OpenStreetMap
The last bit of Stonebridge Park was mapped yesterday. The City Farm is NOT part of that district but I took the opportunity to walk some of the paths & take some pictures so that you could go “Ooh look! Middle-aged horses close to some houses!”.
Stonebridge Road is an otherwise unnoteworthy road in Nottingham NG3. It came to my attention back in April 2016 when I tried to get some opendata from the local GIS department. I pointed out that Central Government had told the Ordnance Survey to share their data publically (giving all relevant links) but, in spite of them also committing themselves to sharing public data, the GIS dept said they “would not be permitted by Ordnance Survey as this would basically be providing people with a copy of their product”. The triangle of what is now known as “Stonebridge Park” thus remained a white spot until recently when finally we got some satellite imagery that could show it. Mostly (some houses are still not on those tiles).
Having spent March 21 mapping much of it here are a couple of features.
The estate was redeveloped as a Radburn Design in the 1970s from former Victorian housing and, whilst many of those 1970s houses were demolished in the 2010s, the street layout was largely kept. The council tried to make some improvements. Here are some of the new houses in Jersey Gardens:–
Well, it just keeps getting better, doesn’t it?
In the intro I pointed out what had kept me prevaricating & not surveying for 22 months.
Next was the discovery that OSMTracker v0.7 was utter tosh since it would not produce viable tracks on my phone.
Next was that in addition v0.7 also had most GPS missing from the photos, and that diary was a howTo Fix the Photos, putting GPS back into them.
Finally this diary sees me re-install OSMTracker v0.6.11 and go out tracking recently-built houses within Stonebridge Estate on March 21. There were a number of discoveries:–
After installing OSMTracker v0.7 on my Android SmartPhone on the Ides of March, then using it the next day for the first time, I discovered that not only did it not track (a touch of an existential issue for a GPS Tracker - how come no-one noticed that before?) but photos taken with the App also were lacking almost all GPS info within the metadata, making them useless for Mapillary.
~/DCIM/Camera$ identify -verbose IMG_20190316_092818.jpg | fgrep GPS
exif:GPSAltitudeRef: 240/100
exif:GPSInfo: 686
It was a short session and only 43 photos, but I did not want to waste them if it could be helped. Somewhere in my searching I came across two really old plugins for JOSM which worked to fix that absence:
photo_geotagging
photoadjust
My phone is a cheap model from Vodaphone (SmartPrime-7, model VFD 600, Andoid 6.0.1) and has been able to add a full set of GPS tags to the photos that it takes with the built-in utility from the get-go, let alone when using OSMTracker. Even so, after taking photos under OSMTracker-0.7 and exporting a GPX (track-file), even though the gpx contained lat/long/compass for each photo, the photos themselves did not.
April update: Location needs to be switched on for BOTH the smartphone and the camera. They are independent actions within my model.
Inside JOSM:–
tl;dr: Location ON within your smartphone before tracking, you also need to switch Location ON for the camera, else no GPS metadata.I’ve made use of OSMTracker v0.6.11 since starting surveying for OSM on 21 March, 2016. It does not do a lot (GPS track, take GPS-located photos + voice notes), but it does them simply, easily & well and — more to the point — in my opinion that is pretty much all that you need whilst surveying.
There is just one thing that I would like to see added to OSMTracker, and that is for the GPS direction (probably GPSImgDirection) to be added to photo’s exif. That would allow Mapillary to know which direction the camera was pointing in when the photo was taken, which would assist it’s processing of the photos after being uploaded.
On a day in May 2017 2 crack-heads† tried to kill me as I was mapping. They failed, I dialled 999, the police attended & in the end decided to ignore it (no CCTV, and the police sergeant claiming a lack of resources to investigate).
I guess that it is simple middle-class naivety on my part but I was profoundly affected by what I thought of as the refusal of the police to defend me.
The UK government has taken away the right to bear arms from all except the police, military & criminals (thank you Tony Blair). A former member of the Territorial Army that I know was recently asked to help clear his parent-in-law’s house following her death and discovered viable pistols + shotguns in the attic. He took the pistols back to his house and shortly afterwards was descended upon by the police. I counted 15 police at one stage standing around chatting outside his house + an unknown number inside. The whole palaver went on all night until the next morning, including police film-crews with portable floodlights conducting interviews outside the house with other police. The entire family is now in shock & clearly suffering from PTSD.
I had a touch of PTSD myself for the next 19 months, spending most of my time after the crack-head incident inside my house. I certainly could not face any surveying. In the end it was obvious that I had to drag myself up by the bootstraps and do something — in effect, re-boot myself.
Some little leaflets originally produced by Andy Allan were most useful but I was almost out of them. So, I spent time updating those promotional OSM leaflets and getting them printed.
Whilst huddled in my burrow Mapillary had spent it’s time vandalising my photos, all 6,200 of them. So, I spent time attempting to undo the damage using their blur editor. They ignored all my work.
