall. Barton Mills will take 3 more walks so that will probably be finished this week.

I also went to Shrewsbury. I've just finished tagging up all of my route.

I went North, and did the roads bounded by the new A5124 link road in the North, the A5112/A5191 in the east, and the A528 in the west.

I started from the outside and worked my way in. I didn't quite get into the centre of Shrewsbury, but what I've done is, I believe, complete in terms of the road network.

I had lunch by the river in lovely weather whilst watching some racing at the Shrewsbury Regatta, before it was back on the road again to get a few more roads before time caught up with me, and I had to be on my way to Congleton.

It was nice to meet a couple of other OSMers. Thanks to Higgy for organising the event.

Found two more tracks and connecting footways between Knittkuhl and Ratingen. As usual I keep being amazed what you find going out mappging.

Arriving in Ratingen, I could not help as to map a few residential streets there, although this is not really my area. But the center of Ratingen is a nice place, and it is about time it gets mapped.

Driving to Weil de Stadt I recorded the major road of the Wächtersber. And 3 smaller residentioal roads

Spent a good part of the weekend in Shrewsbury, but not principally as a mapping event (albeit that Tom Higgy was running one there on Saturday anyway). Introduced someone new to the process so I hope we will see another user doing some edits as he finds the time. The weather really was excellent for mapping on the bike, especially being able to drop into the pub afterwards - although I found that SteveC had got there and mapped that sometime before! or sitting by the River Severn watching a rowing regatta. Mixing mapping with socialising and regular activity has a lot going for it :-)

I have finished correcting the "braided" streets listed on the Tiger fixup page.

I've been looking for more to fix, and I haven't found many. I found a handful more in the greater Bay Area, mosly in Oakland. None in Portland. A few duplicated streets in Tacoma, but no actual braided ones anywhere around Tacoma and Seattle.

I'm going to broaden my search across the US, but I'm wondering if the underlying issue was peculiar to the San Francisco area. Since the TIGER data is an amalgam of other sources, it could be that the topology leading to the braiding phenomenon only occurred in some source data from that area. Interesting.

During february I have added together with Adrian some streets in Bochnia. Yesterday I have added few remaining traces. BTW a little bit of validation problems has been corrected in Wrocław.

Did a trip around the outer circle bike trail in Melbourne. Nice but it crosses a lot of streets and at some points there is no trail and the signs telling you how to get to the next section are non existant.

Well know most of it is in osm, so mkgmap it and load it up onto your garmin gps.

Finished the east end of the village down to footpath level. Did not add the footpath from the R. Lark to the A1101 beyond the Cut Off Channel. The stinging nettle defeated me.

I've added some streets of my home town and I've created an entry for my home town in the wiki.