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Marc J Miller's Diary

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I offer my traces, not my GPS

Posted by Marc J Miller on 14 February 2010 in English.

Just as a note on what my traces are and why I do it: TomTom records data about how fast people drive on certain roads at certain times of the day. Also records things like the average wait time at a red light, typical traffic conditions, etc.

I offer to OpenStreetMap the same data; I know we don't really do anything with that quite yet, but my traces are out there so that when someone decides to take trace data and automatically average the speeds across all public recorded traces, you'll have my data. All of my traces are drivable roads -- my rechargable battery used to last me hours, now it doesn't even last 5 minutes; so I *can't* take it on trails; wouldn't get far before I ran out of juice.

I do sometimes edit maps, but it's rare. I don't take traces so that I can edit the public map, I take them so that somebody else can verify their traces or extrapolate useful data from them.

Just so no one gets any ideas, my TomTom GO 920 is always locked up somewhere; even if you find my vehicle the TomTom is with me or in a locked compartment. It's also password-protected so even if you got a hold of it, it wouldn't be much use. You can steal someone else's GPS much easier than you would be able to steal mine. Already had my GPS stolen once; I'm smarter about protecting it now, even with its unusable battery and broken reset button, I still take measures to protect it.

Ooops

Posted by Marc J Miller on 20 June 2008 in English.

Newbie mistake I'm sure... I started plotting the location of Highway 101 based on my collected GPS data before the map had completely rendered... and found out afterward that the highway was already on the map. I deleted the properties (name, road number, classification) of the offending add, but can't seem to make it go away entirely.

Entire neighborhood is off...

Posted by Marc J Miller on 20 June 2008 in English.

I've found that my entire home neighborhood is about 1/4 mile from where it should be, but I can't figure out how to move the neighborhood to its proper location. I can do it street-by-street, but I'm finding the intersection markers tend to move each time a connecting street is moved, throwing all of them way off. I'd like to select multiple streets and adjust as appropriate, but there doesn't appear to be a way to do this. Ummmm... help!?