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Recent diary entries

Posted by chillly on 12 February 2008 in English.

Cottingham in East Yorkshire has been claimed to be the biggest village in England. It certainly feels like a town when you're trying to map it. I have now covered all of the roads and some of the footpaths. There are quite a few shops to add as amenities, but schools, churches and pubs should be all correct. There are a surprising number of footpaths (no cycling signs everywhere).

Location: Cottingham, East Riding of Yorkshire, Hull and East Yorkshire, England, United Kingdom
Posted by Richard on 12 February 2008 in English.

You can now choose from several background layers in Potlatch.

Go to the options window (the little "tick" near the bottom left), and you'll see that the pop-up menu which used to offer only 'Yahoo' and 'None' now offers:


  • OpenAerialMap
  • Yahoo
  • Mapnik
  • Osmarender
  • Maplint

OpenAerialMap is likely to be particularly useful. Not just because it's a great project in itself, but also because it uses the same low-res Landsat imagery as Yahoo - but enlarges it when you zoom in. So if you want to trace over enlarged Landsat, use this to replace the old Flash Player zoom.

(If anyone else has spherical Mercator GMaps-like tilesets that might work as a background image, let me know.)

Thanks to Christopher and Jon for configuring their servers (OAM/tah and tile respectively) so Potlatch can do this.

And for just one example of how it looks, go to osm.org/edit.html?zoom=16&lat=49.795&lon=15.445 and select OpenAerialMap!

Posted by ColinMarquardt on 11 February 2008 in English.

It just took an update of the DejaVu font on tile to have the local Georgian names rendered (thanks jburgess):
osm.org/?lat=41.539&lon=43.896&zoom=9&layers=B0FT

I was looking at the map sources on Wikipedia for მცხეთა/Mtskheta (http://tools.wikimedia.de/~magnus/geo/geohack.php?pagename=Mtskheta¶https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:ms=41_51_N_44_43_E_type:city), and it seems OpenStreetMap is the only online map which shows Georgia in local script. Quite cool.

Location: Mtskheta, Mtskheta Municipality, Mtskheta-Mtianeti, Georgia
Posted by HaraldK on 10 February 2008 in English.

By just looking at a 1:50000 map of the area left and right of the Autobahn A3 between Erkrath and Mettmann, I would have never considered cycling there. Just for completeness I went there to track some paths and found a very interesting area with many more ways than expected from the map. Again I was amazed how much more lifely the experience of a rather small area can be if you want to map all the tracks you can find there.

Still I have to go back there, because I could not finish everything. I must say, however, that I should have made the trip in summer. Quite a few tracks are still terribly muddy. Not that it really kept me out, but I am not exactly looking for this kind of experience.

Location: Hubbelrath, Stadtbezirk 7, Dusseldorf, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany
Posted by diogow on 9 February 2008 in English.

More progress in the java applet to view OSM data...

Allowing keyboard browsing, going left, right, up, down, zoom in, zoom out and back to GPS fix.

Included NMEA decoding function (only GPRMC for now)

Still some stuff to go:
- Bluetooth serial link with GPS
- Caching of data into local database
- Reading Cell ID from GSM phone
- Automatic GPX upload as you go through unmapped places

Server needs:
- Cell ID database
- Real time traffic data from GPS users

Posted by diogow on 9 February 2008 in English.

Has anybody thought of a server where you could have people uploading their current position, heading and speed to monitor the traffic and avoid traffic jams ? I'm thinking about implementing something along those lines, but I'm aware that the project will only benefit when there is a high number of people collaborating also. I'm also thinking about using the GSM cell tower info from the cellphones so that you could get a location fix without a GPS, but that's going to required the mapping of the cell towers. Anybody can help me out pointing to projects that try to address these ideas ? Thanks in advance, Diogo

Posted by zut on 9 February 2008 in English.

Das schrie geradezu nach einer ausgiebigen Radtour, und in der Tat konnte man nur genießen. Auf der Tour von knapp 40km mitgekommen sind Feldwege nördlich Wettmershagen und im Ilkerbruch, ein Wohngebiet in Calberlah und der östliche Serviceweg am Elbe-Seitenkanal. Was für ein schöner Tag, und was für ein wunderbares Hobby.

Location: Allenbüttel, Allerbüttel, Calberlah, Samtgemeinde Isenbüttel, Gifhorn, Lower Saxony, Germany
Posted by Esben Damgaard on 9 February 2008 in English.

I've been making progress with the mapping. I'm still using my OpenMoko phone: Neo1973 and I'm still loving it :)

But now there a beginning to come programs for the Neo which can use the map we all a making. This is just so cool. It's really fun cycling around, navigating the city with a map I've helped create. It makes me proud, and gives me a lot more willpower to just go out only tagging new roads.

Posted by Brian Schimmel on 9 February 2008 in English.

My previous try to fix germanys bigges continous wood turned out to be more destruction than fixing. It was reverted by user rrissek.

It created some white tiles, and fixed others that were white before, giving a rather disappointing total.

I think I now understood the way it works - finally. The Harz outline has to go through every tile inside, and it is not enough if a segment goes throug the tile (I know, there are no real segments any more, but you know what I mean...). There has to be a node.

I think it was not very nice to modify the Harz itself (it has 473 nodes even without my fix). So my current try is based on new way inside the Harz, tagged as natural:wood. It has a node in every zoom 12 tile inside the harz, and should finally work. It may take some time to get rendered, because the T@H server is overburdoned right now.

Despite this, I uploaded about 20 gpx files that I missed until now, and traced the viallages around Wernigerode using Landsat images, tagging them landuse:residential.

Location: Schierke, Wernigerode, Landkreis Harz, Saxony-Anhalt, 38879, Germany