OSM booth

At the AbenteuerTage (Adventure Days, a festival where adventurers present their travels) two years ago in exchange for hosting a GPS Workshop I was allowed to represent OpenStreetMap. Last year Gil Bretschneider, operator of the festival, invited me again to have an OSM booth at the festival last weekend. Happily I agreed, although I partly broke my right arm shortly before the beginning.

Again the festival was well organised, everything ran smoothly. Of course one could also meet interesting people when not being at the OSM booth. :)
This time I was so bold to visit one of the presentations of a family with two girls of now eight and four which had travelled Mongolia during three years for about ten months with camels. Although I am of course fascinated by this kind of reports I’d prefer not to listen to the traveller but instead do the travelling on my own.

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Just realised that the steles forming the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe don’t have the correct size. Though I salute to the mapper who mapped the memorial: is there someone who can give the steles their true size? Regarding to wikipedia they are 2.38m to 0.95m (with different height values).
I created one with the exact measures but think that it takes a little more to create all of them in file.

Here the email I just sent to Scout/Skobbler:

Hi,

I’ve had a look at Scout Signs. I agree that this is a comfortable way to collect maxspeed data. What I’ve compared in my region leads me to the following conclusions:

• the average Scout Sign I verified is misplaced by averagely 20 m¹
• all of the speed limits shown by Scout Sign I verified were already mapped in OSM
  –> I’d find it helpful to only show signs in JOSM for highways without maxspeed=* or maxspeed:forward/backward or where the by Scout collected maxspeed doesn’t match the one on the highway
  –> because: after closing a lot of Scout Signs with “it is already in OSM since 1-4 years” the task gets boring
• the OCR seems not to be failsafe: (Sign ID 25587, here)

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A note to self but may also be helpful for other mappers.

Edit: The newer easy undelete of several ways may prove faster results with less work.

Recently I had to undelete a lot of stuff. I used JOSM with enabled remote control, the Plugins todo and reverter on Linux and established this workflow:

• Find a changeset which looks a bit fishy. For example if the user seems quite inexperienced (short time OSM member, small amount of changesets) and has a lot of deleted objects on a changeset this seems worth a second look. Example-Changeset, deleted objects are shown like this¹:
  

• Revert that changeset locally in JOSM using the revert plugin: press ctrl-t, enter the changeset number and click “revert”

Since we don’t want to revert the whole changeset – maybe there are some useful edits in it, too – we need to take some extra steps:

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revenue with month of generation (pay-out two months later)

A small summary

Matching the end-of-year rallies for donations of a lot of institutions I want to have my little share in pointing the people to OpenStreetMap as receiver.

In 2011 I set up an affiliate account for OSM at Amazon.de. Since then a lot of people used the affiliate link to buy their stuff –4315 products– at Amazon so that we had a steady flow of averagely 140 EUR per month. Now for the headline I used: In this very month the 6000 EUR mark will be hit. With the beginning of the new year OSM will have received in total 6.021,25EUR. All numbers in full detail you find at the wiki.

In the name of OpenStreetMap I want to thank everybody who contributed to this sum. Of course I also want to encourage you to continue doing so! ;)

Have some relaxed holidays –
Thomas

Affiliate mit Monat der Erzeugung (Auszahlung 2 Monate später)

Ein kleiner Rückblick

Passend zu den Jahresend-Spendenmarathons aller möglichen Institutionen möchte ich meinen kleinen Teil dazu beitragen, auf OpenStreetMap als Empfänger hinzuweisen.

2011 richtete ich für OSM einen Werbepartner-Account bei Amazon ein. Seitdem haben eine Menge Leute den dazugehörigen Affiliate-Link verwendet, um bei Amazon 4315 Produkte einzukaufen, so dass durchschnittlich 140 EUR pro Monat zustande kamen.
Nun zur Überschrift: In diesem Monat wird die Summe der Auszahlungen die 6000-EUR-Marke überschreiten. Insgesamt wird Amazon zum Jahreswechsel 6.021,25 EUR an OSM überwiesen haben. Detaillierte Zahlen finden sich im Wiki.

Im Namen von OpenStreetMap möchte ich jedem danken, der zu dieser Summe beitrug. Natürlich möchte ich dazu ermuntern, das auch weiterhin zu tun.

Entspannte Feiertage wünschend –
Thomas

Part of a 360° panorama from Mt. Valamarës. Click to see all of it in good quality.

During four weeks of which I hiked about three I used mapillary as described in a previous blog post.
The result were 113.384 pictures with 596 GB size (on ext4 – on exfat it was 623 GB).
The maximum of pictures recorded during a day was 9000, the average per day 4500.
After review 101.261 pictures with 561 GB size (ext4) remained.

