I finally got around to buying a 'proper' GPS yay! I ordered a Dakota 20 'cos it's not hugely expensive, it seems to have a decent battery life, takes AA batteries so I can keep some spare with me and most importantly is able to take an SD card with opencyclemap on it.

I see while I've been off OSM some kind souls have been filling in lots of gaps around Corsham. Melksham is one of the target towns now, so once I've tidied up various loose ends I left lying around here from last year, I'll do some mapping around there. My wife is on hols for a week so should be able to put some quality time in (weather permitting).

I just tried adding a handful more roads by walking around locally. Although I took some notes, what the GPS tracks is a little vague at times. I can see I'll need to walk around again later to fix things I've got wrong on the first pass.

"You get what you pay for" so my Dad always said.

I bought a cheapo 40-quid bluetooth-only GPS so I could get started with this mapping. It's been not too difficult getting it to work with my netbook PC, but to be honest it's pretty fiddly and it's not always clear whether it's actually working properly or not.

I'm going to see if anyone has written a java app for my mobile phone which might make things more portable, but if not I think I'll be asking Claire to buy me a half-decent GPS for my birthday. The one mentioned on the OpenStreetMap website looks pretty useable. http://www.storagedepot.co.uk/Handheld-GPS/sc893/p75.aspx and not bad value neither. The OpenStreetMap project can get a little money from the transaction too, so everyone wins!

Added a road which I'd traced 3 months ago, and contacted the other mappers in Corsham in case they want to collaborate on anything.

I've just been documenting how to get my cheapo bluetooth GPS connected to my Asus Eee netbook running Mandriva linux 2009.1 . Ideally I need to find or write a startup script for gpsd but not sure if I'll bother though as it's only one simple command needed to start it.