just came back from a two week trip to the Allgäu / Germany.
Due to a lot of non-paragliding-weatherconditions there was a lot of spare time for OSM.
Equipment used: a Garmin HCx with 2GB flash with only the OSM based Map on it and as a backup/second data source a simple Royaltec SIRF3-based tracker, both set to a constant sample interval of 5 seconds.

I stored POIs, tracktypes, streetnames and other information into the Garmin-device as waypoints, so I could easily draw OSM data from the GPS-points and the waypoints using JOSM.
I had a laptop with me (offline for two weeks / no wlan anywhere)
and a copy of the OSM data of the area. Uploading the edited OSM-data back
today went without problems.

Some notes about the good things:
* both devices worked fine, were able to easily store the whole GPS-tracks without need to sync them to an external data storage.
* the garmin is quite nice to track and to store information, it works in rain, dirt (pen and paper dont) and darkness, one set of 2Ah batteries will last for more than 12h and it is possible to operate it with one hand. The display got a lot of scratches but i dont mind about this.

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Went to the Allgäu / Fischen area for paragliding a week ago,
due to bad weather there was a lot of time to do OSM traking.
Unfortunately there is no way to upload data to the project.
The public (pay) computer in the public building allows me to
write this text, but it does not even allow me to upload GPX-records,
and not even thinking about uploading edited OSM data.
I will do this at the end of next week.

last week I have mapped a residential area in Köln Mauenheim with most of the streets beeing living_streets (Spielstraße).
Now, everything is rendered (both with Mapnik and Osmarenderer) but not in a really satisfactory way, it looks like the streets are rendered using the same color as the residential-landuse color.
map

To my surprise, power lines and power towers are now rendered in some Mapnik zoom levels. thanks! Is it possible to render power sub-stations as well?

Its too cold outside today, so I stayed at home.

To my surprise the Mapnik-Tiles were online soon after i made some changes, very nice, i like the apperance.

This week a have seen some high-voltage power lines, so I mapped them via extrapolation. With an other sight of these lines last week I had three points to extrapolate.
Today i wondered, were these power-lines come from, and to were they go, luckily the hi-res-Yahoo-Satellite-Images were avaliable in this region, and so I ended up spending half the day mapping power-lines with ca. 460 power-towers in the region around cologne. (there are a lot of un-mapped towers left, if anyone likes to continue...)

I just imagine, mapping those via physical presence and GPS, this would take very long, Even with some old-school trigonometry, this would take a long time, with the satellite it is a matter of seconds.
e.g.
sub_station in Sechtem lat=50.79556 lon=6.97661
Unfortunately the hi-res-yahoo-images are not available everywhere.

Just one thing about the JOSM-icon for power-towers: please clean that up. This fat white icon is much too present. Especially in low zoom levels i see fat white paths of high-voltage-lines around cologne. The icons e.g. for train station, suburbs, villages are tiny compared to this, and train-stations are unique while the power-towers come in a long periodic row.
I suggest a small and thin, mostly transparent icon.

One more ...
the emergency-telephone to call the police or fire-brigade
ColinMarquardt suggested to use amenity=telephone, access=emergency
(thanks)
I also started to map those telephones this way.
Furthermore i map public coin or card-telephones with access=public.

Spending some time at home on development and maintainance
of some essential OSM-Tools.

Yes, my bike got some problems, light failed, the Sachs-3-Gear
failed and both tyres were in need of some additional air.
This is all fixed now, and i have put a spare ball-pen
in my bag after i have lost my only pencil somewhere
out there in the bush week
(I got a beer and a replacement in the next pub)

Today i have been working on the idea to print OSM-Maps using gnuplot.
This is an important tool because it generates high density maps,
e.g. perfect to check if POI are at the right position or missing
and to draw notes into it.

The old approach
is not functional anymore since OSM 0.5, but that is easily fixable.

