My love is lost
My love is lost. Oh, woe is me! I thought I’d found my favourite GPS receiver, but the gloss has gone off our relationship. Several reasons why:
- I noticed from close examination of the tracks surrounding an audio recording shows that the V-900 stops recording tracks when it’s recording audio. What if I recorded more than a few seconds of audio? And made a turn during that time? It’s bad, but it’s not completely bad, because at least it shows me where I started recording the audio. The audio waypoint gets stored on the next point recorded; obviously the time and location of the end of the audio recording.
- The audio recording doesn’t immediately start when you press the button. If you’re moving at any speed faster than walking, it matters very much. Worse, the delay is variable.
- They store the audio files in the root directory of a FAT16 filesystem. This is bad, very bad. I have a gigabyte of flash to hold my audio files. Not likely to fill it up with audio any time soon. But the root directory only holds 512 file — which they note in their documentation. Why not put these files into a subdirectory like digital camera manufacturers do? Subdirectories can grow in size as needed. Lest you think that 512 is impossibly large, I filled it up yesterday. Cut my mapping bicycle ride short.
- A really BIG problem with a data logger is that is needs to be 100% reliable. When you’re out in the field collecting locations, you have no way to check to make sure that your data is being recorded. One of the “features” of the V-900 is that you can turn off data logging. I guess that’s a good thing if you’re only using bluetooth, or if you don’t want it to log you going to your mistress’s house. But I wasn’t using bluetooth, and I don’t even HAVE a mistress (that anybody knows about, natch). So after I got home from my mapping bicycle ride, I found out that I had a HUGE pile of very short voice recordings, with no idea where any of them were captured (before you have much pity on me, consider that that gives me a reason to go on the next bicycle ride, as if I needed a reason).
- The waypoint button is not reliable. You press it and sometimes you get the waypoint beep, and sometimes you don’t. I haven’t discerned any pattern yet.
So, while I plan to keep using it for audio mapping, I’m less in love with my Columbus V-900.
March 26th, 2009 - Posted by Russ Nelson | 1 Comments
AAG Conference Day 2 recap
Day two of the American Association of Geographers Conference and the OSGeo booth was a busy place once again.
Had some great conversations throughout the day, and have heard about some interesting projects such as Maps4Kids from Anthony Kehlhofer. It’s been great introducing so many people to the OpenStreetMap project and other free and open source tools, applications and projects for maps and map-making.
Today I received a lot of interest from people looking for open source alternatives to traditional mapping applications. Thanks to the knowledgable volunteer staffers of the OSGeo booth, I’ve been fortunate to hear first hand about tools such as Quantum GIS and GRASS amongst others which are under the OSGeo umbrella.
To continue my crash course in GIS, I attended one of the three afternoon sessions organized by Alexander Mandel on open source solutions for geographers. Judging by the number of sessions and attendees, it appears that the open source movement is getting a foothold amongst the geography community.
Panelists on open source at the AAG convention (From left): Bruce Ralston, Shriram Ilavajhala, Alex Mandel, Andrew Turner, Eric Wolf.
Alright, time to get back to manning the OSGeo booth (#618) here at the exhibit hall. If you’re in the neighborhood, swing on over:-)
March 25th, 2009 - Posted by Dirk Munson | 0 Comments
Still buzzed
I’m still buzzed off my trip this weekend. I went chasing old railroads for my birthday. Yes, I understand that not everyone is a railfan, so I’ll spare you the details, but you can go read them on Railroad.net If you want. Definitely one of my most favorite activities; exceeded only by bicycling on old railbeds.
On the way there and back I took audio waypoints using my Columbus V-900 receiver. When I got home, I ran their file through my columbus2gpx.py converter and loaded the resultant GPX file into JOSM. It shows me little speech bubbles at the points I finished talking. Click and it plays the audio. Just about THE easiest way to map.
March 24th, 2009 - Posted by Russ Nelson | 0 Comments
BYOM
Bring Your Own Maps that is!
It’s great that Apple is allowing us to choose what maps we want for turn-by-turn directions!
