Found two more tracks and connecting footways between Knittkuhl and Ratingen. As usual I keep being amazed what you find going out mappging.

Arriving in Ratingen, I could not help as to map a few residential streets there, although this is not really my area. But the center of Ratingen is a nice place, and it is about time it gets mapped.

Unbelievable. I thought I had forgotten a track or two, but I ended up cycling 20 km in a small patch of forest that is no larger than 2x2 km^2.

That was nice. Yesterday, the exceptional good weather day in an Easter weekend with generally horrible weather, I used bicycle "routing" from my home to Kettwig and back for the first time. Kettwig is a surprisingly nice little town with old houses and narrow alleys. And the weather even permitted to have a coffee on a balkony overlooking the Ruhr.

It was no real routing, of course, because all I had was a list of waypoints. I got the waypoints through a site that offers exactly that: clicking waypoints on a google map.

Cycling along the waypoints stored on the GPS device is just great compared to fiddling with a paper map. Even in areas where OSM does not yet have any roads and tracks, it is easy to follow the waypoints route.

This site for getting the waypoints is a bit terrible to use, because the author also provides a probably nicer one for cash. The days before I toyed a bit with OpenLayers (openlayers.org) and with no prior knowledge to Javascript (albeit I am a hacker) I was able built my own simple site to display smoothly the more interesting map data described on http://www.gis3.nrw.de/DienstelisteInternet/ .

To bad I cannot demo the result online, because I am not sure about the copyright implications. What I read about this data, it seems to be ok to use it at home for private viewing. (I wonder if it would be ok to distribute the 10+ lines of Javascript?) This little app does not yet allow to click waypoints, but this should be no more difficult than integrating the maps, so I really want to get to that soon.

Today I was amazed to find out how many tracks there are in the Grafenberger Wald. The warm weather attracted a lot of walkers, so cycling was a bit difficult. But I think I mapped nearly all tracks that run on top of the hill. In the end I was too lazy to follow all of the up/down tracks, so there are a few tracks missing in the west belly of the forest. Should be easy to do on another weekend.

By just looking at a 1:50000 map of the area left and right of the Autobahn A3 between Erkrath and Mettmann, I would have never considered cycling there. Just for completeness I went there to track some paths and found a very interesting area with many more ways than expected from the map. Again I was amazed how much more lifely the experience of a rather small area can be if you want to map all the tracks you can find there.

Still I have to go back there, because I could not finish everything. I must say, however, that I should have made the trip in summer. Quite a few tracks are still terribly muddy. Not that it really kept me out, but I am not exactly looking for this kind of experience.

at the bottom of the Grafenberger Wald. In addition I finally managed to connected the two ends of Bauenhäuser Weg. Now I am trying to upload from Josm, but the server seems to have an overload. It just doesn't move.

Obviously it took me a whole week to get my computer up and running again. Luckily the disk did not just stop working, but started to work flaky. This morning I finished the reinstallation on a new disk and went out for a cycle ride in the afternoon.

On top of that my mp3 player/recorder crashed too. But this one was not recoverable. (Don't try DreckStore, broke after less than a year.) So no audio mapping in the near future.

I went to Unterbach, but mainly mapped the paths to get there. In Unterbach I watched their Karnevalszug before riding back to Gerresheim, where I traced about 10 more resendential streets between Quadenhof- and Heyestraße.

Nine degree celsius in the middle of winter. Wow, that's what I call global warming. So I went out to map these 4 streets off Lakronstraße, a very nice neighbourhood here in Gerresheim. Old, large houses, well maintained and modernised. It is a bit uphill and downhill there, but 3/4h was enough to track it all. The street sign fotos are a bit dark but still readable. I am pretty sure I got this corner between Bender- Dreher- and Torfbruchstraße now complete --- except for one half street :-)

And why does this silly map down there change all the time while I type. Who invented this nonsens:-?

Today I thought to try recording comments about streets crossed and cycled with my mp3-player. It seemed to work well, but when I wanted to load the sound track on my computer the damned Trekstor vibez (what a name) started displaying 'starting player' and 'formatting ...' while the disk made unconvincing noises.

This thing is not a year old and not actually used a lot. What a poor quality.

Unbelievable: I live here now for nearly two years and I thought I had explored every corner reachable by bike. But cycling around with the OSM map and with the goal to really cover everything shows how many way I just ignored until now because I thought it was a dead end or not very nice to cycle. The motivation to look around every corner is really quite different when out there with the GPS and tracking.-)

Went out another 3.5 hours for nearly 40 km of track by bike. Yes, taking all these photos takes it time. But now I have circled Grafenberger Wald, made the connection to Ratingen and mapped my first complete town: Hubbelrath. Oh, well, has about 50 to 100 houses, I guess, so that was easy.

