Great idea. One problem, sometimes it couldn't tell because the road drawn over the map was obscuring the satellite image.

Nice. Any other "cats" tags

I played with producing 3D images from traces I made while skiing. While they looked OK individually, several days traces contradicted each other about the height. This was with a Vista Hcx which has a barometric altimeter as well as GPS altitude.

> i-Blue 747 is a cheap and good GPS receiver which can be carried in a rucksack.
> every time you turn around, the GPS receiver jumps 20 meters away.

and you still reckon it is a good receiver ?

Keep up the good work. I'll be in Namibia for 3 weeks in the summer (err, sorry that's your winter isn't it) to check up on you!
We were last in Africa 14 years ago, and although we had a primitive GPS it only served to show how poor a lot of the maps were. Some of them appeared to have been drawn freehand.

Weather Underground has lots of data from personal weather stations e.g.
http://www.wunderground.com/weatherstation/WXDailyHistory.asp?ID=IMIDDLES2

Welcome. I bet there's plenty of mapping to do where you are. I have very fond memories of Bamako as "the city of tomorrow", because when we were trying to get there overland from Senegal it was always "maybe we'll get there tomorrow".

How can I extract a cycle route from OSM as a GPX route to use on a GPS?

are we going to need some bigger servers?

I've started to have problems getting the map tiles on my home PC, but it is working fine on a laptop connected to the same router. I wonder if a MS security update has broken something? I sometimes get problems with Google maps too, but not so often. It's the same on IE and Firefox, so I don't think it is a browser problem. I've tried disabling the PC firewall and messing with the MTU settings to no avail. Also tried looking at network traces but all I see are the http requests going out for the images but no replies. Anyone else seen and solved the same problem?

I think you're getting confused between GPS tracks and the ways that make up the map. You can upload GPS tracks and use them to trace over to create map elements, but the track itself is not part of the map. You can get the editor to convert a track to a way, but you then need to tag it with attributes to say what it is, anything from a motorway to the boundary of a building.

Normally a GPS track from a cycle ride will cover a whole lot of different kinds of ways: residential streets, roads with or without cycle lanes, maybe bridleways or dedicated cycle paths. Each of these sections should be split from the others and tagged appropriately. Routing software will use these tags to determine what kind of vehicle can use that way and won't send a car down a bridleway or a bicycle down a motorway. The map renderers will use the tags to draw the way as required. A cycle-map renderer may emphasise specific cycle lanes, a car-map may only show them at high zoom, a railway map might not bother to show them at all.

Which cycleway (tag) to choose? Depends what it is. Take a look at the Map Features page in the wiki. From your description I'd say highway=cycleway and foot=yes for these concrete paths. Maybe add a surface=concrete if you want to be complete.

A track that doubles back and branches should be mapped as two (or three) ways that join at a common node. The section that was double-traced becomes a single way on the map.

Obviously spam, but what's the point of it? Is it trying to make me buy something? Is it going to install a virus on my PC if I read it?

Brilliant. I'm jealous. You've already outstripped Google maps.
I passed through and spent Xmas there a dozen years ago at the Rose de Sables hotel. Is it still there?

I found a "quiet lane" on the Isle of Wight. Didn't seem to make much difference to the way the 4x4 drivers blasted past our bicycles.

You should receive an email telling you success or failure of the import.
The most common reason for failure seems to be a lack of timestamps.

You can just add some fake timestamps in with a search and replace using a text editor. OSM doesn't care what the times are so you can just make them the same.
However, it is best not to use "saved" tracks because saving also simplifies the track so you lose a bit of accuracy.

I wasn't really aware that there was a mailing list until you mentioned it. Having looked at "nabble" I can see that there's way more stuff there than I'd want to see, but a weekly digest would be good. Even better would be an intelligently written weekly/monthly round-up of what's been going on - a newsletter if you like. Any volunteers? Or does such a thing exist already?

While I'm about it, is there a way to filter a Recent Changes search on the wiki to only show English pages?

surface=x might be a way to differentiate different styles of track. How about footway with bicycle=yes ? As a mountainbiker it is important to me to know whether I can legally ride down a path (e.g. bridleway) or if I'll get valid complaints from walkers. It'd be annoying to miss out on a great biking trail because it is too narrow for a wheelchair or recumbent tricycle towing 2 kids in a trailer!

I've tried JOSM and found it much less intuitive and slower to use than Potlach, and I'm a software developer of 25 years standing. Also I tend to make most of my edits in spare time while at work and only have access to OSM via a browser through a firewall.

I'd suggest that the issue isn't so much with the editors but with the back-end systems. All the history is stored in the database so if we could easily compare before/after views and revert changes that stuffed things up it would be great. Also, if the tiles were re-rendered more quickly then folks could see the effects of their changes as soon as they made them and it'd be more obvious if things were bad. A "what's new" view would be good too.

The time must surely come soon when someone starts making malicious edits, either subtly or just deleting swathes of stuff. This will be painful unless reverting changes is made easy.

Yes, I know that all this is being thought about already and requires someone's unpaid time to implement so I'm not really being helpful here :-(

So I asked him and he told me that he got key points with his GPS, then took lots of photos and worked it out from there. It was a challenge!