When I got back from a long weekend yesterday I came across a new project from the legendary Michal Migurski - “Walking Papers“. The basic premise is that when doing OpenStreetMap (especially in partially mapped areas) we all spend a lot of time scribbling on print-outs of maps. For example see one created by Dave that I’ve blogged about before.
So wouldn’t it be great if you could then trace over the printout to enter the data into OSM? This is where Mike’s site comes in. If you print out your map from his site, it comes along with special pictures in the corners that embed some information about orientation and position. So when you scan it in an upload it to the site, it automatically knows where in the world that scan corresponds to and skews your scan to fit properly. And then you can simply trace over your notes with Potlatch to enter your data. More technical details are available from his weblog.
Even if you don’t want to scan back in, it’s actually a good interface for just printing maps for annotation. The only improvement I’d make to the site would be using OAuth to log into OpenStreetMap (so you don’t give walking-papers your password), but since that’s not implemented just yet on OpenStreetMap.org I can hardly blame Mike! I’ll be very interested to see how many people use the service - you can see what I did when testing it out or simply get started yourself!
Last night I went to the first meeting of the unwieldy-named London Geo/Mobile Developers Meetup Group, which was hosted by Google at their London HQ. The three talks are nicely summarised by Gary Gale in his blog post on the event, but I just wanted to include something I always like to see - giant slides showing the cycle map:
Nice. But as Mike mentions in the comments on that photo, there’s still a lot of people need awakening to the powers of OpenStreetMap. BikeRadar mentions a campaign to try to persuade Google to add bike routes to their maps (can’t think who “burlyc” might be…) - there’s now 43,000 people signed the petition, when they could already have mapped all the bike paths onto OpenStreetMap instead. Really, as Nick discussed last night in his “Five things you can’t do with online maps” talk, the ideas behind everyone sharing the same, standard, (frequently Google) map are becoming long in the tooth - all the interest and an increasing amount of “cool” stuff is coming from the open-source/crowd-sourced/OpenStreetMap world. We just need to keep spreading the word and getting more people involved.
After some, umm, over-enthusiastic pinging by a volunteer at a recent OSM Mapping Party, the springy catch on my GPS’s bike clip snapped off. In an attempt to get it fixed I left my brain out of gear and bought a second bike-mount kit from Amazon, but for reasons that still escape me only the handlebar-bit works with the ‘x’ models - in the kit there’s a replacement back for units without the SD card that have the springy-bit molded on but that doesn’t fit most models. So thinking back, I realised the removable clip I wanted had come in the original box, and as much as I fancy a new Legend HCx, I’m not paying hundreds of pounds just because of a two-pence piece of plastic broke!
But, good and surprising news came when I found a forum post that suggested phoning Garmin. Absolutely no hassle, they just sent me one in the post, for free. The cynical would say “just as well, it’s their design flaw” but I just think it’s nice when you stumble across some nice customer service - it makes a change. So if you’re having the same problem (i.e. looking for a replacement 145-00709-00), just give them a call. And a tip of the hat goes to Amazon as well for their returns policy - even refunding the postage. Nice.