Today I filled some known holes I had left the other day between my home and Knittkuhl along the sailing plane landing strip. Also I think I have Knittkuhl complete now. Finally I tracked three more streets off Bergische Landstraße. Strange place to live. The houses look very expensive and well taken care of, but they are a so close to the primary road that I cannot imagine sitting in the garden in summer --- except you like motor sports and feel fine with the constant noise of cars:-(

Towards the end, it got dark and I learned that a cheap digicam has more and more problems to picture our street signs. They are usually on a pole up 2.5 meters high, so you cannot get really close and the flash of the digicam is useless outside. But this will improve daily now anyway towards summer:-)

Today I went to the bicycle shop, albeit by car, in Unterbach. At least now there is a minimal roundtrip available for Unterbach. This trip also allowed me to completely connect Dreherstraße in Gerresheim.

Added two ways missing in the Rheinwiesen despite someone else doing a lot around this area. Also completed Leostraße, which had a strang gap right in the middle.

Since I knew there must be a footway between Wildpark and Landeskrankenhaus in Gerresheim, I went out again and found it. Could even be cycled, if the weather and then the surface is slightly less slippery.

Covered the neighbourhood east of Gräulingerstraße. This is full of one-way streets, only some of which are open both ways for cyclists. Also covered the area around the church in Gerresheim and made the connection south to the L357.

I am still puzzled by how the GPS works: sometimes it is exact enough to show properly two different tracks when I went up a street and down again. Then again, where I rode around the market place, a nice square, the result looks anything but a square. And sometimes it gets confused and tracks me 50m off the street only to jump back on the street shortly after.

I wonder if overhead electricity for the tram can be a problem.

This is a strange corner of bush/park between the B7 and Benderstraße. It contains a water reservoir for Düsseldorf and surprisingly many footpaths. I had to stay longer there than expected to track them all.

Recently I learned about the photo-sync capability of JOSM (right click on the GPX-layer). With the clock set properly, it easily add thumbnails to the GPX track, which is quite nice to check out street names.

It makes sense to (a) always make the photo in the direction of travel, because if you (b) make the photo to include even two street signs, you know which applies to which street.

Of course photos are also nice to record the type of road surface or access restrictions or features like playgrounds or shelters or information plaques or you name it.

I note that when I ride a street up and then down that the two tracks really look as if they can make the difference between the two sides. But from the estimated resolution of between 5m and 10m this cannot possibly be. So maybe Garmin put a software fix in that always corrects the points slightly to the right in the direction of travel. Would be easy to check in the UK, though. Except they have the driving side of a country taken into account;-)

Just came back from my parents in BM, part of the way over the Autobahn A46 and the Theodor-Heuss Brücke in Düsseldorf. While driving I recorded the track and had a chance to compare the path with map. It was obvious that the map has some gross simplifications. Sometimes I swerved away from the line on the map to hit it exactly a few hundred meters later. This looks like they just left out a few points from the path.

At home I loaded the track into JOSM and compared with OSM. According to OSM I drove right on the road all the time:-)

This time I took my digicam along (I don't one a photo mobile:-). That makes it much easier to record street names. Just mark a waypoint and take a photo. The two are trivially synchronized by time.

If Josm would make the timestamps in the GPX file available for display, I would not even have to enter waypoints on the GPS device.

The question is, of course: why does the @!#$#@$ GPS device not have a camera, or an MP3-recorder, or both?-(

Anyway, the camera solution is not too bad.

Went around my home (Gerresheim center, B7, Rennbahnstraße, glider airfield, Knitkuhl, B7 and back) by bicycle with the new Garmin eTrex Legend HCx. A friend recommended this device despite cursing their proprietary software. It works anyway thanks to the people providing things like gpsbabel and mkmap. So, within a day I learned to use the GPS device, record tracks, upload tracks, edit maps with JOSM (needs further experience), download OSM files, use mkmap to produce garmin maps and upload them to the device.

All this works on Linux and seems to be easier even then setting up a printer directly hooked to the computer:-)

For JOSM I still need to find out a few bits: is it necessary for ways to share a point at a junction to enable real routing? What is the best way to deal with residential streets for which I don't remember the name (need to take a MP3 recorder along)? What is the best tagging for forest and field tracks that are well suited for cycling. This type of track is nearly unkown in England, so the UK biased tagging is not a perfect match.