Another 20km on the bike today and Jewells street naming was complete :). Most of the schools, parks and bus stops in the area should now be mapped too.

A few stats:

In the past month or so I've spent 15hrs and 3mins on the bike mapping, 12hrs and 7mins was spent moving. The average speed was 19.3km/hr for a total of 234km.

The following suburbs have been surveyed as a result:

(from South to North)

Belmont North (East of the Pacific Highway)
Jewells
Gateshead (East of the Pacific Highway)
Whitebridge
Kahibah
Highfields
Adamstown (~70-80%)

Redhead is in this area as well. So far all the residential streets have been entered, but none of the back street laneways, the school or any shops.

All in good time ay? :).

I'm starting to feel that there's a bit of competition between me and user c-j-b. In that I'm trying hard to keep ahead of him in terms of number of streets named and what not, dunno if he feels the same way.

I probably won't do much mapping tomorrow. A package came for me while I was asleep this morning (at 8:20 :p) so I'm off to Sandgate to the Australian Air Express depot to pick it up. It's a couple of Seagate HDDs that were faulty. Seagate are damn fast with their returns. If you post a faulty drive on a Monday they'll have one back to you on Friday!

I went for a 2h 15min ride today with the aim of mapping all the streets South/East of the Pacific Highway in Jewells and Belmont North. Unfortunately it was stopped short due to thunderstorms, but the bulk of the area was mapped.

A few extra bits around Redhead were surveyed as well.

An update request for the osmarender layer has been submitted.

I planned to take a "long" bike ride today and ended up doing a 2hr/30km mapping ride.

During the ride about 175 photos were taken, which resulted in about 310 changes. These were mainly street names but also included a bunch of bus stops, 2-3 post boxes and a public phone.

As a result of today's ride a milestone was reached in street naming. The area encapsulated by the Pacific Highway, Glenrock State Recreational Area and the Awabakal Nature Reserve is now completely named and surveyed. There are probably a few bus stops and what not hiding away in streets I didn't go down, but all the street names are there.

The area includes the suburbs of Highfields, Kahibah, Whitebridge, Dudley and about half of Gateshead, with the exception of 2-3 streets which are difficult to access.

After completing that chunk I headed down into Adamstown to put a dint into that area. The bulk of the area between Park Ave, Glebe Road and Brunker Rd was surveyed.

The osmarender layer should update "soon". No idea when Maplint updates.

The main difficulty with mapping this region is that the Pacific Highway runs along a ridgeline that's ~100m above sea level. It makes mapping on a pushbike a rather intensive experience. My body will be thankful in the long run :).

I've had 3 flash based storage devices fail on me in the last 5 years...they have all been Olympus xD cards. I use lots of USB thumb drives, CF cards, SD cards etc, but only xD cards have ever catastrophically failed.

Today's mapping effort was cut short when the P&S camera I have spat out a card error and requested a reformat. The reformat failed. Removing the card and re-installing it did nothing. *sigh*

Now that I'm home again it's decided to start working. So much for an indestructible Muju model.

So anyway, instead of collecting the last of a section of nearby street names I just cycled into town and back along the coast. I followed a route signposted as the "NSW Coastline Cycleway".

So, it's time to research how to make a route relation to link all the streets together...

Map location is very approximate.

Recently I've made a few hacked up mods to make mapping on a pushbike easier and figured it was worth sharing a bit about them.

Problem 1: No bike GPS mounting

Solution: Make one.

Pic 1: http://img13.imageshack.us/img13/2426/img4678yg3.jpg
Pic 2: http://img413.imageshack.us/img413/9999/img4679jpgsmall.jpg

As you can see it's just a bit of steel that's been bent to acomodate the GPS snugly. A few rubber bands hold it in place, then the pipe clamp tightens the steel's grip on the GPS a bit further.

Parts required: GPS, Bit of steel or whatever, pipe clamp
Tools required: Vice, Hammer

Pros: Easy to build, cheap, clamps very snugly
Cons: Requires tools to remove from bike, namely a flathead screwdriver or 5/16th" socket/spanner to undo pipe clamp.

Problem 2: Camera used for mapping was found and doesn't include charger

Solution: Make one

Pic 1: http://img413.imageshack.us/img413/9273/img4681jpgsmall.jpg
Pic 2: http://img21.imageshack.us/img21/5270/img4682jpgsmallxu6.jpg

This idea is basically attributed to user c-j-b, he suggested a couple of pins in a bit of wood as terminals. I've used nails because I couldn't find any pins.

