I'm continuing to improve the high zoom coverage of Cambridge by adding more paths within colleges, some areas of trees, drainage ditches that connect to the river Cam, etc. I've also started filling in bus stops, which are one of the few advantages Google Maps coverage has over OSM for Cambridge. I'm surveying the bus stops in person, with GPS unit and camera.

I've also traced a load more buildings on Sidgwick Site (off West Road) and in the centre (mainly churches) using Yahoo coverage, although I've not filled in the names for most of the new ones yet. I'll have to go there in person to flesh out the remaining details...

Went out with my usual expeditioning buddy and took some traces of more footpaths West of Cambridge. This time primarily between Long Road and Hardwick (finishing off a network of paths that were mostly already completed there) and between Hardwick and Caldecote (also joining up with existing paths).

Whilst out there I also did some detective work: the out-of-copyright NPE maps show a stream that starts somewhere near Hardwick and goes down through Coton. I've surveyed portions of this stream directly where it went alongside footpaths and was able to use the NPE map to join these portions up. Similarly, NPE revealed that a stream I'd seen flowing from Dry Drayton to Hardwick was called "Callow Brook" and extended south into Hardwick itself...

My theory is that these are the same waterway and that the old OS surveyors just didn't have time to confirm that they joined up. I'm not able to check using satellite maps as there's no Yahoo coverage in the area. I was able to extend the path of the stream a bit more through direct survey; next time I'm hoping to take some compass bearings of whatever bits I can get to, in order to confirm that they join up. It's fun to explore :-)

The Bury St Edmunds mapping party last Saturday attracted five people. Despite the miserable weather forecast, it was actually a pleasant, warm, rainless day, so between us we got about 30 person-hours of surveying done. I think this amounts to about 70% of the city. There is a much new development on the eastern fringes of the city that wasn't apparent from Landsat so Donald rather drew the short straw on that one. North through west and south is pretty much done (and most, but not all, the data for those now uploaded) except for a small bit in the south east. And then the dense section of the town centre south of Abbeygate Street remains to be surveyed.

Of the bits I did, I discovered an excellent cycleway in from the west parallel to the A14 which I didn't know existed. A new access road to West Suffolk college will be a first. Slightly surprisingly the river really does go right through the middle of Tewco's car park! The maze of narrow one-way residential streets in the old town immediately north of the centre meant going round several times if I wasn't to keep breaking the rules. There is an obscene amount of car parking around the town centre, though some of what I remember as car park on my last visit there a couple of years ago is now having a new shopping centre built on it.

K 36 (SZ 36) Lückenschluss zur K 50 (PE 50)

… turn it over, put a fork in it, it's done. No, not quite, but I have left some bits in much better shape. Not the bits I expected to do, but that's weather for you.

It's now more than two weeks since we returned from our ski trip in Canterbury, a trip where I learned to love and eke my primitive eTrex. That sounds a little wrong but it's actually all good. I collected pages and pages of scribbled notes, as many tracks as I could squeeze in, more waypoints than I saw sheep (not really), and most importantly, fantastic ideas, experiences, and techniques.

The weather meant that we visited places I didn't expect, and didn't visit places I did expect, so all my prepared printouts were rendered useless. I was forced to educatedly guess what would have had good coverage and what would have had usable aerial photography (back on the interweb). More edumacation would be a fine thing. We only skied one resort, Mount Hutt, where we'd hoped to get to three. Only three days of skiing (including an unplanned Saturday), but nice powder on those days. I didn't expect to take a cross-country train journey – in fact, the plan was hatched and decision made while the train was still at Springfield station. No-one expects the Spanish Inquisition. I may document my tractivity in more detail on the wiki some day. This diary entry mustn't digress into a travelogue.

I've really hit the edits most nights since we returned to complete what I had to. As light relief, I've finally worked through a couple of my backlog of Oz-trailian bushwalk traces, too. I've pondered bus stops and bus routes. All good stuff. I've had Potlatch running on a LiveCD on a spare laptop for a while now to do my editing. I think it's the last major tranche of work I will do with a live editing tool, unless the network round-trip can magickly speed up.

Here are my random observations. Many will be obvious to those with a blood supply to their head:

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And working out how to use User Diaries. As a start this is the information from my wiki profile which I think should have been diary entries instead.

As at 15th August 2008 I became the owner of a Locosys Genie NaviGPS GT-31 - and am now working out how to drive it. Trial and error at the post office car park might have captured the route home, but we'll see.

18/08/2008 As it turns out it hadn't captured the route home - I hadn't set an interval for tracking my route. Since then I've done a few 1 second intervals of roads in and around Clacton, as well as a 5 second interval route pushing a pram around an industrial estate! Someone said this was addictive. Anyway, I think I've now mastered mini-roundabouts, roundabouts, level-crossings and bridges in JOSM and I'm getting the hang of the different street types. As an aside I went to Wivenhoe at the weekend (as chauffeur to daughters) and that looks beautifully mapped already. At some point I'll work out the OSM user diaries as I suspect I should move these sort of notes there.

