Today I decided to take things easy on the pushy in order to recover from yesterday's long ride...I ended up doing 25km anyway :p. It was all taken pretty slow though.

The mapping which was done can be seen here (zoom in): http://osm.cdauth.de/history-viewer/changeset.php?id=%231685107

Info about the changeset viewer can be found in this diary entry

How can you put links in diary entries? Does this thing accept HTML or can you using something like VB code?

I did 58km of cycling today. Basically I'm trying to get enough endurance to contemplate some cycle touring and mapping is happening as a result.

Today's ride first went down Gundurimba Road which runs South from Lismore and roughly follows the Williams River. There were a few small roads which came off it which I couldn't map because they were unpaved and 700c x 25mm tires don't like that kind of thing.

In fact the rear tyre did get a puncture at some stage. A small stone (~1mm wide, 3mm long) got lodged in the tyre and put a small puncture in the tube. It patched up fine though.

I'm starting to regret not buying a Specialized Armadillo tyre ($65 each) instead on the flack jacket of the same size ($35). 2 more punctures in the next 1000km will have made the armadillo worth it.

The next road mapped was Richmond Hill Road. It starts at ~11m above sea level and ends at ~140m or so. It's fairly long though so there aren't any feral slopes, just a long gentle one. Along the length of this road are several short streets which branch off. I surveyed a few of them completely but there are a lot which just got photographed for the name, marked in then left with a FIXME=unfinished tag.

Tomorrow my mountain bike gets dropped off at a bike shop for a new bottom bracket and maybe new cranks. It looks like somehow the bottom bracket axle has become twisted and it needs a new one and possibly new cranks, depending on exactly what is twisted. Getting it fixed will allow me to go on long rides up into the Nightcap National Park.

Anyway, should just do a short ride tomorrow, maybe 15-20km of flat road mapping.

Somehow my random cycling around the place caused me to start mapping Lismore Heights yesterday. It's the steepest area of Lismore there is and I started to map it first :p.

It's mostly done, thankfully. I'll probably head out cycling again this afternoon and survey the streets to the South of Lismore Heights. Essentially there's a ridge that High Street follows. On the North side is Lismore Heights and on the South side (the steeper one) there's some bushland. Once the streets to the South are surveyed the bushland can be guessed in.

At least it's good for my fitness...The rear spokes on the pushbike might need some loving soon though.

So today was my first day in Lismore after moving up here for study. As it stands my first lecture isn't until Thursday (and only every Thursday after that :p) so there's a fair bit of time left over for mapping :).

Today saw a few incidental bits and bobs mapped like a few lanes and the local Aldi which were cycled down on my errands. In the afternoon I headed out for a ride and ended up mapping a chunk of Lismore Heights.

I've got all sorts of plans to map the surrounding area. The most ambitious is an overnight cycling tour which will include camping in the Nightcap National Park.

After coming home and entering the collected data I spent an hour or so tracing over creeks and rivers around the place. This is a fairly high rainfall area so there are a lot of waterways around the place. Unfortunately the Yahoo and Landsat imagery is only good enough to do some of them but the ABS suburb boundaries provide a lot of good hints.

One thing that is really annoying though is JOSM randomly disconnecting ways when tracing things. For example when tracing a river it will draw several connected nodes and then randomly stop the way and draw the next node disconnected. It's like the shift key is sending phantom signals to JOSM. Anybody know why this may be? I've got the nearclick plugin installed, perhaps it's screwing things up?

Did 40km on the pushy today to map out parts of Jesmond, North Lambton and Waratah West. Ended up completing a fair chunk of the region and will hopefully get time to complete Waratah West and possibly parts of Waratah and Mayfield West.

I leave for Lismore on Thursday night and still have to pack for the ~12 week stay up there, so there's a good chance that I won't be able to map in Newcastle for a few months now. But that just means that Lismore will be exhaustively surveyed.