Parts required: nails/pins, bit of scrap timber, some other li-ion charger, alligator clips
Tools required: hammer

Problem 3: Bike seat uncomfortable for long rides

Solution: Hack up an old, comfortable seat to fit the modern mounting

Pic 1: http://img19.imageshack.us/img19/9803/img4684jpgsmallok9.jpg
Pic 2: http://img12.imageshack.us/img12/8287/img4683jpgsmallxq8.jpg

Nothing fancy here, just the bars under the seat where the stem clamps on were too close together, so I bent them out with some beefy pliers and just forced it all together.

Parts required: More comfy bike seat
Tools required: Pliers, screwdriver etc.

Problem 4: It's currently raining a bit

Solution: Harden the fsck up.

A week ago I got off my arse and collected some street names. It's something I've been saying I'd do for a long time now.

At the time I didn't have a working P&S camera to use, so I marked waypoints with the GPS, left them as their default name (1,2,3,...,n) and jotted down on a notepad what the name of each waypoint was.

This method worked, but it was a little slow. It allowed collection at the rate of about 25 streets per hour, on a pushbike in the area linked to below.

So today I pulled out a P&S camera we had found, but didn't have a charger for. It uses a LI-40B or something, some Olympus Li-ion battery. Anyway, I do have a li-ion charger for a Canon battery, BP-511 or some such. So armed with that charger, 2 alligator clips and some heavy duty tape I rigged up a McGyver charger by taping everything in place on my desk. A photo is available if anyone's interested.

Armed with the new toy I finished mapping a chunk of Gateshead, Newcastle. The area is bordered by the Pacific Highway, Dudley Rd, Bulls Garden Road and Oakdale Road. A few streets North of Dudley Rd were also collected.

Time to train up for cycling endurance.

Today I went for a mapping ride through the Jesmond Bushland in Newcastle, NSW. The area is council land that's reserved for public recreation, but there's nothing official that allows MTB trail building and maintenance. Either way there's nothing to prohibit MTB'ers from riding there :).

Anyway, I just mapped as much as possible until the water ran out. A good chunk of the trails got surveyed, but there's still a lot of trails that need to be discovered. I'd approximate that, in terms of track distance, the area is about 50% surveyed.

Use OSMARender to view. At the time of writing only a small section has been rendered.

My parents have some property near Taree and I stayed there over the last couple of days and did some mapping.

Yesterday I just did a few country roads in our area. The property is at Firefly and I linked it up with Krambach properly. Also mapped all 3 streets of Krambach. The diary entry map link should get you to this.

I drove home to Newcastle today and figured a few detours wouldn't hurt.

First one was to map Wootton Way, it's a section of the Old Pacific Highway that runs from Cooloongolook (spelt?) to Bulahdelah. It's one of the most fun sections of road I've ever driven! It's really twisty and really wide. Often there are "2" lanes, ie a main lane and an overtaking lane, but since there's no traffic on this road (I saw 1 other car the whole length of it) you can just fang all over it :p. Link: osm.org/?lat=-32.292&lon=152.2469&zoom=13&layers=0B00FTF

At Bulahdelah I had a poke around the state forest on the East side. Can't remember the name of it, but drove up a trail that leads to an old quarry. The trail was very steep, single lane and very rocky. The Ford Fiesta I was driving almost didn't make it. Good fun! There are a few walking tracks around here that I didn't do (had to get home eventually) but will hopefully map at a later date. There's a picnic area, toilets and playground at the start of the track. Link: osm.org/?lat=-32.41572&lon=152.2171&zoom=16&layers=0B00FTF

Next was Booral road. I first drove this road as a Pacific highway detour. Back before the Karuah bypass was built the holiday traffic would line up for about 20km North of Karuah (it had a set of traffic lights). Booral Road was a right hand turn off the highway (heading South) just South of Bulahdelah which links up with The Buckets Way. It's also very twisty, but is a 2 lane country back road so not as fun as Wootton Way. Link (hopefully, it hasn't rendered yet): osm.org/?lat=-32.4642&lon=152.0768&zoom=12&layers=0B00FTF

… See full entry

Did 40mins of walking today and mapped a pocket of bushland in Kahiba that needed doing (view on osmarender layer). The Great North Walk runs through here which means that it's now mapped contiguously from here to Glenrock. Ok, so that's not very far but it's being done! I'm not sure exactly where it goes through Glenrock. The Southern section of the walk is mapped, and eventually ends up at a lookout (marked) but after that I'm at a loss. I know it comes out at Burwood Beach, so I guess it's time to backtrack from there. It then officially goes up the beach, which may be difficult to map as there's no "path" there.

