Now supporting voice recording/playback of POI descriptions

Completed an outline of Googong dam (with Islands) a few days ago. I copied the method used on Lake Burley Griffin (good work whoever did that one!)

Completed Yass Road from the roundabout in Queanbeyan to the first roundabout at Brindabella Business park tonight.

In the next few days I should have Fairbairn complete, and with any luck, Brindabella Business Park too.

I've decided to ditch Potlatch and use JOSM full time now as it looks like the Potlatch author is making changes on the fly. What was with the change in line thickness a few days ago?? Now it's back to the way it was! Maybe I hit a wrong key or something?

Also, I did, and re-did, only to do again, the Googong dam way. I did it the first couple of times in Potlatch but some of the changes didn't stick after checking it 24 hours later. I was getting segments that weren't part of the dam's way, even though they were all created sequentially in the one sitting. Very strange. Finally resorted to JOSM in the end. I'll scream if the data is still broken next time I check it..

I finished my job exactly one week ago and got everything moved back home on the Thursday. The following day, shortly after doing a bit of work on my computer (PSU blew up, replaced CPU fan at same time and now runs 30°C cooler!) my bike arrived.

The bike Haro DX folding mountain bike. I was put off a folding bike by the fact they don't seem particularly useful over anything that isn't paved road. Was also put off a full size bike by the fact I'd be limited with what public transport I could take it on. This bike seems a good compromise.

Although it doesn't fold up as small as most folding bikes it's still small enough that I can take it on most buses and it'll go on the train without the feeling awkwardness that has always accompanied my previous experiences.

Anyway, took the bike out for a test ride 'round the block' and soon after leaving had my phone stolen. It's knocked my confidence a bit but I'm sure I'll be out mapping on my bike soon enough.

Shrewsbury looks a bit bare. I think I might end up filling in cycle routes there next week.

Update:

I mapped a substantial area of Teignmouth (South Devon) last Friday. By using the 'moving' OSM map as a guide, whenever I came across a street that wasn't on it, that's where I went. Three hours of recording (and walking!!) were very productive and not one of the tracks was a repeat.

I was also able to use the Waypoint Recorder of my software to upload a few POIs. A grand day out!!!

I've "completed" 4 full "square blocks" now, I believe. I'm slogging through them in Potlatch, but there are lots of things that aren't clear. I think I've got one ways, but I have no clue how to do turn restrictions, stop signs or traffic lights, so while the map stuff seems to be coming (slowly), the nav pieces aren't complete. I might have to switch to the local tool to get the full effect.

I-10 data seems to have disappeared between Deming and El Paso. It's already rendered on tiles@home at level 12, but it no longer shows up in Potlatch nor in JOSM. Database crash or something I guess. It's getting tiresome -- that's the third time I traced out that road on the satellite images only to have it disappear.

I've ordered a Neo1973 phone, which has GPS. It is the first completely free (as in freedom) phone (except for the GPS part..).

Since the town I live in (Odense, Denmark) apparently has no roads ;) I'm going to map as much of it as possible. It is the third biggest city in Denmark, so it certainly should be mapped.

In some time the Neo1973 (with the OpenMoko OS based on Linux) should have a program which uses the OSM, and where it should be easy to record new roads. I hope I can be a part of that project, if I find the time and skills to do it.

thanks to a brief bit of walking this lunchtime, there are now complete and mostly accurate bounding boxes in the database for the City of London (boundary=administrative, left:district or right:district=City of London) and the London Borough of Tower Hamlets (district=Tower Hamlets).

Westminster next, I expect.

Having recovered the use of my right eye after the wasp I finally got around to fixing the hole that Ferry Road had developed and while I was at it sorted out the Silverknowes Golf Course. Took a walk around to see where the boundary to the football pitches was.

Now must get the pitches on and the Community Wood and the caravan park.

