Nine degree celsius in the middle of winter. Wow, that's what I call global warming. So I went out to map these 4 streets off Lakronstraße, a very nice neighbourhood here in Gerresheim. Old, large houses, well maintained and modernised. It is a bit uphill and downhill there, but 3/4h was enough to track it all. The street sign fotos are a bit dark but still readable. I am pretty sure I got this corner between Bender- Dreher- and Torfbruchstraße now complete --- except for one half street :-)

And why does this silly map down there change all the time while I type. Who invented this nonsens:-?

Found here http://www.dolphinpix.eu proof I really have driven 250,000 miles in the last 10 years.

Not bad, that covers most of the roads in the far north of Scotland. Some roads get 2 or 3 vehicles a week! And thats the postman!

Spending some time at home on development and maintainance
of some essential OSM-Tools.

Yes, my bike got some problems, light failed, the Sachs-3-Gear
failed and both tyres were in need of some additional air.
This is all fixed now, and i have put a spare ball-pen
in my bag after i have lost my only pencil somewhere
out there in the bush week
(I got a beer and a replacement in the next pub)

Today i have been working on the idea to print OSM-Maps using gnuplot.
This is an important tool because it generates high density maps,
e.g. perfect to check if POI are at the right position or missing
and to draw notes into it.

The old approach
is not functional anymore since OSM 0.5, but that is easily fixable.

I wrote a XSLT-stylesheet
osm2gnuplot.xsl
to extract way- or poi-data from an OSM-Data file,
and a messy script
osm2gnuplot.sh
to call the XSLT-processor.
This script will generate a bunch of files, one each for streets, rails and
different POI. These files are readable by gnuplot, e.g.
example to draw some parts of cologne

Note: this is not the fastest/most efficient approach.
Doing this with a well indexed database would be a matter of seconds,
doing this with my stylesheet and the gnome-xsltproc is a matter of hours
for the complete map of cologne (ca. 5MB) on a 400MHz PII-Box.
But its working fine
take a look at the north-east from cologne: osm-cologne-ne-20080127.ps.gz

oh well, I print my maps on A3 paper, like this:
pstops '1:0@1.65(-2.9cm,-2.5cm)' myplot.ps myplot_A3.ps

We need more POI in OSM, 33 bus_stations and 40 pubs in cologne, thats pretty poor,
cheers!

Well, this is it! My first blog post ever! Let it better be a good one then ;)

I just uploaded all my gpx-files (about 7.5 megs) and was rather annoyed by the nonexisting possibility to upload multiple files at once and even more of the missing progress bar :/

Actually it seems like I'm a little iffy today anyway, because the only thing I feel like is complaining. So lets keep it up: I'm still not satisfied with the way JOSM is behaving on my Mac. For once there is no way to scroll in it, other than connecting a mouse with two buttons and sometimes things are just a little queer.
Maybe I will get the source one day and put my Java-skills to good use... All it really takes is adding a new button and a if-clause to change the shortcuts to the "Apple-Style" if OS X is the current operating system. Sounds like something I can manage :D
Other than that: A BIG HUG TO THE GUY's and GIRL's (hopefully ^^) WHO BROUGHT US THIS VERY EASY TO USE TOOL :)

I'm currently working on a virtual machine image of Tiles@Home, with my friend Brian "the Brain" Schimmel, so everyone can have a private Tiles@Home, without all the trouble needed to install it by hand...

Up to this day I have mapped some parts of Wernigerode (most of which was stolen, by someone who was daring enough to add street names, I will get you for this one you *#?%$"& ;) ) and all of my home town/village Berßel.
Actually I decided to map my old place of residence Osterwieck tomorrow.

...

OK spent an hour and a half cycling the last remaining bits of Cottenham this afternoon, mainly Smithy Fen. As far as I know that's all of the roads on the map now (once it updates). I also added 6 post boxes, one telephone, the fire station, the pharmacy, one shop, the war memorial, the fuel station and the recreation grounds with their various sections. I also covered a bit of Rampton, including the moat around Giant's Hill. I tagged it as waterway=moat, which isn't a standard tag but a proposed feature, and therefore presumably won't show on the standard renderers. I added a point in the centre historical=archaeological_site, name=Giant's Hill so at least that will appear.

What are still missing from Cottenham are the various footpaths and bridleways surrounding the village, and Cottenham Lode, which I think probably counts as waterway=stream even though it's clearly manmade - I guess the original course was similar but probably changed from year to year, and the banks were built to prevent flooding and enable agriculture on the surrounding land. That's a job for next weekend.

Today I thought to try recording comments about streets crossed and cycled with my mp3-player. It seemed to work well, but when I wanted to load the sound track on my computer the damned Trekstor vibez (what a name) started displaying 'starting player' and 'formatting ...' while the disk made unconvincing noises.