The rest of the walk into Newcastle CBD is along residential streets. Maybe it'd be worth making a route relation that includes the bush tracks and residential streets?

Heading West of the map location the Great North Walk continues through more streets, crosses the Pacific Highway, then dives into the bush again somewhere in Charlestown. Somehow it crosses the Newcastle Inner City Bypass (presumably by tunnel?) and heads down a thin strip of bushland between the bypass and Charlestown (Hillsborough?) Golf Course. All this is next on the list to map, once my legs have recovered from a couple of long mapping rides in Glenrock.

The tracks in Glenrock State Conservation Area are *almost* comprehensively mapped. The only section left to do is a small area in the North East corner of the park. Unfortunately I live South of the park, so I don't head that way very often. It's about a 20-30km round trip to do mapping in that area.

I still haven't bothered doing much street name collection in Newcastle. It's, well, boring :p. Mountain bike riding is just so much more interesting! That, and I don't have a P&S camera for recording them yet.

… See full entry

I went out on my daily ride today and mapped a stack of MTB/dirt bike trails. Most are either singletrack or heavily eroded wider tracks. There's a lot of damage done by the dirt bikes but it's council land so who's to stop them? It just makes it more technical :p.

There was one point where someone had built (what I'd class as) a massive jump. It goes over the Fernleigh track (the disused railway part) and is about 10m across with a 10m drop. You'd want to be going fast enough! A sort of chasm has been cut into the rock for the railway line so it's fairly sheer cliffs on both sides of the jump.

Shame I only just missed out on the Mapnik update, use osmarender if you want to view the trails.

There's a good chance I've missed a couple, but 90% of the tracks should be marked.

Well, everything North and East of Lake Macquarie is traced in anyway. There are sections of bushland West of the lake (South of West Wallsend) which haven't been marked in yet either.

My next task will concentrate on marking in as much of the bushland West of the F3 as is feasible.

All I can say so far is: That was Epic. Several thousand nodes a night for about a week and finally most of Newcastle is done.

My ground surveying is going to concentrate on paved cycleways and bush tracks. A lot of bush tracks (particularly MTB and dirt bike trails) tend to be made by civilians and so are mostly undocumented on any "official" maps.

Street name collection will probably happen at some stage, but I'd love to get some help for that one! Hopefully somebody in the region will see the map so far and think "wow, maybe this will be useful someday".

The one thing to keep telling yourself is "once it's mapped it's mapped", so the map can only get better :).

Another low priority job would be to mark landuse=residential, but it just makes the map look cool and isn't a great navigational aid.

Another 3789 objects uploading on JOSM. This upload has an estimated time of ~45mins, that's my longest yet I think.

Newcastle is *nearing* completion. I'd guestimate that there's 1 or 2 night's of work left to trace the rest of the roads, parks, bushland, streams/drains and shopping centers.

I hope a lot more people get involved to collect names and POIs.

I'll ramble a bit.

I just completed a large chunk of Newcastle in JOSM (Yahoo tracing). I finally got around to setting up my desktop computer again after the move from Lismore and since JOSM runs much faster on it than on my eeepc a lot got done.

One surprise though was the discovery of a dead mouse inside my PSU. One of our dogs was licking the back of my computer so I looked inside. Hopefully I can sleep with the smell.

I added a few cycleways around Newcastle Uni yesterday, soon it might be worth extending the cycle map up this way (2 weeks ago there was only ~5km of cycleway drawn).

There's an insane amount of name collection to do around Newcastle now. No way I'll be able to find time to do it all myself. We need more contributors! *thinks of more ways to advertise OSM*. Hopefully the increased coverage will attract more people. As the map becomes more useful it will be great to see it in more practical applications.

It'd be cool if geocaching.com.au could add OSM to their list of cache location maps, that would certainly increase the awareness of OSM anyway.

I can't wait to see this Wednesday's Mapnik update for Newcastle, so much has been added in the last week!

I did a fair bit of bushwalking today. In the morning a few extra tracks in Glenrock State Recreation Area were added, then after lunch I went up to Mt Sugarloaf and walked a good chunk of the tracks around it. They are all easy grade walks, designed for families. 3 geocaches are in the area too which makes it a bit more interesting :).

This area is littered with picnic tables, it would be cool to mark all of them on the map. There are also lots of wood fired BBQs and a couple of gas ones.

As far as I know OSM is one of the few maps which has all the trails marked on it. The only other places I've seen them marked were in a local bushwalking book and on the info board at Mt Sugarloaf.

I'm meeting friends up there for lunch tomorrow so a few more features might pop up :).

