Didn't do any mapping today because of an assignment that needs doing, but I did go shopping and in among the bread and milk a Camelbak HAWG NV somehow got thrown in...

I bought it because 2 750mL bottles just doesn't cut it while mapping in the full Sun. With those bottles rides were limited to 1.5-2hrs and as such I'd regularly have to return home due to a lack of water rather than lack of stamina. Unfortunately amenity=drinking_water's are hard to find at times, mostly because they're not mapped yet and I'm exploring new territory.

Anyway, I went with a Camelbak because a) they're easier to acquire than Platypus packs and b) word is the current Omega HydroTanium bladders are taste free. I've not yet tried it so can't really comment on the taste free bit, but I can say that there is zero plastic smell from any of the bladder components, so there's hope.

Storage wise the pack is spec'ed at 18L. This is on the small side for backpacks but it's always a compromise between comfort, weight, size and, for a cyclist, aerodynamics. Anyway, there's more than enough room for tubes, tools, phone, GPS and a few sandwiches. Just don't go trying to fit a loaf of bread or bag of chips in it.

The storage space itself in separated into 6 sections, 7 if you count the bladder pocket. These include a large pocket which comprises the bulk of the storage, a smaller pocket in front of that (with several smaller subdivisions within it), 2 "large phone" sized pockets (1 either side), a lose netting section on the front and a water resistant top pocket which is designed for an MP3 player but again could easily hold a phone or GPS.

The back of the pack is an excellent airflow webbing which keeps body contact to a minimum to avoid sweat buildup. There's also a stiffened reinforcement membrane which helps to keep the pack away from your body.

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Since I've got an assignment due on Thursday there has been excellent motivational influences to get out mapping. So, today Goonellabah got a chunk of blank space populated by streets. The region is fairly hilly, so there was lots of high intensity hill climbing. Also a spoke has worked loose on the rear wheel, probably because hills mean braking and disc brakes mean high spoke tensions.

One thing that was learnt from this ride is that I will need a handlebar riser for the MTB for any rides longer than ~1.5-2hrs. My back and shoulders are a bit achy from holding myself up.

Also, the 1L and 750mL bottles are insufficient for riding more than 2hrs on a sunny day. So, tomorrow I'll start looking at getting a Camelbak. Word is that the newer ones don't have any plastic taste due to some fancy lining in the bladder/tube, hopefully I can find one like that.

Anyway, the changeset can be viewed here.

I hopped on the MTB today and surveyed North Lismore. There are a large number of unpaved roads in the area. Unfortunately the renderers don't show this but labeling them all highway=track would be inappropriate.

Wilsons River is proving annoying to geolocate, mainly because the Landsat imagery is so out of alignment and it's difficult to geolocate due to it's low resolution. There's an ABS boundary along the river but I don't know if it's meant to go down the middle or along one bank. Since the river is ~40m wide it kinda matters.

Short of renting a kayak I'm at a bit of a loss as to how to draw it accurately. I've taken some waypoints to represent the banks underneath the 2 main bridges, maybe them plus some interpolation is the best that's going to happen.

Oh, I also did a few more streets around Lismore Heights, so the list of suburbs which have complete street tracing are:

North Lismore
South Lismore
Lismore
Lismore Heights
East Lismore
Girards Hill

Goonellabah is to follow, with a small chance of Alstonville being traced before I return home early September.

Other partially traced areas in the region include:

Coraki
Casino
Ballina
Woodburn
Evans Head
Byron Bay
etc...

The rural road network to the NE of Lismore is surprisingly complete though :). There are some omissions (which will be filled in during endurance training rides) but they probably stand at ~70% complete, not including dead end roads.

Lastly, I started to trace out landuse=farm, produce=orchard areas last night from landsat/knowledge. There are lots of macadamia and sugar cane plantations in the area and marking them a) makes the map more useful and b) makes it more interesting to look at.

I should stop now and take a shower...

Today I did 78.3km on the pushbike cycling to Coraki and back. I surveyed as much road as was practical but ended up having to change my planned route as a road marked as Tertiary on Google Maps ended up being unsealed.

Coraki now has a few streets and all the major roads in/out mapped. I took a swing down the main drag and collected all the shop POIs too. There's still lots of residential streets to go though. I'd estimate the street completion to be ~30-40%.

While JOSM was oped I also traced a few rivers around the place. Evans Head didn't have a full riverbank trace so I drew that in from Landsat. The coastline still looks very rough but the ABS boundary is quite good so I'll ignore that for the time being.

The road changeset can be viewed here.
The rivers changeset can be viewed here.

They're both fairly large areas so the changeset viewer may not work. YMMV.

Edit: Oh, I also left my sunglasses in Coraki. *sigh*, at least they were only from Bunnings.

After today's very indirect ride home from uni Lismore Heights only has ~500m of streets left unmapped.

