User:Beej71

Hey, San Francisco-area Folks!

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What I Am Working On

I typically work in Berkeley/Albany/North Oakland, California, trails in the East Bay Parks and elsewhere, and Lava Beds National Monument, California. Also I frequent Chico, California and Grass Valley/Nevada City, California.

Here's a link to my page at www.openstreetmap.org.

I live in Berkeley, and can be contacted at beej@beej.us.

Point Reyes Trail Map Import

Matt Heberger found a site with NPS data for national parks as he was looking for information on the Marin Headlands for an upcoming mapping event. He converted the Point Reyes trails e00 file to a shapefile and gave it to me.

So I munged it using yet another custom Python script (from Shapefile UTM NAD83 to OSM latlon WGS84) and imported it.

You can find it by searching for all nodes and ways (about 60,000 results) with this query:

http://www.informationfreeway.org/api/0.5/node[importuuid=e54f4bb6-3462-4841-9f20-3d97b6783c49]
http://www.informationfreeway.org/api/0.5/way[importuuid=e54f4bb6-3462-4841-9f20-3d97b6783c49]

GNIS US City Name Import

I have uploaded all the populated places in the US (cities, towns, villages, and hamlets) from GNIS data, as of December 9, 2007. A complete 87.4 MB OSM file of all 165,569 nodes can be obtained through osmxapi with the following URL:

http://www.informationfreeway.org/api/0.5/node[import_uuid=bb7269ee-502a-5391-8056-e3ce0e66489c]

GPS Tips

I have a Garmin eTrex Vista HCx. It has the high-performance sensor in it, which is a must for trails in the forest, and a color screen. I dig it. (I don't use the compass so much, but that's ok.) It's small and doesn't cost a fortune. The UI sucks, of course, but whatcha gonna do.

Trackpoint recording interval--increasing the sampling rate can help reduce the error of the final result in areas where reception is poor.

• Driving long distances: Auto/Most Often
• Driving narrow streets in town: 1-2 seconds
• Hiking/Biking in the open: Auto/Most Often
• Hiking/Biking in the forest/town: 2-4 seconds

ETREX WARNING: If you "Save" your track on an eTrex, it'll discard the timestamps on the trackpoints! Only the "Current" log has the timestamps. (Note that if you save your tracks to the uSD card, those saved tracks will have complete data.)

ETREX WARNING: The eTrex only shows the last 300 or so points of the "Current" track on the map. They disappear from the screen after that, but they are still safely in memory! I learned about this the hard way chasing the "tail" of my breadcrumb trail around.

I recommend using JOSM with the AgPifoJ photo geotagging plugin. It's very convenient. When taking photos, I put the camera in low-res mode so I don't worry about the disk space I use on the images.

Terraserver Aerial Photos with the JOSM WMS Plugin

Here's what I have in my ~/.josm/preferences file for getting WMS data from Terraserver using wmsplugin.

Urban hi-res urban aerial photos are only available in some areas.

I recommend using the Urban and Aerial images when possible, as they seem to match my GPS tracks better than the Topo (DRG) maps.

The more you are zoomed in, the higher resolution the image will be. However...

The plugin will only download the image if you're zoomed out far enough (else you'll get big red error tiles). For Topos and Aerial the closest I can get is when the scale reads about 150 meters. For Urban, the scale needs to read about 50 meters or more.

Terraserver data is from the USGS and is in the public domain.

wmsplugin.url.0.name=Landsat
wmsplugin.url.0.url=http://onearth.jpl.nasa.gov/wms.cgi?request=GetMap&layers=global_mosaic&styles=&format=image/jpeg
wmsplugin.url.1.name=Open Aerial Map
wmsplugin.url.1.url=http://openaerialmap.org/wms/?VERSION=1.0&request=GetMap&layers=world&styles=&format=image/jpeg
wmsplugin.url.2.name=Terraserver Aerial
wmsplugin.url.2.url=http://terraservice.net/ogcmap.ashx?version=1.1.1&request=GetMap&Layers=doq&Styles=&SRS=EPSG:4326&format=image/jpeg&
wmsplugin.url.3.name=Terraserver Topos
wmsplugin.url.3.url=http://terraservice.net/ogcmap.ashx?version=1.1.1&request=GetMap&Layers=drg&Styles=&SRS=EPSG:4326&format=image/jpeg&
wmsplugin.url.4.name=Terraserver Urban
wmsplugin.url.4.url=http://terraservice.net/ogcmap.ashx?version=1.1.1&request=GetMap&Layers=urbanarea&styles=&format=image/jpeg
wmsplugin.url.5.name=YAHOO (WebKit)
wmsplugin.url.5.url=yahoo://webkit-image {0}

License

I dislike restrictions on data.

All my contributions to OpenStreetMap are released into the public domain. This applies worldwide. In case this is not legally possible, I grant anyone the right to use my contributions for any purpose, without any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law.