This is the final in a sequence of posts on acquiring some small leaflets originally produced by Andy Allan:–

1. Fonts missing from OSM Promotional Leaflets
2. Github HowTo: Clone Repository then make a Pull Request
3. Printing OSM Promotional Leaflets
4. Update to OSM Promotional Leaflets due to Padding errors
5. Adding a Preview JPG + crop-marks for printing

Five years ago Andy Allan produced a GitHub repository of a design for a credit-card sized (A7: 105mm high x 74mm wide) 8-page leaflet based on a Frederik Ramm German design, but updated for the UK (see above + at openstreetmap-promotional-leaflets). Andy had very kindly sent me a bunch of those leaflets on May 2016, and told me that they cost GBP £95 for 5,000 leaflets direct from the printers or GBP ~£165 for 10,000.

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Most things are easy once you know all the jargon and have done it for a while. That broke down for me with Github. It seemed that everybody just assumed that everybody else already knew all the jargon, and nobody bothered to explain how to do anything step-by-step.

1. Fonts missing from OSM Promotional Leaflets
2. Github HowTo: Clone Repository then make a Pull Request
3. Printing OSM Promotional Leaflets
4. Update to OSM Promotional Leaflets due to Padding errors
5. Adding a Preview JPG + crop-marks for printing

I cannot explain everything about git nor Github, but I’ve just successfully created my first git Repository on Github by forking another repository, have cloned it to my local Desktop, made three commits & also a pull request. So, whilst everything is still reasonably fresh in my mind & I have the history available to report it all to you, here is some of what all that shit means and how to get into it if you want to do something similar.

Brief Background & Overview

Near the end of last year (2018) I tried to use Andy Allan’s OSM Promotional Leaflets to get some little giveaway-leaflets printed, and failed. It was missing some crucial items & also needed updating, so I tried, and eventually succeeded in updating it, and also made a post about that: Fonts missing from OSM Promotional Leaflets.

I’ve found Andy to be tremendously helpful in the past, so I was also privately in conversation with him about his Repository. He suggested that I make a Pull Request as to add links for the necessary fonts to the README file. I thought that that might be a great idea, just as soon as I could find out what a Pull Request was, and then how to do it.

Git + Github Overview

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1. Fonts missing from OSM Promotional Leaflets
2. Github HowTo: Clone Repository then make a Pull Request
3. Printing OSM Promotional Leaflets
4. Update to OSM Promotional Leaflets due to Padding errors
5. Adding a Preview JPG + crop-marks for printing

tl;dr:
You will need to install a combo of ubuntu font, a suitable Sans-Serif font (OpenSans family font is available via GitHub) + Inkscape in addition to mirroring locally the current GitHub OSM files. Then use Inkscape to import one of the SVG files, Save-As a PDF from it, and print from that. Rinse/repeat with the other SVG file:–

Updated PDFs + SVGs (identified by ‘relation/15371’) are currently available at https://github.com/alexkemp9/openstreetmap-promotional-leaflets. In addition I’ve made a pull-request (a request within Github for the original author to consider pulling-in my changes), so they may soon be available from the original source (next line).

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As I was walking through NG3 Nottingham this afternoon, on my way towards Tesco at NG1, I was stopped by a chap in an electric car with his wife & 2 kids (lots of electric cars in Nottingham these days) and asked if I knew where Hartley Road was. They were trying to get to the House of Pain Wrestling event in St Peter’s Church Hall.

I have mapped most of NG3, 4 & 5 in Nottingham, but not NG7. He had internet on his mobile so I suggested that he bring up https://www.openstreetmap.org in his browser. To my surprise, this brought up a long list of short lines of text (I could not read them) (desktop OSM brings up the map) but after a short while he got the map of England up. I told him confidently that he could now search for Hartley Road, but he could not find a search box nor any link to a search box. By this time his wife had used Google to locate the road & also discover the route from ourselves to it (3½ miles). He thanked me and set off.

Oops. Google has got user needs & interactions well worked out, whilst OSM struggles in it’s dust to even get started.

Hard on the heels of my previous Diary (How to report spam) I’ve discovered spam within a changeset (map edit) for the first time:–

Changeset#6050808957

 addr:city	Hà Nội
 addr:district	Thanh Xuân
 addr:housenumber	25
 description	Video Bài Hát Việt Nam
 email	<redacted>@gmail.com
 name	Ngoc Anh
 phone	<redacted>
 start_date	10/11/2018
 website	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=<redacted>

Splendid.