The map around Lismore is really starting to look rather beautiful, like something I'd be happy to print out big and have as a poster on my wall.

It's still a long way off being "production ready" though. I'll survey North Lismore tomorrow then get stuck into Goonellabah next week.

They predict better weather next week too, which will be nice. Hopefully it'll clear up enough on Saturday to make for a nice long ride in the countryside.

Today's changeset can be view here.

Went for a high intensity ride today, mostly as a result of having to climb up City View Drive in order to access a (fairly upper class) residential area in East Lismore. According to the NSW Dept of Lands topo map the area is at ~140m. What's more several of the streets drop ~50m so in surveying them a bit of a climb is required.

It's a fairly drab day today, got rained on a bit but took refuge in a covered picnic table in Wade Park (it got mapped, search for it :)).

Depending on the weather tomorrow might just be a ride to uni and back. If it clears up a bit I'll have a stab at completing North Lismore. North Lismore is the last flat area which needs surveying.

After that there's ~3 streets which need surveying in Lismore Heights. They lie in the blank area between New Ballina Road and High Street. Then Goonellabah will get attention which should result in several high intensity cardiovascular workouts as it's all >100m above Lismore.

Anyway, today's changeset can be viewed here. (requires zooming in).

Oh, there's also one street which was surveyed which is really new. It appears on the Google Maps photography, but isn't in the street database. Haven't checked if it's in whereis or not. It's only got 2 houses on it so far anyway.

Well I'm stuffed. Did 64km on the bike today tracing out country roads in the name of cycle touring training. I estimate that about 45km of extra roads were added as a result of this exercise.

If the OSM history viewer decides it's able to visualise the changeset it can be seen here.

Otherwise I added: Boat Harbour Road, part of Eltham Road (then added the rest from Landsat), McKenze Road, Pearson Road, Cowlong Road, Alphadale Road and Tregeagle Road.

Cameron Road (joins Boat Harbour Road and Cowlong Road) was added as it's an ABS suburb boundary.

I've done 270km on the pushbike since moving to Lismore 8 days ago. Time to do nothing for a few days :p.

For some reason the osmarender layer is playing up. It's viewable through informationfreeway.org if you select the Firefishy proxy though.

If anybody's interested the motionbased.com analysis of the (very simplified) GPX track is here

Also, I feel like throwing in this photo of me on the road (yeah, the flash fired to try to fill-flash...all it did was blow out the reflective strips :p):

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Did a few more streets in South Lismore this afternoon. Mainly because it's dead flat and I was after an easy ride.

The area is a bit of a hole. Basically it floods easily so it's either cheap residential or industrial land.

There's still some stuff to do on the East side of the Bruxner Highway such as marking the Bunnings, parks etc, but at least the bulk of the streets on the West side of the highway are now done.

Probably doing hill sprints tomorrow, so the rest of East Lismore might get done.

Has anybody else noticed that mapping is really hard on a pushbike? The constant stop/start nature of it is seriously chewing into the life of the rear tyre and cassette. My current rear tyre (Specialized flack jacket 700x25C) looks to be about half way through it's life and it's only done 300km! Same with the rear cassette, it's on it's second chain (also replaced 300km ago) and is significantly more worn than it was when the chain was installed.

Cycled into uni today for my first lecture and surveyed another chunk of East Lismore on the way home. Ended up doing 30km for the day. If I do 10km tomorrow it'll make 200km for the 7 days to date total :).

Anyway, the OSM history viewer linked to in previous diary entries isn't working for the today's changeset. So, lets just say that it was everything between Oakley Avenue, Wyrallah Road and the edge of the suburb. The most fun bit was surveying the stormwater drains in the area. I also did a fairly detailed survey of the kid's bike track in Wade Park.

The rest of East Lismore (the landuse=residential area to the West of Wyrallah Road) is basically a big hill, but since I'm due for a high intensity ride tomorrow I'll give it a stab.

Did 24km on the bike today, almost all of which was on new streets. I mainly aimed for hilly terrain as the previous 2 days had contained easy going rides.

The changeset can be viewed here (zoom in).

Oh, and if anybody gets a JOSM error "placeholder ids must be unique for created elements" make sure you haven't got any repeated elements in new relations. I spent a while racking my brain and googling to work out what had gone wrong to get this error message, turned out a no right turn restriction had 6 members because each member was entered twice.

Tomorrow I cycle in for my first actual uni lecturer, a good excuse for more unmapped street surveying near SCU.

I did some landsat tracing around Lismore last night and marked out the bulk of the landuse in the area. So far Goonellabah, to the East, is unmarked as it's difficult to do without the bulk of the streets marked in first.

There's still some tweaking to do, for instance all the industrial areas are currently marked as residential, but having the bulk of it marked in has made the map loop significantly more complete.

I've also taken a bit of an interest in water drainage. Being a flood prone area it will be interesting to mark in the major drains, creeks etc. Maybe even the levee walls.

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.