Could you do it instead by reference to the planet diff files?

I think it would be very useful to be able to see what changed visually as the result of a changeset. ITO's OSMMapper is excellent, but doesn't zoom in so you can't really see the changes to geometry, only to tags.

Ironically, the more rapid update to mapnik makes it harder than it used to be. Previously you'd see a changed way or node overlaid on the old rendering for a few days so the changes were pretty obvious, but now they're usually in step unless you're really quick.

Though it's not in Map_features, man_made=mast is recognised by JOSM (i.e. there's an icon for it) and it is rendered on Mapnik (eg osm.org/?lat=52.60182&lon=0.37385&zoom=17&layers=B000FTF)

I think tower is a rather more substantial thing than a mobile phone mast (like a TV transmitter or the Eiffel Tower).

Perhaps you should read at least the basics in the documentation before starting to use a tool you've never used before. The first section of "getting started", even above the list of contents, tells you "Changes are written directly to the OSM database, but you will not see them on the Slippy map until it updates, currently every week. Other options are available if you want to see your work rendered immediately." (or at least it used to, I'm going to about to change it to make it clearer that every change is saved immediately).

Indeed, as everything in OSM there seem to be more differing opinions than contributors, and I am of the opposite opinion here, for precisely the reason you say - it makes it really hard to edit. I usually leave a gap of up to 5 metres so it is distinct in JOSM at a reasonably tight zoom. But its not just for convenience. The way marks the centre line of the road, and roads have significant width - typically about 10m including footway - so it's not actually true to say the adjacent areas coincide IMO.

One other thing about Denver I omitted to say is its appearance in Dorothy L Sayers' Wimsey novel The Nine Tailors. At the beginning of the story, Wimsey (who is Duke of Denver) crashes his car into one of the dikes in the new year snow. Rescued by the villagers of Somewhere St Someone (as many of the villages in the central fens are named) he takes part in ringing the new year changes on the church bells, and therein lies the plot...

> JOSM is a complete nightmare that I can't use

Could you expand on this?

You need to read the getting started guide osm.wiki/Beginners%27_Guide. There is a Spanish version osm.wiki/ES:Beginners_Guide

You need a GPS to record where the streets are and a piece of paper, voice recorder or camera to make a note of street names. You can upload your GPS tracks and then use these to trace from, which is how you get started in a blank (or any) area.

You MUSTN'T copy off Google maps which are copyright.

I can't recall JOSM ever having crashed for me. I've been using it all day today, and even when Java ran out of memory JOSM told me but didn't crash. What did you do to upset it?

My fault I'm afraid. The namefinder index isn't being updated at the moment due killer to performance problems earlier in the year. I'm afraid I haven't found time to do the necessary tweaks to get it up and running again. I know I must get on and do this, but like all of us, there's lots of other demands on my time.

Well I had a puncture last time I was out mapping too. About £4.50 for a new innertube. But then I am restricted to about 20km/hour, as that's as fast as my legs will propel me. So all depends on your perspective really.

Welcome Neil,

One degree of latitude is about 111km, so your 0.0001 is about 10m, which is not unusual. No GPS is going to do well in areas of poor signal - if you go down an alleyway with high fences, or an urban canyon, or going through a wood, you'll often lose some or all of the signal. Also it varies according to how many satellites are visible and how low in the sky they are at any one time - you can spend 4 hours mapping and come back to the start point to find it tells you you are 20m away. In the end some interpolation and intelligent interpretation of your tracks is needed to make a good map - you can't follow the trace blindly. It's a good idea in my experience to enter your data as soon as you can so you can remember the area. After a while I find you get a feel for the 'birds-eye view', that some streets are laid out parallel to each other or there is some systematic model behind the layout which can guide you, even in apparently haphazard surroundings. Often culs-de-sac require you to retrace your steps, but this isn't necessarily a bad thing as you get two traces and can often see where there was a bad one. Bear in mind most suburban roads are 8-10m wide, plus say 3m for a verge or footway, so the trace along one side of a road could well be 10m from the end of an alleyway emerging onto the road. Also, if you're co-ordinating with someone else's traces, they could be 10m out as well, so 20m between you. Or they could just have had an off day and simply got it wrong.

Making corrections to names is really helpful. If you're finding quite a few streets missing, you probably want to do a systematic survey of the area as the person who did them clearly hasn't been very helpful in doing some streets and not others. Randomly adding streets isn't all that helpful as it gives a misleading impression of completeness and discourages proper surveys of an area. Obviously a skeleton of main roads is useful, but to randomly put some side streets in an area in and not others just means someone else has to do it all again later because you don't know what streets off the ones that have been marked are missing.

The only reason is because it isn't implemented. It's a reasonable request and something I had intended doing at some point.