Registered, logged-in users recently got an additional facility for every Diary, and also every Diary Comment, posted within this site: a report button. At this current moment (Tuesday 14 August 2018) these are the option buttons available after pressing that button (choose just one):–

• This diary entry is/contains spam
• This diary entry is obscene/offensive
• This diary entry contains a threat
• Other

Registered, logged-in users also got an additional facility for every Diary Profile: a report button. At this current moment (Monday 20 August 2018) these are the option buttons available after pressing that button (choose just one):–

• This user profile is/contains spam
• This user profile is obscene/offensive
• This user profile contains a threat
• This user is a vandal
• Other

This diary post is about the first option ((non-email) SPAM) (you-tube (baked-beans are off)). OSM got going in 2004 and, from my POV, it is astonishing that it has taken 14 years to put a Report option in place (I joined StopForumSpam in 2009 and am a Mod on that site, so you will have to accept a strong anti-spam obsession in this post).

tl;dr: most SPAM is posted via bots; AFAIK that has not yet happened with OSM, but it is only a matter of time. However, OSM has been so tolerant of SPAM for so long that a host of human spammers has got used to feasting on OSM. Please login & report all spamming that you find (remember to check the Profiles as well).

There now follows a rambling exposition on the sources of SPAM.

You are never alone with an IP

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In Transfer files to/from Android 6 via USB under Devuan/Debian it was detailed how to setup both Devuan & the Android smartphone as to import/export files between the two devices. In this post, a script is given to quickly one-touch files from the phone to a designated directory in the desktop.

The script below will need saving into a file called ~/Personal/copyFromPhone. You will then need to:-

:~$ chmod +x ~/Personal/copyFromPhone
:~$ ls -al ~/Personal/copyFromPhone
-rwxr-xr-x 1 user user 1857 Aug  8 21:18 /home/user/Personal/copyFromPhone

The script is launched as :~$ Personal/copyFromPhone. The values $CAMERA, $FUSERMOUNT, … , $MOUNTPOINT will all need checking. $LOCAL + $MOUNTDIR are almost certainly wrong as provided for any specific user.

Problems:

The major problem I had was ‘device is busy’ reports on attempted unmount at end of script. Using the unmount command from terminal always worked (fusermount -u /media/user/disk), but I added the ‘lazy unmount’ option to try to get rid of that.

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My home PC is now Devuan and I’ve lost all trace of how I previously set Debian up to be able to transfer osmtracker files between my home PC and my Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow smartphone connected using a USB cable. So, here it all is again, but this time under Devuan 2.0 (ascii).

tl;dr:
1. On the phone enable Developer Options and change the USB default to MTP.
2. On the Desktop install jmtpfs + mtp-tools, then mount
3. Use Thunar to access mounted disk + transfer files

Xfce is my desktop environment & Thunar the File Manager. Once mounted (below) and whilst the phone screen is unlocked it is possible to browse/copy the phone directories with Thunar in the normal way. The jmtpfs README states that “tools like find and rsync work as expected”, although I have not yet explored this.

One item that is currently missing is that, whilst USB Mass-Storage devices are auto-mounted upon insertion & can be stopped/unmounted from Thunar, that is not yet available for me with the phone. You thus need to use the terminal to both mount, and to unmount the phone before removal.

There is every chance that you need root for this on your phone. I wanted to be able to mount the phone from my desktop and thus then use either GUI or terminal to move files created whilst surveying using OSMTracker on my smartphone.

Here is the info detected on the smartphone model after installing mtp-tools:

$ mtp-detect

Listing raw device(s)
Device 0 https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:(VID=19d2 and https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:PID=0307) is a ZTE V880E.
   Found 1 device(s):
   ZTE: V880E (19d2:0307) @ bus 1, dev 6
Device info:
   Manufacturer: Vodafone
   Model: VFD 600

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This is a YouTube video uploaded on 7 Aug 2014 by ScoutbyTeleNav, and celebrates 10 years of OSM existence at that time, giving a visual demonstration of the month-by-month build of OSM by all it’s contributors. This video makes me proud to have added a little to OSM, even though for me that did not start until after this video was made.

And yes, I know that this is a bit old but watch it anyway, and I think that you will agree that it is an excellent video, worth watching. The music (also excellent) is Open Electro by Vincent Girès from the album Silence.