Did a bit of walking around Cuckmere Haven, Seven Sisters and Alfriston on the weekend. Have now done the editing, and found that lots of the area is well covered by Yahoo aerial, so I added some of the cliffs and water areas. I was surprised that the South Downs Way (footpath version) doesn't seem to have been mapped yet. I only added it as a name to paths, I think a relation will need doing sometime to link it all up.

Stayed up all night learning to use JOSM properly (well, from about 1am anyway). Suddenly realised it was ~5am and that it wasn't worth going to bed. But I did a tonne of updates! Had only got node editing practice before, but now I'm getting happier adding/editing/splitting ways, and even did an area. It's really not the simplest interface to learn, but I can see how it can be quite quick to use when your fingers know the shortcut keys well. Still managed to hit Ctrl-Z too often while using Ctrl-Alt-Shift to add nodes near existing items. Honestly, 3 simultaneous fingers plus a mouse click! Maybe I need to check the manual or default options more. Also still not happy how to get the layers set up and having the ones I want visible at the same time (and actually usefully visible, not in grey/... I know I can mess with colours, not done that yet much except for my GPS traces). Why does it sometimes seem to make a layer invisible if I click on it and other times not, but if I test clicking on the left end of it rather than the name it doesn't make a difference!

JOSM rant...
I want to be able to move around the map using Search, or double-clicking on a node in the "commands" window to check it out... Or when the validation plugin pulls up a problem, to be able to go to it and highlight it for a second or so when I click on it! I don't really know enough Java to help out without it being slow and painful, but if I did I'd be v.tempted!

Localities Edited...
Woolwich Royal Arsenal development - improvements to one or two paths and tags, added the square on the main walkway down to the riverfront (but wasn't sure on how to tag it, so left a FIXME tag with a note).

south side of Vauxhall - road names in some of the residential areas there, one-way indicattors (meant reversing and splitting/re-combining a few way segments, so good practice!)

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Ich habe mit Hilfe der Yahoo-Bilder eben mal den Wald rund um den Meißner eingezeichnet. Ist aber wahrscheinlich noch an einigen Stellen verbesserungswürdig ;)

Habe wieder ein paar Straßen nachgetragen.
Robert-Koch-Straße, Goethestraße, Hammerstraße, Friedrich-Engels-Straße, Formerstraße.
Weiterhin einige Korrekturen bzw. Ergänzungen.
Kreisverkehr in Lauchhammer-Mitte.
Begrenzung auf 30km/h am Kindergarten in Schwarzheide.
Ampeln auf der Kreuzung Ruhland (Bundesstraße und Autobahnauffahrten).

When people come across bike racks, what do they put down as the capacity? Do you specify the number of hoops, or twice the number of hoops as you can usually comfortably fit 2 bikes per hoop, one on each side? My regular one I use for work usually ends up with many hoops having 3 bikes and on occasion even 4 per hoop (shows Westminster's cycle policy up against others - a trip through North West London/West End recently amazed me at how many racks there are, and not just near stations!)

-

Worked on:

McConachie
Brintnell
Hollick-Kenyon
Miller
McLeod East
McLeod West

Anyone know why a big square box has appeared off the north west coast of Scotland?

Also, while I'm asking, I'm curious as to why there are so many German people adding entries? Is the situation with maps the same in Germany as in the UK, ie, a government agency owns all the rights to the maps?

Cheers

Mike

Hallo,
ich bin heute mit dem MTB zum Berg "Weißer Stein" hochgefahren und habe ein paar Waldweg ergänzt.
Grüße, gewi

Jetzt ist auch der Stadtteil Wittlaer im Düsseldorfer Norden
per GPS vermessen und mit JOSM kartiert worden.

Es fehlen noch Feinheiten, aber das grobe Straßennetz steht.

black_bike

Ich habe heute wieder diverse Waldstücke im Werra Meissner Kreis ergänzt. Auch eine Straßen/Wege bei Mitterode.
Ist noch nicht gerendert, erst diese Woche Mittwoch!

Hallo,

nachdem ich jetzt die Karte nutze, muss ich auch was beitragen. Ich habe heute die ersten Wege im Maudacher Bruch eingetragen und fange an mich um die Gartenstadt zu bemühen.

Gerhard

Cuando salgo a viajar llevo mi GPS encendido para grabar todo el trayecto sobretodo cuando es una ruta nueva en mi coleccion, y quiero compartir lo que tengo por medio de esta pagina.
Tambien me he dedicado a medir haciendas y ganarme algo de dinero.

I've added GPS traces for this route in the Western Cape, South Africa and traced the footpaths. Sections of Nursery ravine were too wooded to get GPS reception, so it was a bit of "join the dotted lines". Must be very colse, though.