I thought it would be a nice demonstration of OSM's flexibility to produce a map of all the places in the world containing Darwin in the name - from Darwin College Cambridge to Darwin in Australia. Although this is a gimmick, it would be of some interest in 2009 as it is the bicentenary of Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his work, ‘On the Origin of Species’ (see www.darwin2009.cam.ac.uk). The many organisations which will be staging events in 2009 might be interested in a map like this which they could freely use on their sites and this would showcase OSM to a wider audience.

Making such a map is slightly beyond my (very limited) abilities and making it look pretty might take a bit of time. I thought I would start by posting something here to see if anyone has an ideas / suggestions and wants to take this on. I am happy to help if I can, for example by trying to generate publicity once the map exists. If there are no takers here, I'll try the mailing list.

Oliver

To deal with the excess consumption of Christmas I have rigged my mountain bike with GPS Tracking so that I can plot tracks and get fit at the same time. I'm using a Garmin 12XL I've owned for a good few years now and found that nobody sells handlebar mounts anymore. The few that still had stock were asking £30+ for something a bit fancier than I needed. I had a dig around in my workshop and found an old ever-ready cycle light mount that with some sawing, drilling and filing now makes a cracking handlebar mount for my GPS.
I have used a cable made up from some connectors I purchased at http://www.pfranc.com/ (I have some of the originals that were black). This cable allows me to to power the GPS from a 12v gel battery similar to those used in burglar alarm panels and not have to worry about power. The battery is simply carried in a bag in the drinks bottle holder.
I found some new firmware for the 12XL (new to me anyway) but I have found that the auto setting in the tracklog is now not recording with sufficient frequency for accurate maps as it cuts corners. I simply have to set a suitable logging rate for the speed I intend to travel and I get nice rounded corners again or slow down for intricate bits.
I have done a couple of trips and captured most of the key roads for Winterton, Ormesby and Hemsby and have uploaded the Tracklogs to OSM. Hemsby has been edited in JOSM and should appear soon.

Добавих третокласния път 5601 - Шипка - Шейново - Дунавци. Също така - пътя до язовир Копринка. Третокласния път - Казанлък - Бузовград - Розово - Кънчево - Ръжена. Добавих и град Шипка, както и няколко улици в него (главната до центъра, до Шипченския храм-паметник "Рождество Христово"). Също така добавих улица в Казанлък, както и подобрих пътната мрежа.

Wow, I needed half a year to create a Wiki-page describing the mapping-party I did with some pupils at the Friedrich-Dessauer-Gymnasium in Aschaffenburg.

Here it is (in german):
osm.wiki/Aschaffenburg/FDG-Aktion

I have had the opportunity to add yet another major natural feature in the Truckee area: Donner Lake.

Добавих пешеходните улици в центъра, както и алеите в парк "Тюлбето", където е и Тракийската гробница.

So I've mapped the roads where I live - my very first contribution. Some of the local road names escape me - I don't use them all that often - so I'll have a walk round and start adding stuff. I also have trouble remembering exactly what streets branch off of St. Leonard's road, so I've still got quite a bit of mapping to do in my local area...

Mapping the dirt road from Idre to Fulufjället Nationalpark and the hiking track up to Njupeskär waterfall. Also the hiking track to Vålåberget, a hill near Idre.

So I got my Garmin this week! It's really been a lot of fun learning how it works and thinking of the work in terms of tags and mapping details.

At first when I looked at Portland metro on osm I thought "wow it's DONE! ... What's left for me?" Well "fortunately" I searched for food in the area and the nearest was a few miles away.

So now I know my task... to add points of interest wherever I go. Today I tagged fast as I could while my wife was driving... Taco Bell, Wendy's Walmart, things like that. And now when I feel cooped up in the house and it's late and there's nowhere to go I can walk around downtown and tag all those restaurants everywhere. Oh well, for a month anyways before my move. :-)

Any other n00b projects I ought to work on in Portland to build my skills? If the city has all the streets basically done I don't need to make tracks do I? Just add waypoints and information, or would tracks at this point still have some value?

-DC

So, I've now moved from Glasgow to Switzerland - tis sunnier but the hills are bigger. Plan A is to get Arzier mapped fully, however I've only got one wee trail mapped so far while I took dogs for walk. In the meantime I've added a few labels to the some of the buildings at work (CERN)

Roßberg und Wittelsberg nach GPS-Track gemappt. Außerdem kleinere Korrekturen und Ergänzungen in Heskem-Mölln und Dreihausen.

Wow ... I think I have broken all my other records, regarding contributing to online projects. Well, I have multiple years of CPU time donated to various distributed projects, but not where I (me, myself) have spent so much time on making a project better.

Tonight I have helped translating some portions of the Wiki to Danish. This is my first translation job, so I hope that my fellow danes will accept my work. Otherwise, they can do it them self.

I have also spent some time reading on how to get better at map editing and tried installing Merkaartor a nice program, when you get to now its way to work. :)

Drove again out to cover some unmapped roads.

This time the road from E10 to Grov, "Riksvei 829".

Dark, raining, wet ice in some turns. Even some rocks had come falling down the mountain-side onto the road.

Made the trip without accidents.

I got an idea for my own map software. Something to complete what I feel missing from existing software, and keep it fully cross platform. The name of the software is (at the moment) Y-NOT (pronounced Why Not), an acronym for You Need Only This. You can soon read more about Y-NOT on my project wiki.