10 years of OSM: youtu.be/7sC83j6vzjo

PS
OSM Founder Steve Coast is the Head of OSM at Telenav

You may have missed the reports in April about Willand, a pretty little village in Devon that is 2cm (0.7 inches) closer to god each year (from the heliocentric view, of course), yet no-one knows why:

The connection to OSM is a little tortuous, but real.

The University of Nottingham has a Geography department, and it has spun off a commercial company called Geomatic Ventures Limited (GML). GML has created a United Kingdom Relative Deformation Map using results from the Sentinel-1 satellite. Here is the blurb from the mangomap site:

United Kingdom Relative Deformation Map

A relative deformation map of the United Kingdom, generated from ~ 2000 Sentinel-1 images acquired between October 2015 - October 2017. The data was processed using the Intermittent Small Baseline Subset (ISBAS) InSAR method. Each pixel represents the average vertical height change over the period of observations in millimetres per year.

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It seems only fitting that, as Mapperley was famed for the Chase, that it’s householders should love horses:–

Past street art:–

• Marshall Hill Gargoyles
• Gedling Lions
• Gedling House Elf
• Gedling Stick-men
• Wollaton Water Dog
• Phoenix Farm signs
• Nottingham Plaster Boys n Girls

Update 2 July 2022

Mapillary has changed it’s download URLs & therefore all links within my diaries that use photos stored in Mapillary are broken. I’m slowly going through to update them. The new URLs are terrifyingly long, but show OK on my screen (and I hope also on yours).

Here is a snapshot of recent history & developments within the suburb of Nottingham called Mapperley, and explicitly the private road called Podder Lane which I mapped a few hours ago.

This is what most of Podder Lane looks like today (1st photo below) and what the last 10 yards looks like (in my experience, the 2nd photo is an extreme example of the ‘normal’ condition of unadopted roads):–

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Don’t misunderstand me; I like civilisation, I really do. I like that my grand-daughter Micaela can walk down the street without needing to actively fear every man that walks past, or worry about being pounced on by a sabre-toothed tiger, or a cave-lion. There are just so many benefits, like amoeba-free water plumbed direct into the home, lots of shops with shelves full of food good to eat, and maps of the area freely available. It’s all excellent stuff, even if it’s just the Matrix.

So why do I miss wild woods? With wolves, and deer running free? Possibly it is the Austrian blood from my mother calling to me, or perhaps because I have finally reached the edge of Nottingham’s suburban housing (Spring Lane), but at my last mapping session I was able to stand within Gedling Country Park and gaze from the high sierra south across a vista of naturally-seeded trees (please forgive my whimsy) and gain a hint of what the long-gone Sherwood Forest might have looked like:–

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Please remove these Profile spammers (from Other nearby users, as shown in my Profile page).

Info on Profile Spammers

If you have access to their email address & IP you can signup at SFS & report them on to the DB, which will then prevent them from spamming any other forum/blog that makes use of SFS.

felineescorts (removed - thank you) (spam for escorts):–
Signed up:– 10 April, 2017
Edits:– 0
Traces:– 0
Diary:– 0

bohemiagirkl (removed - thank you) (spam for escorts):–
Signed up:– 13 March, 2014
Edits:– 0
Traces:– 0
Diary:– 0

debbie bryan (spam for a shop; no link, but is still spamming):–
Signed up:– 25 March, 2009
Edits:– 0
Traces:– 0
Diary:– 0

Steveford11 (removed - thank you) (pharmaceutical spam):–
Signed up:– 11 April, 2014
Edits:– 0
Traces:– 0
Diary:– 0

RDArchitects (spam for architects practice; no link, but is still spamming):–
Signed up:– 12 October, 2012
Edits:– 0
Traces:– 0
Diary:– 0

This is 5 of 30 users, suggesting that 16.7% (1 in every 6) of users sign up purely for the purpose of spamming OSM. After an analysis of those 30 users shown on my Profile, I found that 80% made no or very little contribution (3 or less edits) to OSM; this seems to be the classic 20%/80% split, and makes it very difficult to understand why all these redundant users should be retained.

A small snippet from my recent survey off Mapperley Plains, Notts.:–

The householder was a retired chap & explained that, when he & his wife got married & bought a house, some so-called friends had said that the two of them were now “Up the creek” (splendid friends, huh?). So, in response, they decided to give their new home a name:–

Update 2 July 2022

Mapillary has changed it’s download URLs & therefore all links within my diaries that use photos stored in Mapillary are broken. I’m slowly going through to update them. The new URLs are terrifyingly long, but show OK on my screen (and I hope also on yours).