I wrote a XSLT-stylesheet
osm2gnuplot.xsl
to extract way- or poi-data from an OSM-Data file,
and a messy script
osm2gnuplot.sh
to call the XSLT-processor.
This script will generate a bunch of files, one each for streets, rails and
different POI. These files are readable by gnuplot, e.g.
example to draw some parts of cologne

Note: this is not the fastest/most efficient approach.
Doing this with a well indexed database would be a matter of seconds,
doing this with my stylesheet and the gnome-xsltproc is a matter of hours
for the complete map of cologne (ca. 5MB) on a 400MHz PII-Box.
But its working fine
take a look at the north-east from cologne: osm-cologne-ne-20080127.ps.gz

oh well, I print my maps on A3 paper, like this:
pstops '1:0@1.65(-2.9cm,-2.5cm)' myplot.ps myplot_A3.ps

We need more POI in OSM, 33 bus_stations and 40 pubs in cologne, thats pretty poor,
cheers!

first of all, thanks for all replies.
within one week i managed to map two suburbs of Cologne from previously completly white to (i hope) nearly complete.
I am quite curious how this will look rendered with Mapnik.
at=50.9672&lon=6.9082&zoom=14

Some words about technical stuff, as mobile equipment i am usigng a bike, a Royaltec RGM-3800 data logger, a clipboard, a pencil and some white sheets of paper, sometimes printed OSM Map-fragments.

There are some problems with this equipment:
- paper gets wet and unusable if it is raining.
- printed OSM-Maps are limited to 1200x1600 (my max. screen resolution, i am doing screenshots). Is there any way to render crisp b/w postscript maps?
- the GPS-Logger-Readout-Software is M$-Windows only, attempts to readout the new GPS-Tracks running this software on my linux-box with wine produced some badly corrupted data, e.g. colonia_20080114_3.gpx (will be deleted). I am working on a linux-client to read the data from the GPS-tracker. For the meantime my tracks will be uploaded with some delay because i have to ask someone else with a M$-Windows box to download the data.

One more question: Police vs. Police/SOS-Telephone. Is there an amenity like "SOS-Telephone" / "Notruf". This telephones have one button only, if you press it, you get connected with the police. How do i put those in the map?

just back from a three-hours-night-cycling tour throug cologe.
First Ossendorf, later Vogelsang (translated: Birds-Voices or similar).
Some parts of Ossendorf already went throu the local media as beeing a ghetto, today i have been there, and yes, its pretty strage there. Too many 4-level-flats
packed too close together. And its going to e packed even further, construction is in progress.
osm.org/?lat=50.97232&lon=6.88459&zoom=16&layers=0BFT

There are two parts of Vogelsang, "Steinkauzweg" in the north, with 4-layer-flats, not too far from Ossendorf and the remaining - more posh part.
A huge uniform area. Long one-way-streets and dead-end-streets.
Yes, and everyone in this area at the end of a dead-end-stret has got motion-detector triggered lamps. One positive aspect: no nasty barking dogs.
osm.org/?lat=50.95843&lon=6.88416&zoom=15&layers=0BFT
Tracks and Map comming soon.

There were brights stars tonight and its getting warm.
Maybe i im wrong, but i renember some frogs making some noise at the dead end of some muddy cycle way. Spring is comming.

Oh, a stupid beginners question:
if there is a branch of one street, how do i map this?
Is it better to leave the side-arms un-labled or should i make it like this here "Erlenweg":
osm.org/?lat=50.96721&lon=6.89578&zoom=17&layers=0BFT

Hallo zusammen,
die Gegend um Ossendorf/Nippes ist bisher ziemlich spärlich kartografiert.
Dem werde ich mit Fahrrad und freundlicherweise vom Kollegen geliehenen GPS-Tracker abhelfen. Erster Test-Track im regnerischen Köln kam gestern, weitere Tracks der Gegend werden in den kommenden Tagen folgen.

Werden Schulen eigentlich auch in den Karten verzeichnet?
Und als was trage ich einen Knast in der Karte ein, aus der Not raus habe ich "Tourist Attraction" genommen.