However it doesn't remove the need for calibration. It depends on how your recorder works. If its clock drives both the sampling rate and the file timestamps (as is likely), then the timestamps are just as inaccurate as the sample rate and you'd associate a later audio snippet with the wrong point on the track. If the sample rate has its own clock, then you're not bothered about that one for short snippets, but the timestamps would need calibrating. It's a simple enough experiment to do and you only need do it once typically. The same is true of timestamps on photos by the way - if your camera clock runs fast or slow, by even a tiny amount, you'll be off by tens or hundreds of metres in only a couple of hours. That's independent of synchronising, where the clocks are unlikely to coincide unless you've taken some care to set them that way, but run at a different rate. BTW, each second of difference in the synchronisation amounts to maybe 5-6m on the ground when mapping by bike.

I fully understand the problem with having to press lots of buttons. My old GPS was like that. Inow use a Nokia N810 with a modified version of its Maemo Mapper program so I can stab the screen anywhere to get a numbered waypoint on the move. But equally, aren't you having to turn the recorder on and off the way you're doing it?

It's time I revisited some of the audio stuff.

David

It's "the world's largest straw-fuelled power plant"...

http://www.ely-standard.co.uk/content/ely/news/story.aspx?brand=ELYOnline&category=News&tBrand=HertsCambsOnline&tCategory=newslatestELY&itemid=WEED23%20Feb%202009%2008%3A49%3A38%3A080

David

The fastest way is not to bother - use a continuous audio recording then no post processing is required (other than get your audio in WAV format, as yours apparently isn't).

Clearly you're going to have to write a program to do this if you do want to. Maybe someone's already got one, but I haven't heard. It's basically a merge, you've got two data streams, the s (let's assume you've presorted these) and the s (typically in order already) each nominally with a key, the time stamp, so ignoring the formatting issues, the task is to emit one stream or the other depending on which has the earlier key as you run through each in parallel.

Hi Paul,

I wrote the JOSM audio stuff, so maybe I can help.

Firstly, do look at the help within JOSM for Audio, there's a detailed run through of the different ways to use it.

I'm puzzled why you need to keep the timestamps. When you associate an audio track with a GPX track, you bring the two into line by synchronising an audio cue (something you say on the audio) with a waypoint in the GPX, or a feature on the ground (like a sharp left turn) that you can recognise in your track, if you're not using waypoints.

It's also possible to associate audio snippets with the GPX track by editing the XML, though this seems to me to be much more inconvenient both in the oprocessing involved and the fact you have to keep starting and stopping the recorder - but maybe that's why you want the time stamps. If so, why not simply note the time stamps for the original tracks and so long as the file names have some patter to them you can just associate the new WAV file with the time stamp of the old WMA file using the file name.

Note also the need to at least check whether you need to calibrate your recorder's clock so it doesn't drift as you go along. If your recorders clock drifts by 0.15% as mine does, it doesn't sound much but you'll be out on the GPX track by a hundred metres or more after a couple of hours mapping.

David

No idea, it seemed to have happened while I was actually writing the diary entry.

There are as many ways to map things as there are contributors and that's why it is confusing. There are two camps of opinion in OSM: those who would like standardisation and those who want a free for all (which to my mind means that mostly those who define what gets rendered on the maps get to decide), and this has been debated endlessly on the mailing lists. smoothness in particular is a battle that has been raging this week (to which my reaction is not to attempt to use it).

I think the best approach is to look at a well-mapped area nearby, or at least in your part of Germany, and follow their lead. I suspect you'll find a lot of the physical features stuff is not widely used.

On the parking area question, you could create more than one way between the shared nodes, but you wouldn't normally use the highway way itself. Or you could separate the area by a small amount (which is what I do, because it makes it easier to edit than having superimposed ways). There is no right answer.

If you find good answers to your questions, you could edit the wiki pages so they reflect at least one reality.

If you're using Landsat, then yes, the images are misaligned in JOSM. The amount varies from place to place, though 500m is quite a lot. There is a button specifically to correct them.

This issue has arisen a number of times on the talk list. Here's my opinion:

In some ways it's like the distinction between the formal designation of a road by some authority and what it looks like to a surveyor on the ground. Most of the time they agree (trunk road is signed as such), but sometimes they differ. Most cities are also large (in the UK) but some are not (Ely is another example, though not quite as extreme as St Davids). In the US nearly all incorporated settlements are "cities". So really we need some clue as to the importance of a settlement in order to solve these rendering problems; at present the place= designation is synonymous with importance, so nealry all US cities are tagged as town or village. Without a widely adopted alternative tagging scheme, we can't really do any better and St David's ought to be downgraded according to its importance (which given its history is probably more than just a village despite its size) despite its formal designation. Population has been suggested as an alternative, but (a) this information is copyright in the UK and (b) some places punch above their weight (e.g Hay-on-Wye is definitely a town not least in the eyes of the inhabitants even though it has fewer than 2000 people). Approximate area might be another one, not copyright and possibly computable but does still suffer from point b. Probably some combination of factors is the answer, but so far we only have place= to go on in any widely adopted way.

You might want to join the talk-midanglia mailing list (http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb-midanglia). Despite the name, it has a number of people on it who are mapping near the Essex coast. David.