I will be adding OpenStreetMap to my iPhone for sure: http://is.gd/o09M
March 24th, 2009 - Posted by Hurricane McEwen | 0 Comments
OpenStreetMap at the Association of American Geographers Conference
The doors to the exhibit hall at the fabulous Riviera Hotel & Casino are about to open. Attendees of the Association of American Geographers Conference in Las Vegas are cordially invited to swing by the OSGeo booth (#618). Volunteer advocates of open source geospatial projects will be on site to help spread the word about the latest and greatest in community-led mapping efforts. So, if you’re in the neighborhood, swing on over and say hi to OSGeo volunteers Alex Mandel, Mike Treichler and Michele Tobias from UC-Davis.
I (Dirk Munson) will be doing my best to compliment the efforts of OSGeo as I offer attendees some insight into the OpenStreetMap project. So…stop on by and say ‘hi’.
OSGeo volunteers Alex and Mike waiting for the doors to open
March 24th, 2009 - Posted by Dirk Munson | 1 Comments
Fullers, NY
I’ve just discovered layers. Layers turn out to be utterly crucial to OpenStreetMap. When you have two bridges crossing one another, how do you know which one is crossing over which? Or there’s an interesting road in Philadelphia, 30th Street. Being an elevated highway, it is directly above a road underneath it. The road below is layer=0 (the default) and 30th Street is layer=1.
I’ve been fascinated by the intersection pictured below for quite some time. It is called “Fullers, NY”. Yes, this intersection between two railroads is considered to be a hamlet, and has a name. Used to have a public school just to the east of it (immediately to the right of this photo).
But …. here’s the catch. It isn’t actually an intersection between two railroads. It’s actually the same railroad, crossing over itself. As you can see in the photo below, the tracks are parallel to each other, only to have the left (eastern) one swing out and gain height to cross its sister track at Fullers. Why? Because the tracks come into a yard further to the south, and the track on the right needs to be on the left in order to enter the yard, whereas the track on the left needs to be on the right to bypass the yard. Yes, they could have done that with a junction, but then you could only have one train on the track at that junction, which would substantially reduce the throughput of the two tracks. They would behave as a single track, at least whenever a train needed to bypass the yard.
The track on the left has its bridge marked as layer=2, on the right is layer=1, and the road is layer=0 (the default).
But that’s not actually why I’m writing this blog entry. You see, as it turns out, the imported TIGER data was completely and insanely wrong. It had the right track making a right turn to stay on the right track, and the left track making a left turn to stay on the left track. Yes, that’s how the ways were drawn! Crazy, I know. The lesson here is that although the TIGER data is nice to have (it accounts for practically every road in the United States), it cannot be trusted. Each and every road needs to be fact-checked, and if you find that the road is correct, you should remove the tag tiger:reviewed=no. Just delete it. No need to change it to say “yes”.
March 19th, 2009 - Posted by Russ Nelson | 2 Comments
Boy Scout Troop 77
Spent my Monday evening with Boy Scout Troop 77. Yes, indeed, they were Trustworthy, Loyal, Helpful, Friendly, Courteous, Kind, Obedient, Cheerful, Thrifty, Brave, Clean, and Reverent, or at least as far as I could tell. Their scoutmaster, Ed Sachs, was curious about OpenStreetMap and how his troop might help, so he came to my first mapping party ever (I also host the troop’s web page, so Ed wasn’t a stranger by any means.) He saw how the process went, and thought that his troop might be helpful. And indeed, they were. We were tight for time, and some of the lads seems youngish, so I didn’t push them to take any waypoints. A few did, though. We went out on the Potsdam State campus to capture the campus walks … of which there are many. The party animation (below) is particularly pretty, since we walked as a group out to campus, then exploded out in every which direction. Resembles a time-lapse photograph of a flower blooming.
Anyway, when we got back I quickly grabbed the data off all eight GPS receivers, showed them what their tracks looked like, and did a tiny bit of editing before we could run over the end of their meeting time too badly. Handed out OpenStreetmap buttons to everyone, and that was that. One nice thing was that Mapnik had rendered the edits before I made the animation, so it includes their edits in the video.
March 19th, 2009 - Posted by Russ Nelson | 2 Comments
In a town of entertainers, entertainment is found!