Above is one of the final of the set of photos taken May 8, 2017, within the edge of a stand of wild trees looking north-west towards the ruins of Chase Farm. It is close to a ridge of high ground which runs from Nottingham (to the South-West) towards the North-East, which is on the other side of the Farm, and which today is called “Mapperley Plains”. Only 150 years ago it was full of trees and was called “Sherwood Forest” (yes, that Sherwood Forest), was originally owned by the King and renowned for The Chase.
I’ve finally added all the stuff I surveyed back in 2017 to the map, and will very soon be free to begin mapping again after a gap of 2 years. The bypass whose development you can just see on the LHS is one of the things that needs mapping.
Hope you like the photo.
This is the second time that I’ve come across a Flood Lagoon (the far-more-impressive first time was back on 20 June 2016 with the Carlton Foxhill Road Central Flood Prevention Lagoon. Thanks to lots of help provided on that First Contact, and after a phone call with Nav today (“my name is ‘Nav‘, like ‘SatNav’”) I’ve also got the inside skinny from Severn Trent on this one. And it is complicated…
There is a rectangle of grass (map) that encloses the whole thing:–
landuse = grass3 sides have a metre-high fence (map):–
menu: Highways|Barriers|Fence
The man-made structure that you can see in the centre of that photo above is two outlet pipes for a culvert that conducts surface water from the nearby estate’s roads into the soakaway:–
BuildingsTools plugin (Wiki)
Terracer plugin (Wiki)
In the previous post I showed the basic steps of using the building_tools and terracer plugins together to map buildings with JOSM on to the OSM map, so make sure to read that if you get lost at all during this post. This section will give a pot-pouri of how to perform more advanced tasks using the same two plugins. It will start with 2 Bradstone Drive.
For some reason these are very common in England (this particular house is a 2-story modern house — built in the last 5 years — but bungalows in this style have been built like that since the ’20s). As a detached house, adding the L-shape can be done either before or after using terracer, but for all other houses any changes to the basic rectangle of a terrace must only be done after terracing the building.
That’s it - an L-shaped house. A similar procedure can be performed for buildings with rear-extensions, etc.
BuildingsTools plugin (Wiki)
Terracer plugin (Wiki)
Nottingham City Council maintain an Adopted Highways Register which is fantastic for confirming both adopted & un-adopted streets local to me + house-numbers and, on occasion, housenames. The info comes from Ordnance Survey and therefore has a Crown Copyright. Because of that, it is important that I point out that I use the site to confirm my earlier survey results, rather than copying from it.
Adopted Highways register
A highway and a public right of way mean the same thing; they are both a “way” over which the public have a right to pass and repass at all times of the day and night. The term highway includes all carriageways (roads), streets, footways (pavements), footpaths, bridleways and byways. A highway may also include the adjacent verges.
This site shows which highways are adopted. If a highway is adopted it means it is maintained and repaired by Nottingham City Council. It also shows public rights of way (footpaths, bridleways and byways) both adopted and un-adopted which are recorded on the Definitive Map and Statement. This is the legal record of public rights of way in Nottingham at the time the Map and Statement were last updated (the “relevant date”).
You will therefore understand that the above is also the legal status that allows OSM surveyors in the UK to both survey and photograph from those highways anything that they can see.
One of the keys to using JOSM is to teach yourself to use the keyboard at the same time as you use the mouse. Once you have a small selection of keyboard shortcuts in your head things will go much quicker.
BuildingsTools plugin (Wiki)
Terracer plugin (Wiki)
2 mins tutorial: Drawing Buildings in JOSM
(from the HOT team; a little old, but still accurate)
Most of my time post-survey is spent mapping houses & roads - it is rare that a road is not already mapped, though naturally they always need checking and sometimes correcting. In contrast, it is rare in the areas that I survey that any houses are mapped at all.
Here is an account of my current startup sequence after launching JOSM from *menu | Education | JOSM (latest snapshot):–
The Operating System (OS) is different on my computer now from when I last used JOSM, so it had to be installed from scratch. Here is a bunch of stuff that should be useful if you need to install JOSM:–
The following will be install instructions for Devuan / Debian / Ubuntu:–
This is my OS:–
$ lsb_release -da
Distributor ID: Devuan
Description: Devuan GNU/Linux 2.0 (ascii)
Release: 2.0
Codename: ascii
At this moment my profile shows 1,822 edits, all done with JOSM, so it would seem reasonable to assume that I know JOSM inside-out. Well, yes & no.
My OS is different than the last time I used JOSM, so everything needed to be done from the beginning, again. My thought was to make use of this opportunity to give advice to those starting from scratch and trying to learn how on earth to use this programme. Uniquely, I’m both well-experienced and a complete novice in using it at the same time, and that may help give me an insight into what newbies may need to know.
This will be just an introductory post. The meat of the matter will start at the next post.