We cannot (unfortunately) use Google Satellite to directly help us sketch buildings. I’ve spent the past 14 months using Bing (and now a week occasionally using DigitalGlobe) under JOSM to draw the outline of houses throughout Nottingham NG3/NG4. In my neck of the woods, DigitalGlobe is much newer, whilst Bing is less blurry, but Google normally knocks them both into a cocked hat, being both very new & as sharp as a pin (wistful sigh).

SomeoneElse showed me Google-3D — on a laptop/desktop hold down the <Ctrl> key whilst you use the mouse to move the satellite view & you will get 3D rather than 2D (I believe that this is accomplished using the 45° Imagery). I now use this imagery to re-walk the path that I took on my earlier survey + check the backs, etc. of the houses for all the bits that I could not see from the street when making the original survey.

In the past various MPGs have reacted with fury to me taking photographs in their vicinity (and have even tried to cause me serious injury), and there is a link between the location of these characters & missing sections of StreetView. I also know from many, many conversations just how common the irritation/anger is over Google’s street photography amongst Nottingham householders. This next bit will possibly cause their heads to explode.

In ordinary circumstances, pressing the + key on the Google Satellite view will eventually switch from overhead-satellite to StreetView (if it exists), and that change occurs in spite of the 2D/3D setting. I’ve discovered how to get closer without switching. Astonishingly close.

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Frinz (removed - thank you) was your classic spammer, and in this case a Profile spammer:–

• Spammer (Oxford Dictionary) (Wikipedia)
• Profile Spammer:– Someone that places their spam within their forum Profile & then places at least one post within at least one of that forum’s boards
   
  (the purpose of the forum post is to get a legitimate forum link back to the Profile, something that all search-engines (SE’s) will follow — ALL spammer activity is intended to game the SE SERPs; any uplift from direct spammer links is simply a bonus)

In this case, Frinz placed his spam within the Personal page for his Profile. His stats are:–

• Signed up: 07:18 16 May, 2017
• Edits: 0
• Traces: 0
• Diary: 0
• Comment: 07:19 16 May, 2017: Comment content: “Hi Hello!”

Fairly transparent once you understand the method & motivations.

There are hidden gems at the corner of Arnold Lane & Mapperley Plains, both above & below ground.

The first item to be found travelling out from Nottingham town is a gas pipeline site, but let’s gloss over that.

Next is the 3WScouts site, and I think that it may be the best pocket-location for Scouts in the UK (it was locked up when I called last Wednesday, but this shot taken through the gate may give an indication of the delights behind) (or look through the photos at the 3WScouts website):–

The 3WScouts training ground is called “Pepperpots”. The photo below comes from the 3W website (I’m hoping to be able to arrange to take one of my own), and is one of the two sources for that rather odd name (the other Pepperpot is hidden within the woods at the eastern end of the site):–

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(Wednesday May 10)
Some experiences I could do without but, at the same time, you can rarely choose those that you get. This particular one I have to be a touch careful about as (I very much hope) it may lead to criminal proceedings & I most certainly will not prejudice those (2 July 22 update: that never happened).

Added Friday 12 May:
Initially, after posting this I removed it & put in place a “(removed due to possible criminal proceedings)” notice. Today, John on the Newsdesk of The Nottingham Evening Post informed me that only once criminal proceedings are issued does there need to be a news embargo, so this diary entry can go ahead, as I have yet to receive any notice of any action.

Most of my recent time has been spent mapping Gedling NG4, UK, and had reached the point that it seemed right to extend a little further away from Nottingham, so I returned to the furthest place that I’ve mapped in an anti-clockwise direction, but further out. This was a large, recent development in the corner of the junction of Mapperley Plains and Spring Lane.

It was a blisteringly hot day. I normally set out at 9:30am, but this morning needed to finish off entering the previous survey, which took until midday. It was damn cold in the morning so I took 2 coats (English experience) but in the event needed neither after the first hour.

The emotional ripples on the way there were not very agreeable. On the evening at home I saw the Full Moon and went “oh, of course!”. Everyone is wound up tighter at the Full Moon, and unstable folks are more tripwire dangerous (mad dogs). I’m getting tired of continually only becoming concious of this after the fact. I need to complete my transfer to Java of an astronomical ephemeris that I wrote for VB4 35 years ago, and then I should be able to display the tides of human emotion on my desktop. Every good sailor needs to keep their eyes on the tide-tables.

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