I've been absent for a good while. I had planned to keep up the OSM work throughout the year but other things took up my time and it fell off the priority list. Then suddenly I found myself a father, and having a baby means long walks, and long walks of course means I can bring my phone and do some tracing! So I'm trying to get back into mapping, and we'll see what happens. Today I took a long walk around some areas nearby which were completely missing and filled in some blanks. I'm going back for another pass in a day or two, just got the major roads and cycleways down today.
I also spent some time cleaning up and finally got around to plot out the houses in my neighbourhood, something I've been meaning to do since day one. :)
Well, it's late so signing off for now.

The effort goes on. I was out for a three hour walk around the neighbourhood in the morning, mapped out a few streets, cycleways and a few paths in the nearby woods. When I got home I noticed I got a message from a fellow mapper in the area, so I wrote him a reply. I've also been reading up on rules and keys, but I'm still unsure about a lot of the roads and paths nearby, and I'll probably need to re-tag a few of them in the future as I'm sure I haven't been tagging everything properly.

I've still to attempt to get Tiles@Home running on my server, but there hasn't been time to look into it yet. Hopefully I'll find the time some day this week.

I'm quite tired, I was out walking for a total of over five hours today - good exercise! And a lot of fun! It's great to see some of the features on the map are coming together now. My street and the adjacent streets are shaping up better and better. I should start adding buildings and street numbers soon too, to make it complete.

Today was my first day of Geocaching, I brought my girlfriend along and together we found four caches. She enjoyed it a lot, too. It'll certainly be great fun to do this summer when we'll be driving to northern Sweden and Lofoten in Norway for our summer vacation.

Tomorrow I plan to take the bike around a few nearby areas which I haven't mapped yet. I'm also planning a ride up to Slottsbergs Mosse in Ruddalen, a relatively small pond, to map it out along with the trails there.

Well, Easter is all but over. Family dinners and parties are all visited, gifts have been exchanged and much fun has been had. I came home earlier than I expected, so I actually had a bit of time to take an afternoon stroll through the Påvelund woods today and map out the jogging trail there. I've started to study mapping keys, which tags to use and so on, and I've probably made a ton of errors but I'm getting there. I feel like such a noob at this, but I'm sure it'll pass once I get the hang of the jargon and the correct tags.
I also took the liberty of mapping out some missing streets from memory with the assistance of the background tiles. I intend to take a ride around the neighbourhood in the coming days and map out all the streets I've free-handed, in order to make sure they're correctly drawn.
I noticed there used to be a few mappers in my general area and there's a page on the Wiki detailing the status of the Gothenburg area mapping effort, but I'm unsure whether any of them are still active. I can't imagine there'd be nobody else in the entire city who isn't into OSM, there's got to be at least one more person around here, right?

Oh, I also discovered the phenomenon of 'Geocaching' today. Well, I've heard of it before but never paid it much attention until now. It seems like good fun, and there are a lot of caches in the vicinity that I could start with. I might go off on a bit of treasure hunting tomorrow when I'm out mapping. :)

I had a day off work, so I decided to go for a ride and map out some of my neighbourhood. Since I was due at the dentist after lunch and it's a long trip there and back I only had about an hour of biking time this morning. I realized quickly that doing thorough mapping takes _a lot_ more time than I had initially thought. To map out just my street and the closest neighbourhood will take several weeks of tracking and mapping at the very least.
But I'm not deterred. I'm going to take it one step at a time, tracking a new route every time I go for a walk or a ride, constantly adding data as I go. But my next big project is to start nailing down mapping and key rules so that I don't need to go back and edit later. I'll attempt to build a relatively complete area with a number of different features that I can make as perfect as possible, both as a reference for future mapping efforts and as a tool to teach myself the rules.
Tomorrow and Saturday will be pretty slow mapping days for me, as I'll be away on Easter dinners and family gatherings and such, but Sunday and Monday are holidays and I have nothing else planned - if the weather permits, I'll spend most of my time outside with my bike and my iPhone. :)

I also have a Mac Mini server in my living room which really is idle most of the time, I might look into getting Tiles@Home running on it as well, although from what I read it looks like a bit of a hassle.

All in all, a fun first day! Although I have a bit of a toothache from the visit to the dentist which I could do without. :P

I've been mountain biking around the woods and parks of Gothenburg for the last seven years, and I've always wanted to keep some sort of record of where I've been, which trails I've ridden, highlights and waypoints - in other words, I've wanted a good GPS solution. But ordinary GPS units have been cumbersome, limited and most of all - another gadget that needed lugging around.
Well, last week, I finally went the distance and got myself a shiny new iPhone 3G. And what a wonderful piece of IC's, plastic and pixels it is! Its built-in GPS, though somewhat lacking in reception capability from what I've gathered so far, is perfectly suited for my needs.
So I set out to find a good piece of software for my riding and found MotionX, which is a nifty little piece of GPS tracker and map targeted at cyclists like myself. I saw this "OpenStreetMap" name in the lower corner of the screen and wondered what it was. I checked out the website, and was pretty much immediately hooked. So much of the area around where I live is unmapped, inaccurate or outdated and I want to fix that! I'm going to start recording some trails today; start to learn about guidelines, rules of conduct and mapping keys.
I'll begin with the area around my home. It looks pretty easy to get the hang of this, and with a bit of luck, I might have found a new hobby. Not that I really need another one, but it might go well in hand with my biking interest.

If there are any other mappers in the general area of Gothenburg who are interested in giving me some tips and/or pointers, feel free to send me a note!

More to come.