OpenStreetMap: Edinburgh Mapping Party Review

Last weekend's Edinburgh Mapping Party went well. We had around 10 mappers at the meet up. Most of FIXME land has now disappeared.

There was a few debates on what things should tagged. After some discussion it was decided the West Approach Road tagged highway=primary rather than tertiary, as it has all the characteristics of a primary, even so it doesn't have a reference number. Also Princes Street hasn't been a primary road since it was restricted some years ago to allow only buses along it east bound.

Hopefully there will be some more meetups in the future.

OpenStreetMap: Edinburgh Mapping Party: August 2007

This weekend is the first OpenStreetMap mapping party in Scotland. It will start with a get together starting in the Doctors Pub, in the centre of Edinburgh, on Friday at 1800. (Map (with the pub marked)) From there we may find some show at the Edinburgh International Festival to go to.

On the Saturday and Sunday we will meet-up around 0930 in InfoSeed, who have donated their space for the mapping party. At the start of each day we will decide the specifics of where/when/what to do, depending on who is there, and what they want to do. The general idea is to start off with a quick introduction about the project, and the mapping party. Then head out to the streets to do some mapping. Then back to base to upload the results and have lunch. For the afternoon, we head back out on to the streets and do some more mapping. Back to base to upload the results. On the Saturday evening there will probably be some form of spontaneous evening entertainment.

The main aim is to get the city centre fully mapped. There is a sketch of the area that we are looking to complete. There are many unnamed roads, and missing roads in the area. There are also some smaller things like post boxes and pubs that need to be added to the map too.

Hopefully the really nice weather, with a pure blue sky, is going to continue until the end of the weekend.

More information is available on the OpenStreetMap wiki.

Cycling: Back on the Road

Today my dad came round and helped me to clean and re-grease my rear hub gears. Now the bike is running a lot better. Almost as though it's now.

However I still need to replace the cogs and chain some time soon, before they wear out completely. As I have internal gears, I can get away with wearing away the cogs for a lot longer compared to other external derailleur gears.

Hopefully I won't need to take it apart for the next 6 months to a year to do another re-grease.

Clean re-install of Mac OS X

Today I have spent some time re-installing Mac OS X on my MacBook. It has been over a year now since I have bought the MacBook, and have only once done a clean install on it so far. 

It is now a lot faster as I don't have any junk lying around running in the background. That's one problem of installing various bits of software to see what it does and then not using it again. Maybe I should unsubscribe from the VersionTracker daily mail of new software releases. I've also gained around 20GB on my internal hard drive. 

Of course prior to the clean re-install, I had create a complete bootable backup of my hard drive, thus allowing me to selectively recover anything that I need.

I should now be able to use the OpenOffice.org CWS tools again as I'll setup my local cvs server on a different port than the default port.

Cycling: Bike Repairs

Today, I was intending to cycle from Edinburgh to Berwick-upon-Tweed and back. Unfortunately on leaving the lights a Regent Road to head down on to London road, my gears started making a grinding noise.

Gears 5-8 all made a horrible noise. Luckily I still had gears 1-4, though unfortunately I had a top speed of only about 15 miles per hour, which is way too slow when on the road. I cycled down to Halfords at Seafield to see if they could see what the problem was. One of the guys at the BikeHut took a look and said that I could either wait about 10 days for a gear service (£14.99), or replace the gear cable myself, which probably would be the problem (£1.99). 

The old gear cable has had one of the strands lose in parts of the cable. However the change of the cable hasn't made the noise go away. So it seems that the gear unit will need to be opened for an half yearly service. I also need to get a new chain and front cogs for it too some time soon. :-( 

At least I did manage to do some more mapping for OpenStreetMap.org, so it wasn't a completely wasted journey.

Map of today's route. 

Petition to get Apple to support OpenDocument in iWork

Filip Molcan has just pointed out a new petition to get Apple to support the ISO standard 26300, otherwise known as OpenDocument in iWork 08. iWork 08 already supports the Open Office XML (OOXML) document format, which isn't yet an ISO standard. Wasn't Apple meant to be a supporter of open standards?

Cycling: Edinburgh and Galashiels circle

Yesterday I took a cycle south on the National Cycle Network route 1. 

 I headed out on the Lasswade Road, towards Bonnyrigg, where I joined the NCN1.

It was quite a nice day, with some awesome views in parts of the route.

From 20070804osmcy...

One of the great things about being on a push bike, is that you can ignore "Road Closed" signs, instead of taking a long diversion. In this case, a bridge on the National Cycle Network was getting replaced. Though there was a temporary scaffold bridge available for use by cyclists and pedestrians.

From 20070804osmcy...

Parts of the journey were quite tough, even so they were downhill on quiet roads, there was a strong head wind. At Innerleithen, I stopped for a short break to grab a pizza, so that I would have enough energy to get back home. From there the cycle route starts heading east to Galashiels and Melrose. 

From 20070804osmcy...

After Melrose, I decided it would be better to head back home rather than continuing south on the national cycle network. At that point I seen a distance sign that said that Edinburgh was 39 miles away on the A68. At that point I predicted that I'd be home some time between 12 midnight and 1 am.

As I was heading up the first part of the A68, which was quite a bit of uphill, I was starting to extend my prediction as to the estimated time of arrival home. However the downhill at the other side made up for the extra time to get up the hill, with me arriving home around quarter past midnight. 96 miles in 9 hours 45 minutes is pretty good, with a few breaks. It is however only a third of the speed required for setting some UK Road Records.

While I was out on my travels, I collected a nice track log of  my journey, so that I could add it to OpenStreetMap.org.

Map of route