• Intro
• OSMTracker v0.7
• Fixing the Photos
• OSMTracker v0.6.11 loses 42% of Photos

On a day in May 2017 2 crack-heads† tried to kill me as I was mapping. They failed, I dialled 999, the police attended & in the end decided to ignore it (no CCTV, and the police sergeant claiming a lack of resources to investigate).

I guess that it is simple middle-class naivety on my part but I was profoundly affected by what I thought of as the refusal of the police to defend me.

The UK government has taken away the right to bear arms from all except the police, military & criminals (thank you Tony Blair). A former member of the Territorial Army that I know was recently asked to help clear his parent-in-law’s house following her death and discovered viable pistols + shotguns in the attic. He took the pistols back to his house and shortly afterwards was descended upon by the police. I counted 15 police at one stage standing around chatting outside his house + an unknown number inside. The whole palaver went on all night until the next morning, including police film-crews with portable floodlights conducting interviews outside the house with other police. The entire family is now in shock & clearly suffering from PTSD.

I had a touch of PTSD myself for the next 19 months, spending most of my time after the crack-head incident inside my house. I certainly could not face any surveying. In the end it was obvious that I had to drag myself up by the bootstraps and do something — in effect, re-boot myself.

Some little leaflets originally produced by Andy Allan were most useful but I was almost out of them. So, I spent time updating those promotional OSM leaflets and getting them printed.

Whilst huddled in my burrow Mapillary had spent it’s time vandalising my photos, all 6,200 of them. So, I spent time attempting to undo the damage using their blur editor. They ignored all my work.

Finally, there was the old mapping from May 2017 - it was unfinished. So, my new computer needed JOSM installing, etc. and I needed to re-learn how to use JOSM. That process was finally completed on March 14.

I spent the next day — the Ides of March — preparing myself for my re-launch. The obvious place was Stonebridge Park. It was a white patch in 2016 and, whilst Bing has still not updated to show the houses that were built there years ago, other imagery is now available which does.

I had acquired a cheap GoPro-alternative + chest-harness (it shoots in upto 4k, which is remarkable) to add to my mobile for recording stuff. I also had sourced & installed an update for OSMTracker. Hooray! We were good to go the next day. What could possibly go wrong?

†I have zero proof that they were crack-heads. I call them that because they were behaving like Tigger (“Bouncing is what Tiggers do best”) and, after thinking it through for a while, it occurred to me that a fact that would nicely make sense of all their many bizarre actions would be if they were crack-heads.