This thing is not a year old and not actually used a lot. What a poor quality.

Tracks4Africa contains a route marked "Dinokeng Mtb" and today I grabbed the opportunity to ride it.

I started by riding through the Buffelsdrift nature reserve, where it was most likely that I would encounter locked gates, which turned out not to be the case. The complete route consists of around 40km of gravel roads and 15km of busy tar road.

Yesterday I tried out the maximum capycity of my mobile phone. For GPS + audio mapping it is about 3.5 hours. I drove along the border between residential and forest areas, so I was finally able to put them into the map.

At first, I used landuse:residential and natural:wood as completely separated areas with some free space in between. If there was a road between them, I had three parallel ways, each one with its own nodes.

Afterwards, I merged the ways / nodes, so that residential and wood now "touch" each other at the road. This looks a lot nicer in the map, but the JOSM validator plugin now complains about overlapping ways. Am I doing things right?

As well, I now took care of the proper tagging of cycleways, footways and tracks, which are mostly distinguishable in our wood areas, were most ways are "Wanderwege" but commonly used by bikers. That means, as a guidway I used the questions "Does this feel like a cycleway? Would I recomend it to a biker? Would it be possible to drive a car right here?". I hope this meets the common sensus, too.

Same goes for rivers and streams. In the T@H map, rivers look too wide and streams too small, so what to take? I tried to make some compromise.

Added a few more lanes but, more importantly, I voluntarily gave myself squinty eyes and traced Dumaresq Creek from a blurry Landsat low-resolution image. Armidale now has its creek bisecting the town, flowing north-west to south-east. (Osmarender only at this stage).

I not sure how to tag the waterway, though. It's bigger than a waterway=stream, and not as grand as a waterway=river. In Australian parlance, it's a creek. It doesn't have permanent flow.

Anyway, for the time being, "stream" will be fine.

Whenever I hear of Armidale, I think of a small village on the Isle of Skye.

Just thought I'd mention it.

I've had fun in ski holiday last week. Beautiful weather and a lot of snow in Zermatt, Switzerland. So I started to map my first aerial ways and pistes by carry my receiver downhill.

So I joined the Piste Maps [1] project.

What already works are simple aerialway [2], but only with osmarender, not mapnik. Pistes [3] are still in early discussion phase, but I already tried some of the tags. They seems to work fine. But they still needs some cleanup.

Happy skiing or snowbording, the next ski holiday is coming!

Cheers, Andy

[1] osm.wiki/index.php/WikiProject_Piste_Maps
[2] osm.wiki/index.php/Key:aerialway
[3] osm.wiki/index.php/Proposed_features/Piste_Maps

Two parkings added. One on Bielany (Makro). Second near Hallera and Mielecka crossing (Carrefour).

Hi,

Anyone else reading this from the Nelson area and own a GPS? I've been mapping what I can of the area since the end of last year and Stoke is certainly looking quite good now, but still quite a bit of missing detail for Nelson and Richmond.

I've discovered the 'uber-device' for doing this sort of thing: the Nokia E90 Communicator. The built-in GPS works well, and the Nokia Sports Tracker allows direct export to GPX format. Additionally, the camera and PDA-style functionality work well on mapping expeditions.

Got myself a mountain bike at the start of January (after a 2+ year gap of no cycling) so am combining getting fitter with getting the area mapped!

And... My other half helps - she does lots of running and recently got a Garmin Forerunner GPS watch - which can also export traces to GPX with some additional software...

Started using Merkaartor, but now using Potlatch as I got fed up with it failing to create roads and then leaving a load of orphaned points on the map! Looked briefly at JOSM but can't say I like its interface very much!

- Ali (InTheSand)

Garkalne ir kļuvusi daudz smukāka. Uzzīmēju visu, kas ir starp dzelzceļu un Vidzemes šoseju.

Turpinājums sekos :)

Så er jeg godt i gang med at få kortlagt Frederikshavn, en opgavde der kommer til at tage lang tid, eneste måde at få vejene ind på er via. GPS track (Yahoo har for dårlig opløsning her).

Alkaa nuo kaikki tiet olemaan sen verran hyvin paikallaan, että siirryin maalailemaan karttaan landuse-tagilla alueita. Lähinnä residential-tagia on tullut viljeltyä paikkoihin, jossa tällaista aluetta on. Rajat eivät ole mitenkään kymmenenteen desimaaliin tarkkoja vaan osin paikallistuntemukseen perustuvia.

Eilen tuli tallikoitua Hämeensaaren alueella ja otettua kulmapisteitä rakennuksista ja kentistä. Siellä ne ovatkin jo kartalla. Yahoon aerial fotoja odotellessa joutuu tekemään tällaista summittaista sijoittelua.

Created residential street near Bzowy square and Bzowa street.

Almost whole Balzaka and small part of Cesarzowicka created.