Santa Monica:
Entertainment and Entertainers
There is a time for meticulously planning events , there are times when planning is best thrown out the window and then there are the events you couldn’t have planned if you had a crystal ball with the future held in it.
This weekend was one that started as the former, but quickly became the latter, and one of those times to best to roll with the punches.
Friday
I flew out to Los Angeles on Friday and tried out my new FlyClear card at security in DIA (www.flyclear.com). This neat credit card sized device has more information than I really care to admit on it. The normal: age, weight, height, eye scan, finger print data, dating record, grade school report card and probably knows what I ate for dinner last night. But, with all that on record, it seamlessly let’s me cut to the front of the security line– yes, I’m the one with special treatment that you’re secretly jealous of… It’s like getting revenge on all the kids who cut in front of me at the lunch line in high school. Sorry, if you’re not one of those, but I’m still enjoying the payback fantasy.
I will admit, after the security line VIP treatment, I still fly coach with the rest of the regular world.
In LAX, I picked up a sweet PT Cruiser for my rental car. Slapped my cool CloudMade and OpenStreetMap magnets on the tailgate and hopped on the 405 North to Westwood. I handled the 405 as best as any Colorado native, leaving enough room between the car in front of me and my front end and an energetic blinker to guide me 5 miles north. There are no speed limit signs on the highway… going 25 mph seemed a little outrageously slow.. It felt like the 5 lanes were jammed like a parking lot. But I was told getting to my destination in under an hour was good. For LA.
Saturday
Saturday started at 10am with a presentation to the LiLAX group (LAX Linux). In a perfect world, the projector would’ve worked and I would have fast, uninterrupted internet service. But this is planet earth, and Hurricane’s life: so I rolled with the punches which consisted of a projector hung from the ceiling (wasn’t prepared with a 10ft VGA cord), and a complete lack of internet. The greatest thing about geeks (and I use that term because, well, geeks are proud to be geeks) is that they’re problem solvers. A new OSM mapper who goes by Chunky, quickly solved our problems by creating a virtual network. We shared my screen between several laptops and proceeded with the slides I created for my LA OpenStreetMap presentation. Thanks Chunky!
At noon, more people curious to learn more about OSM arrived, and with them, Garrick had come to the rescue with a long VGA cord so that I could professionally present to a crowd of 16 guests. After the presentation, we are set out to map different parts of Santa Monica. Coffee shops, the 3rd Street Promenade, dog parks and the Santa Monica peer were a few of the select areas we mapped.
We reconvened at Ye Old Kings Head Pub for some late lunch and beers and socialized about the next area of LA to meet at when I return in April. Pasadena anyone? Orange County? Suggestions are still being taken.
Sunday
Sunday’s tend to be a bit slower for the human race. Or at least that’s what I was told about LA folks. They enjoy their brunches and lattes and actually attempt to ignore the rat race for a day. It was actually a permeable feeling around Santa Monica. People were in their leisure suits (okay, they were probably still designer clothes) and walking their designer dogs with a designer coffee in one had and their cell phones glued to their ears in the other.
Our OpenStreetMap party was at Ye Old Kings Head again and we decided to meet outside today since the weather was so nice! I still had the complications from the day before, but I was rollin’ with the punches and found ways to present to the group and then get everyone out mapping! We had three people return to map more from Saturday and a new mapper join that I had also previously met at SCaLE.
I even took the opportunity with our smaller group to go out and map too! I will be posting some Pacific Coast Highway addresses– some of which I know first hand have celebrities living in them! I also passed a guy with a GPS unit who was geocaching. He was very engrossed with his mission, but I mentioned OpenStreetMap, and yes, he had heard of it but didn’t feel he could multitask right then (he had a cache to find!) but would like to know more about the next event.
Monday
And now it’s Monday and I’m catching up on the weekend as well as preparing for Chattanooga, Tennessee which will be my next stop. Preparing and planning being the key words here. Sometimes, the unplanned and random events are the best things to happen!
Until next time, happy mapping!
Hurricane
March 16th, 2009 - Posted by Hurricane McEwen | 0 Comments
Columbus V-900 review
The second of the two economical GPS receivers that I recently purchased is the Columbua V-900. So far I like it a lot, but it’s not perfect. First the good bits.