Well ok, so I've got a thing for maps. You have to at least admit that having all those little pockets of bushland drawn in makes the map look seriously cool (view through osmarender).

Studying via correspondence is having a very positive effect on the state of my local area. I read notes online for an hour, then since I'm already at the computer switching over to an hour of mapping is a logical next activity.

I need to obtain a cheap P&S camera so that street names can be easily collected while cycling. Along with post boxes, public phones, fast food joints, petrol stations, traffic lights, park names...um...wow, at least there's still a lot to do.

In the next week I hope to have an OSM themed geocache planted somewhere. Maybe put a cheap micro SD card in there with OSM pre-loaded as a FTF prize.

*sigh* I just did ~24km of cycling with a couple of mishaps. Firstly I did the first half with the GPX log turned off, then, due to having loaded routable maps last night, the second half was set to lock on road.

Well, just another excuse to go for a ride tomorrow ay?

In case you haven't seen them yet the mapsource installers for various routable Garmin maps are here: http://emexes.powweb.com/osm/download.html

I moved back to Newcastle from Lismore yesterday and have already been out mapping!

I did a few new tracks in the Glenrock State Recreation Area and confirmed/corrected a few others. Bellbird Bridge geocache was found on the way too :).

Anyway, by now many of the changes should be uploaded from JOSM.

I've done some learning about multipolygon relations as there are some private property sections in the park. Hopefully they work...*crosses fingers*.

The area is getting quite complex with the large number of walking and cycling trails cris-crossing. Quite often 2 trails run so close together that GPS errors can cause the GPX tracks to overlap.

Anyway, I'd like to eventually have a high accuracy and high detail map of the park which can be printed and handed out or left in geocaches in order to increase the popularity of OSM.

...and PHWAP! Ways everywhere!

I got back from my holliday a week ago and have since ridden 50km around Mullumbimby. It's not 100% yet as there's a few streets to the SW which are a bit hilly (up around the Hospital and Cemetary) but it's much more complete than it was.

Now all I need is internet access that's not behing a password'ed proxy so I can upload the changes.

Oh, and why aren't the waterway=river ways not rendering? *grumbles*.

My current holiday has taken me through the Blue Mountains and subsequently much bushwalking ensued! So now OSM has a few extra bushwalks in the Grose Valley, including:

Perrys Track
Braeside Walk (Branch of the track from Govetts Leap to Evans Lookout)
Victoria Falls Lookout to Acacia Flat Camping Area
Pearces Pass Junction is now marked (Entrance to valley from Bells Line of Road)
Lockley Pylon track Junction
Pulpit Rock lookout and associated tracks/stairs
Pulpit Rock to Govetts Leap
Completion of the Grand Canyon track with high sensitivity receiver
Cliffs were marked in from Yahoo imagery

TODO:
Rodriguez pass (Grand Canyon to Govetts Leap via valley floor, closed as of July '08 due to fire/landslide damage)
Junction Rock to Acacia Flat Camping Area
Lockley Pylon track
Pearces Pass
Popes Glen trail
Evans Lookout Road

I am totally stuffed now, all up it was 22km on the first day, and 11km + 600m climb on the 2nd. good fun :).

Recently I entered a few tracks in Newcastle too, nothing major though.

It would be great to finish all those trails then publish a walking map of some sort. Maybe have descriptions of all the walks, lengths, difficulty, transport options etc.

First diary post, this is mostly rambles but hopefully someone might like reading it.

While on hollidays in Victoria I decided to do as much mapping as I could during my everyday travels. On the first day all the streets in Port Albert were mapped, along with the park, boatramp, toilets and the old port walking trail. Food and fuel is yet to be mapped.

A couple of days later I went up to the Tarra-Bulga National park and did the all the "touristy" walks around there (the suspension bridge, fern gully walk etc). The longer fire trails such as the Wild Cherry Trail, the old Balook to Yarram road and Diaper Track are best done by someone on 2 wheels (or 4WD where allowed, wild cherry is in the park and behind a locked gate, balook to yarram rd and diaper track can be driven on West of Bulga Road).

The Tarra Valley walk was also attempted, but GPS reception is shocking along the walk, even my Legend HCx had more error then the size of the track! But an attempt at the map was made anyway, the picnic tables and toilets are there, even if they're 50m off. In the process a good trace of Tarra Valley Road was collected either way.

Other roads mapped included Bulga Road, Lower Carrajung Lower Road, Kees Rd and Napier Rd in Won Wron State Forest (we collected firewood, I took the GPS).

The town of Yarram is half-done, I did ~90% of the roads on the West of the main street and ~20% of those right of the main road. This was an exercise in using photo-logging which worked rather well.