A couple of mates and I are planning on doing a ~3-6 day cycling tour in the Spring, so there's a good chance that much mapping will result in the name of endurance training before then :).

Anyway, my goal of having Newcastle mapped by Christmas seems to be quite reasonable, and that's assuming that nobody else starts to contribute in the next few months.

Maybe it's time to start planning some printed maps. To see a printed map get distributed in a tourist information center or something would really be an amazing achievement :).

I went to a social gathering on a farm in Hilldale, NSW and on the way up from Newcastle stopped by Seaham and Clarence Town to fill in the missing streets. Both towns still have a couple of streets missing, but the bulk of each is now mapped.

I also traced out a few more country backroads, which seems to be all but untouched in the Hunter Valley.

Anyway, every little bit helps...

Today I completed street naming (and a few other tidbits) for New Lambton and Lambton, Newcastle, Australia. A few days ago I started New Lambton while finishing off Kotara and Adamstown.

It's really annoying when there's isolated un-named roads scattered around the place. It means a long ride out there and back just for one name. Unfortunately I missed a couple today. Such is life. They can be collected when I ride out to survey Jesmond, North Lambton and Waratah West.

North Lambton and Waratah West are fairly hilly areas so cycling will be tough, what's more there's a 30km round trip just to get there and back! All in good fun eh? Those 3 suburbs may end up being 2 or 3 trips.

I'm really hoping that by the time the bulk of the roads around here are named that people will find the map and think "wow, this could be useful" as opposed to "pfft, my street isn't even on it, what's the point in this crap?" Currently my goal stands at having all streets between Swansea and Hexham named. The West side of Lake Macquarie may take a bit longer, but we'll see how much other's contribute in that time.

Oh, today also saw the first major bike breakdown while mapping: a spoke on the rear wheel snapped. It seems that the low-end spokes that came on my MTB just aren't cut out for serious disk brake use.

Lastly, here's a before and after sequence I took of the area surveyed today:

Before: http://www.overclockers.com.au/pix/hcevh
After: http://www.overclockers.com.au/pix/rfhma

Yesterday I got out on my bike and collected all the street names for the section of Charlestown which lays West of the Pacific Highway. It took 30km of riding all up and included a bit of hill climbing. This area is split in two by a creek (and the Great North Walk) which is fairly low lying, while the land slopes up to the North, South and East. Halfway through the ride I started to turn around due to the cold, but ended up pushing on and finishing the area.

Does anybody know what the street name abbreviation CH means? I haven't a clue so have just left it as CH.

Today was another mapping ride which resulted in the completion of Adamstown Heights. Again there was much hill climbing, mainly due to inefficient routing on my part.

I might be too busy for mapping tomorrow, but my next targets are Kotara, Kotara South and New Lambton. Basically just working systematically North, while staying East of the Inner-City Bypass.

New Lambton and Lambton should progress relatively rapidly due to the lack of main roads (allowing freedom of movement) and the relative flatness of the terrain. There's a small chance they'll get done in 2 trips, but I'm not holding my breath.

On the 27th of June I travel back to Lismore to complete my final semester of a Dip. Ed. Since I'm only doing 2 subjects there's a very good chance that much of Lismore and Goonellabah will be mapped during my 10-week stay.

Went for a mapping ride anyway today (took the motorbike to pickup the post-repair HDDs from the courier depot) and finished off the half of Gateshead that's West of the Pacific Highway.

There's a massive socio-economic divide either side of the highway. The East side is middle to upper-middle class, mostly (we don't have very clear cut class distinctions in Australia) whereas the Western side is *very*..."working class". There's lots of evidence of anti-social behavior (broken/bent street signs, graffiti, a burnt out car body) and a high proportion of public housing.

But it got mapped without incident. I did run over a smashed beer bottle, but thanks to a kevlar-reinforced tyre there was no puncture.

Lastly, is the ITO world OSM mapper service offline? It hasn't updated for a while.

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.