I do not intend to structure the help too strongly. It will be a bunch of disparate stuff as I come across it whilst editing. I strongly urge others to add in their own useful titbits in the comments, or to correct wrongful info.
I know that on first sight that it does not look like it, but this street sign (above) at the corner of Foxhill Road & Forester Grove near Carlton, Nottingham contains 62 blurs! There are so many that the listing (see the window in an earlier diary) stops at #44 with all the rest on the LHS out of site below the window.
A piece of advice from an old man:
Make sure that you admit your mistakes, and try to do so promptly. Otherwise you will find yourself unable to change and making the same stupid errors over & over again, which is most boring.
The picture below was shot on 15 July 2016 on the corner of Carnarvon Grove & Cavendish Road within the parish of Carlton, Nottingham. Like so many other Nottingham street signs it has been vandalised, in this case quite recently, and the vandalism was performed by Mapillary.
I suspect that Mapillary may have jumped the shark. They are certainly losing my affections. After about 10 12-hour days spent editing a few thousand blurs within 69 sets of photographs, yet without any action on their part, I recently sent them an email:
From: Me
Subject: Re: [Mapillary] Re: Re: [Mapillary] Blur editor ineffective
To: Mapillary <[email protected]>
More problems with the Blur Editor window:
(Be warned that today’s Diary is most whimsical)
(PS That picture above is linked to a “Family singalong”)
There is a house on Kenrick Road, Porchester Gardens, Nottingham that is called “Fool’s Jig”, and there is a link in the map to a picture lodged within Mapillary of that House-Name (below).
Is Location on my Smartphone going to die? OS updates may well be available, but Vodaphone stopped providing them 0 secs after I bought it.
(boring detail from the Register link above follows)
GPS satellites contain an atomic clock, and the signal that they put out contains a timestamp derived from that clock. The timestamp is an inherent part of the way in which a device Location is calculated from the accumulated GPS signals. However, that Timestamp stores the week number using ten binary bits…
Ten binary bits == 2¹⁰ == 1,024 weeks ≈ 20 years
The first GPS satellite launch was 1978. The first epoch was 6 January 1980 & the first rollover was midnight UTC Sun 22 Aug 1999 & the next will be the first Saturday in April 2019. Yikes!
If you want to see the timestamp for a JPEG with embedded Location info, then do this (and note: this was done because the time went weird for this set of photos (all 3 timestamps should be the same)):–
$ identify -verbose 2016-10-08_11-27-27.jpg | fgrep 'exif:DateTime'
exif:DateTime: 2016:10:08 10:27:27
exif:DateTimeDigitized: 2016:10:08 10:27:27
exif:DateTimeOriginal: 2016:10:08 21:58:52
I’m indebted to TheSwavu (see Comments) for a link to wired.com detailing how everything went fine (?) on the last time this happened in 1999:–
At 8 p.m. EDT Saturday (21 Aug 1999), the clock was reset to zero
The US Coast Guard said it was unaware of any serious distress calls from boaters related to malfunctioning GPS receivers.
He said fewer than 12 Coast Guard cutters, aircraft, boats, cars, and other auxiliary vessels reported a glitch, however fleeting, when their GPS receivers failed to update automatically. Fixing those short-lived glitches typically required nothing more than powering down a GPS receiver to get re-synchronized with the satellites, McPherson said.
Mapillary is a location-photo-sharing site dedicated to inter-working with OSM & I like it a lot.
Mapillary is the street-level imagery platform that uses computer vision to fix the world’s maps.
450.7 million images; 6.5 million kilometers covered
I am registered on Mapillary since Apr 10, 2016 and it tells me that in that time I have uploaded 6,200 photographs shot whilst walking across 244.7 km of Nottingham’s suburbs. Most of those photos are registered as links with various PoI on the map, which means that someone browsing OSM can find a link attached to a Nottingham point-of-interest that will instantly let them see a blurred photo of what it looks like 32% of the time.
At the moment that I am writing these words the following photo has 33 auto-blurs attached to it, 32 of which affect the street-sign on the right (the 33rd is on the brickwork to the right):–
This is a another small update to a sequence of posts on updating some small leaflets originally produced by Andy Allan:–
This is how to add crop-marks and bleed-marks to a production-PDF for printing (the PDFs within GitHub do NOT currently contain any crop-marks and, whilst they contain 3mm bleed, they do NOT contain bleed marks either):–
This is a small update to a sequence of posts on updating some small leaflets originally produced by Andy Allan:–
Yesterday & earlier today this website was producing a HTTP 500 errors (server error, explicitly reported as an error in communicating with a 3rd-party server). It occurred as I attempted to update my post on Printing OSM Promotional Leaflets. I sent an email to the Server folks.
A few minutes ago I succeeded in updating that post but again noticed occasional problems, which appeared to be connected with the Markdown used on this site. Openstreetmap.org is also sometimes very slow in loading a page.