The V-900 let you record GPS tracks onto a micro-SD card. It comes with a 1GB card, which is plenty of space for any reasonable amount of mapping. Over three days, I’ve only used 12 MBytes per day. It records in a funky format, but at least it’s plain text, one line per track point, and easily parsed.
It’s quite small, about 2/3rds the size of a deck of cards. Fits in the hand very well, which is important for reasons I’ll explain later. The user interface is a set of four LEDs, one for power, orange for logging, green for GPS synch, and blue for bluetooth communication. Turn it on in an area with a good view of the sky, and you’ll get a synch in about thirty seconds, or two seconds from a warm start. Sweet.
The user interface is simple beyond belief. Three buttons: a power on/off button, a waypoint button, and (this is key) an audio record button. The first two are obvious. The third button records audio waypoints off a built-in microphone. Push to talk, release to stop.
I had to write a Python program (ask if you want it) to convert their trackfile format into a GPX file, but when you load that GPX file into JOSM, it shows your track as the standard breadcrumb trail, your waypoints as waypoints, and your audio waypoints as speech bubbles. Click on the speech bubble, and JOSM plays your audio file. This turns out to be much more convenient than photo mapping, because the audio doesn’t take up any screen space, and doesn’t interfere with your editing, since the audio is played independently of your editing.
It has a cute “Spy” mode, where you give it a time interval, and it wakes up, takes 8 seconds of tracklog after getting a GPS signal, then goes back to sleep. Depending on the interval, it can take up to a month’s worth of logs on one battery charge. It will also turn on and start logging when it gets power. Handy for use in a vehicle. It also doesn’t turn off its Bluetooth connection if it’s got power. Without power, it turns off after 1/2 hour of no connection. All very handy features that shows that they’ve been paying attention to how people want to use a GPS data logger.
Okay, now for the things I don’t like. First, the audio recording doesn’t start immediately after you press the button. Instead, you have to wait for the unit to beep, just like leaving a voice mail message. Second, the waypoint button is not always responsive. If you press it too quickly, it won’t always record two waypoints on successive lines of the track log. Third, the USB interface doesn’t expose the micro-SD card. It’s solely used for charging. The included USB cable doesn’t even have data pins — it can only be used to charge this device. That means that you have to use the included microSD to SD adapter, plus an SD card reader to access the data.
On the whole, audio mapping is a lot of fun, and I can recommend this device for editing OpenStreetMap. I paid $100 plus shipping for it.
March 16th, 2009 - Posted by Russ Nelson | 8 Comments
The Texas Two-Step
As the song goes: “The stars at night, are big and bright, deep in the heart of Texas!” Well, I propose an update to include the bright nature of not only the stars, but also the maps that are starting to shimmer in the Lone Star State.
The past couple of weekends I’ve had the good fortune to travel to the Lone Star State of Texas bearing the OpenStreetMap torch. Building on the success of fellow community ambassadors Sarah Manley and Hurricane McKewen, I travelled to Dallas this past weekend, and to Austin and San Antonio the week prior.
In Dallas, I received a warm welcome from John Fields, an OpenStreetMap enthusiast who showed me what Texas hospitality is all about. Saturday morning I enjoyed the chance to meet and discuss the OpenStreetMap project with the attendees at the Open Source Saturday meet-up in Addison, TX. It was great to see so many of them show up at the mapping party afterwards at Trinity Hall.
It was exciting to have 14 people attend the mapping parties in Dallas, it seems the OSM movement is taking hold in Big D. Dallasites can look for more mapping events taking place April 17-19 when Hurricane McKewen makes a triumphant return to the area!
I also want to thank all those who attended mapping parties in San Antonio and Austin. In particular, a big Texas-sized thank you goes out to Ryan Rudnicki who attended events in both San Antonio and Austin. I enjoyed getting the chance to discuss the OpenStreetMap project with folks in both cities, and appreciated the warm reception by our hosts at Olmos Perk in San Antonio and Austin Java in the state’s capitol.
Next stop...Phoenix!!!
This coming weekend, the CloudMade car and I will be hitting the streets of Phoenix, Arizona as I host a mapping party in the Valley of The Sun this Sunday!
March 11th, 2009 - Posted by Dirk Munson | 0 Comments