Hardware used (lent from the Mapillary company):

• 2x 128 GB microSD card
• 2x deltaco Powerbank 10 Ah
• 2x short cables USB-A–µUSB- ~20 cm
• 1x long cable USB-A–µUSB- ~100 cm
• 1x Sony Xperia Z1 Compact (w/o SIM card)
• 1x external 2,5” USB 3.0 drive 2TB
• 1x OTG-Ycable (purchased on my own)
• Anker 40W charging station (Amazon OSM affiliate link) with 5xUSB with 2A output each. My property, can really recommend it.

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Soon I will hike central Albania starting in the Mirdita and after a double S course hopefully ending on the Tomorr.
Between my messages on twitter and on my Blog you can have a look at older journeys of mine from 2011 and last year (the latter two both in German, but there are also pictures).</p>

Miropafshim!

Like last year I plan to have a walk in Albania during my holidays.¹ The planned route is this. ## Hardware

Though the mobile phones I use are Siemens ME45 I already had had contact with Peter Neubauer from Mapillary now and then and also heard him on Radio OSM (German OSM podcast #31). So I asked him about recommended hardware to run the Mapillary app for some days far away from civilisation and power sources and to store away the lots of images created.

Calculations

In walking mode the Mapillary app is set to make a picture every two seconds as default AFAIK. After having had a first walk with Mapillary this seems to be a reasonable choice. Since my average day trip lasts up to eight hours and I assumedly will hike on 18 days I calculated the following:

pictures/minute x 60 minutes x 8 hours x 18 days x picture size 5 MB = assumed amount of created data
30 x 60 x 8 x 18 x 5 = 1.296.000 MB

Stuff

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Since I got borrowed a Smartphone from Mapillary (more about that soon) but no mounts for car nor anything, I had to make up some. As I needed one for the car I had nothing usable with me than an old T-Shirt which was dedicated for cleaning purposes. I just ripped a strip from it – et violá: lowest cost smartphone mount ever
A sequence recorded this way

A mount for walking was not as easy to create. I purchased what seemed to be a durable smartphone cover for about 8 EUR and a 30 cm long strip of 5 cm wide hook-and-loop fastener for ~1,50 EUR.

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This edit saved the world!!1:

(according to JOSM the ways length is 31.651m)

Today I exceeded the number of 1000 sent messages:

The number of received messages is 618.

Maybe others have sent more messages but in the beginning

• I was nearly the only active mapper in my region;
• there were little QA Tools (or I did not know them) and
• I had a lot work in my region so I had no as much time as now to bother other users. :)

Zu meiner Wanderung durch Albanien, die auch Grundlage für den Wanderreise-Vortrag bei den Linuxtagen war, gibt es nun detaillierte Berichte, Karten, Höhenmeterangaben und Fotos en masse.
Wer sich etwas Zeit mit der Lektüre oder dem Betrachten der Bilder vertreiben möchte: hier entlang.
Einige Bilder sind bei Wikimedia Commons besser aufgehoben.

Hochtal zwischen Dhëmbel- und Nemërçka by malenki; CC-by-SA 3.0

This nice willow tree I found last summer during my holidays. A nice view but not so nice for people with wheelchairs or prams.

I cannot help but share two images of a place I stumbled over today while mapping a little. A decaying house with a half collapsed outhouse at its side - but some flowers were well attended:

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JOSM seems to get translated at transifex and launchpad, you can file bugs against JOSM at josm.openstreetmap.de and github, you can file bug against a lot of OSM things at trac.osm.org and github, too.

It doesn’t matter when all resources are handled equally, but it is not so nice when you look at the wrong place…

Just read it at the tagging ML and cannot help but have to share it with you: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:Tag:natural=cloud
Hopefully some interested people will comment and vote on it – and the uninterested will use it for mapping.

*OSM-Stand auf den CLT 2014 direkt nach dem Aufbau*

Vergangenes Wochenende fanden die Chemnitzer Linuxtage 2014 statt. OpenStreetMap hatte wieder einen Präsentationsstand, an dem vielen Besuchern Fragen beantwortet werden konnten.
Wie üblich waren die Fragen der Besucher thematisch breit gefächert:

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Im Mai 2011 habe ich den Affiliate-Account für OSM.de bei amazon.de erstellt und kümmere mich seitdem darum. Gestern wurde die Auszahlung für Dezember 2013 in Höhe von 214,18 EUR überweisen.
Bis jetzt hat das Partnerprogramm des deutschsprachigen Amazon insgesamt 4448,35 EUR abgeworfen – eine hübsche Summe.
Vielen Dank an alle, die dazu beigetragen haben!

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In May 2011 I created the affiliate account for OSM.de at Amazon and maintain it since. Yesterday the money for December – 214,18 EUR – was transferred.

Until now the affiliate program of the German Amazon has payed with 4448,35 EUR – a nice sum.
Thanks to everybody who had their share on it!

But I wonder if there ever will be someone managing affiliates for amazon.com. In 2011 I had also set up an account for that Amazon branch. Due to the lack of an bank account in the US to connect with the account I communicated the affiliate account details to OSM-US. Since I have asked now and then how (if even) it is going – no definite answer so far.…

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