Had a go at Stockbridge colonies. orig intended to have the streets named but flagged to not render(although each one access the upper storey of one terrace and the lower storey of the next so is really two names)and would have had the buildings named. That way SatNav would find a street near enough and rendered map would have readable name.

In the end opted to put names on streets for now so they are not quite accurate but near enough.

Lakewalker will be very useful for use in Scotland, even if sciuro has done almost all the lochs manually anyway.

I have added the major villages of the Outer Hebrides to OSM with their Gaelic names as their default.

It takes some time for stuff to show up once I've mapped it, but when I print the maps look "fuzzy". They are perfect onscreen -- is this a stylesheet issue? I have to do some research on this.

Two sessions this week comprehensively surveying a group of villages off the A10 SW of Cambridge: Harston, Newton, Haslingfield, Hauxton, Barton, Foxton, Shepreth, Barrington, Fowlmere and Thriplow.These bring us much closer now to the Hertfordshire border, with only really Melbourn in between.

i meant "motorway", under which classification most the US interstate system falls...

digging deeper into OpenLayers and some of the other technologies, this mapping business can get a little mind-boggling. i'm thinking of starting mapping with something flat, like the Mandelbrot set, before getting into complicated geometry like the Mercator projection...

We've got both the TIGER database and Yahoo! imagery to use, let's get cracking! You gonna let these Brits, French, German, Norwegian, etc. run circles around us?

I lost about 100 miles of tracing I-10 through New Mexico and Texas (from the Yahoo! satellite images), once due to hitting the escape button, and once because my computer froze. Damn. And now I'm getting a lot of packet loss, so it's slow going. But because "roadways" show up at all magnification levels, it's rewarding to plot interstates, you see real results every Thursday.

I really don't know how useful the TIGER data is going to be, at least for the streets. It's way more inaccurate than tracing the Yahoo! satellite images. Maybe good for the street names in an unfamiliar area.

I am currently travelling in the north of Scandinavia :
Bodø->Lofoten->Andenes->Tromsø->Alta->North Cape->Enontekiö->Kiruna->Bodø

I hope a lot of new roads are going to appear in the next days/weeks !

From http://openstreetmap.gryph.de/count.txt:

971622x created_by

601101x =JOSM

130340x =almien_coastlines

107230x =Potlatch alpha

Ulp.

I noticed in the Talk newsletters recently that Devon and Cornwall were classed as 'White Areas'. As a newbie, I was determined to put at least my home area (South Devon) on the map. I have been using my laptop for logging roadways, etc. as it is better suited for driving and I use my PDA for logging tracks on foot and feel I have made good progress because I am able to follow my track logs on the actual OSM maps as I walk. As it’s the OSM map that ‘moves’ instead of my position indicator, it’s very easy to see what details (roads, amenities) are missing – I can zoom between level 10 and 17 to see if road names and other details have been tagged. It's also useful for checking out any errors that have (sometimes) been made.

Andy Allan's Mapnik map of the National Cycle Network (woo, Googlejuice) is pure genius and the best example yet of why mashups suck, and cartography matters.

It's inspired me to start mapping some of the NCN routes I've cycled, with GPS, over the last couple of years. This has also been made possible by Potlatch's new magic 'U' key, which converts unwayed segments that someone has "helpfully" drawn very approximately along the line of my GPS tracks, into a nice editable way.

So I've recently drawn the Pembrokeshire/Carmarthenshire circuit on routes 4 and 47, and a couple of others that don't show up on the map yet. I've got tracks for much more of routes 4 and 5 to work on, and went out last night to get the missing bit in route 54 from Burton to Alrewas. The truly splendid route 8 - Lon Las Cymru - I cycled without GPS (shame) and will have to be an NPE job. Which means I'll have to remember how to use JOSM. Eek.

I've done more boundary walking this week. We now have the boundary of the City of London with the London Boroughs of Westminster, Camden and Islington, as well as the (tiny) border with Hackney that I did at the weekend, leaving only the border with Tower Hamlets left to do, and also the Westminster/Camden border as far as the Euston Road.