Last Sunday I visited Fortaleza da Santa Cruz da Barra in Niterói, I have added some details about it on the map, such as the access road to the fort, the limits of the military area, the parking lot and the restaurant. I might trace the walls of the fort later. There are a few other forts I'd like to visit, but that will have to be another time. They are marked from Yahoo images at the moment. Maybe others visiting Niterói can assist?

Coming Sunday I will pick up a rented car and prepare for the journey back to Guarapari, if time and weather permints I'll ascend Corcovado (the famous Christ statue in Rio de Janeiro), the road up there was impossible to track from areal photos. I will also complete BR-101 through Campos, making the route from Feira da Santana to Angros dos Reis complete. I might also detour to get Cabo Frio and Macae on the map. If time permits I will also pass to track the missing bit of ES-060, though I have a feeling that this goes out.

I add the ways, places and buildings at Sportanlage Paul-Heyse-Straße in Berlin Pankow.

(I thought it would be better to blog in english)

I'v been out on my bike yesterday to do some mapping north of Kleinostheim. First, everything went well and some tracks and "Towers of Power" have been mapped. Suddenly I realised that my laptop wasn't logging any longer so I went back the same way I came. It was a little frustrating but traces were good after all.
This time I really tried to use Merkaator (SVN head) to do the mapping stuff and I admit that I get along with it quite well. Once you really use the keyboard shortcuts mapping is done pretty fast. Just two things that I don't get yet: Why do nodes look just the same as trackpoints? (And why can I select trackpoints?) How do I delete tags of an object? Adding or modifying them is no problem at all, trying to delete a tag from a node was just not possible. Added a short note on the wiki: osm.wiki/Merkaartor_doc_0.12#Editing_tags_of_an_object

Later that day I added about 20 amenities and shops in Kleinostheim using Merkaartor. I was so annoyed that it didn't display icons for them that I switched to JOSM just to check. Not seeing an icon on a node in JOSM is not a problem at all because you can tell a node without tags, one with and trackpoints by the way they look. In Merkaartor they all just look the same.

At about 23:30 I wanted to go out again to draw a current WiFi-map using kismet and I ended up micro-mapping some stuff around my house. Few days earlier I read that GPSrs have best reception between 00:00 and 04:00 due to the amount of electrons in the ionosphere. I checked my GPS-software and it used 12!! sats for navigation. The sky was totally clear and it was cold but it was fun to map when you know the reception is so good. The Wifi-map was drawn nevertheless.

… See full entry

Today I looked at the map we did 6 months ago during our Kyiv Mapping Parties. Looked and a bit disappointed, because many roads, buildings, POIs tagged with mistakes.

Mapping this area was our first investigation of OSM, so we made a lot of errors. The sad thing is nobody of us reviewed that and check the mistakes. Personally I did not do that, because main part of it prepared one of best Kyiv's mappers - Vladimir Agafonkin (Mourner). I just did not expect there are mistakes. However, this was his first task too. Everybody does the mistakes, especially in beginning.

Learning this I backed to my first good map - residential district Poznyaky (Kyiv), and found that parts which I did first are not as good as later parts: many houses where ugly, not orthogonalized, streets tagged wrongly and so on. Kudos to JOSM: it can make buildings rectangular, find warnings in your map and do a lot of job for you.

So two conclusions from my story are:
1) Everybody makes mistakes
2) Look back and check

Plötzlich steht man mitten im Wald und dann an einem hohen Zaun am Alvern im Wodantal.Also bitte nicht zum Wandern nutzen.Meine Frau schimpft jetzt noch.Der brauchbare Teil ist schon nachgepflegt.Track"An der Liethe"

Tried to view some of the corrections I made some days ago, I could not see them. Switching to the editor showed that the changes where there, but not on the "real" map.

After a brief search I found this FAQ:
osm.wiki/FAQ#I_have_just_made_some_changes_to_the_map._How_do_I_get_to_see_my_changes.3F
It opened my eyes to the next page:
osm.wiki/Tiles%40home

What? They have a distributed client, that is used to render the maps - or tiles as it's called. Cool! I saw that there where a nice Windows installer ... that failed. In the discussion, I saw that others had the same problem as I had. So I tried installing it manually, only to fail. Then I saw that there is a virtualbox download, where everying is (almost, you need to do one tiny thing to get it completely installed) installed:
osm.wiki/Virtual_Tiles%40Home

I downloaded the Ubuntu version, as it is the most current. Fast download via BitTorrent, quick setup with VirtualBox (that I have never used before). It got up and running real fast.

The way it works is like most other distributed projects:
- Client running at a users computer
- Server on insternet has job for client
- client download job from server
- client process the job (creating new tiles)
- client uploads result to server
- client waits for next job

I love distributed computing, but don't want to run it all the time. I'm on a notebook, that can get very noisy when it has to work 100% all the time. This is where tiles@home is great. I start it when I want to, let it run for some time and then shut it down. The work unites are quickly processed, so you will see the results quick.

Heute habe ich die aufgenommenen Daten der Mappingläufe der letzten Tagen per JOSM bearbeitet und hochgeladen. Beinhaltet sind die Landstraße nach Bad Breisig, die Zufahrtswege zur Mönchsheide von Franken und Breisig aus und einige Waldwege dort.