Openstreetmug
At the last monthly meeting of the local geo enthusiasts on wednesday, Fred sold Openstreetmugs. “179 of the most important OSM tags” are printed on its surface, so it’s a must have for the 150,000 project members. “1.30 EUR of each sale go to FOSSGIS e.V.“, which will be the German OSMF chapter “real soon now™”. Get it now!
I’m currently playing with Ruby on Rails, just for my very own pleasure and joy. Admittedly, that’s only one half of the truth. Some ruby (respectively rails) knowledge will also help me during my “daytime job”. What I’d like to do for now is to develop some rails application for the Nokia N810.
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Pic of the Wildsee as seen from the hill above it
On my last holiday I mapped some missing trails and paths in the Black Forest, between Seibelseckle and Ruhestein:
Three times I have been asked by other tourists how to get to destination X. Three times I could answer the questions using openstreetmaps on the Nokia N810, and three times I gave away the german language flyers.
I’m still disappointed by the tracks that the WBT-201 records. The accuracy is horrible, and the bluetooth connection goes down frequently, though the devices are just a couple of millimeters apart.
Besides that, I took some pictures.
Here’s some dead wood, which was perforated by some “furniture beetles”:
Totholz
At the “Wildsee” (see the topmost image) I found those fungi:
Pilze am Wildsee
Here’s some shot of a woodland strawberry:
Walderdbeere
Besides fungi, I find lichen very interesting. Found on trees, those usually indicate a very good quality of the air:
Flechten
And finally, here’s the absolute highlight of the today’s tour – a viper:
Kreuzotter
The pictures of this posting are not public domain. If you are interested to reuse them, please drop me a line.
Admittedly I’m a bit late, but Nokia yesterday have announced the N900, powered by the Linux based Maemo 5 operating system.
On a wonderful sunny and warm late summer day (it still is about 22°C in the middle of the night) I did a 106km mapping tour by bike:
Qtractor Main Window
After Simple Sysexxer is finally available for testing, I found some time to play with my instruments and Qtractor, an audio and MIDI sequencer.
WBT-201/G-Rays 2
As my previous GPSr surprisingly died, I needed a replacement. As I lost a track on my N810 every now and then, I decided to go for a receiver which also can do logging. Less surprisingly I bought a WBT-201 aka G-Rays 2 GPS receiver. Some other mappers use it, and I had the occasion to use and test it about one year ago. The size of the device is just the size of a match box, so it fits easily into any of your pockets.
Blumax
For some time now, I used this Blumax GPSr and I was very pleased with it. It is a bluetooth GPS mouse without any logging capabilities, but it always got a fix very quickly and always gave a good position, even under aggravating circumstances. A nice and small device which just does its job, nothing else.
QJackControl Firewire Settings
Meanwhile I got the Phonic Helixboard Universal PHHB24U mixer connected to my Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope powered Dell Precision M 4300 notebook via IEEE 1394 (aka firewire). The basic setup is simple for an experienced Linux user, but not straightforward for an average computer user. So here are some hints what to do to get such a device up and running.
After my Behringer mixing console died I needed a replacement. I wanted to avoid a fully featured mixing console, as I do not need most of its features. Instead, I was looking for a small firewire breakout box with many (at least 16) line and mic inputs. Unfortunately, I didn’t find any device fulfilling my needs. So I ended again with a fully featured 16 (or 24, if you count the aux return ins) channel mixer with built in USB 2.0 and Firewire interface, the Phonic Helix Board 24 Universal PHHB24U. It is likely that it can be run in Firewire mode using Linux thanks to the FFADO project. It is, however, unlikely that the USB mode will work. I do not care much about the latter one, as I prefer firewire anyway. And BTW: It’s my first firewire device ever. So welcome to the defloration of my notebook:
PHHB24U Front Panel
That is it: Requiem for a Mixing Console
All credits to Fons for the 32′ Bombarde in Aeolus :) .
(Hint: Firefox 3.5 plays ogg files autonomously)
BehringerEurorackMx2804
While writing the last post, my Behringer Eurorack MX 2804, a 28 channel mixing console, died. It’s about 15 years old, and it was about 900 Deutschmarks as I bought it. Compared to the 8 channel Mackies and Yamahas, it offered more than great value for the money. I always loved it for it’s features (and trust me, 28 channels are not too much for a rack mixer), but I disliked it for the weird noise and hum it sometimes produced.
It really is a pity that it dies right now. There is currently no comparable device available on the market. I desperately wait for some Linux compatible firewire device to appear with at least 12 stereo line inputs and some mic inputs, to get my synths and other audio sources connected.
I guess I need to chose an el cheapo device for the interim period. RIP.
After some months of abstinence, I updated Navit from SVN and had a closer look of what has changed. Navit supports different “vehicle” types (such as car, bike, horse and pedestrian) for a while now. Meanwhile it also supports vehicleprofiles. A vehicleprofile can be linked to a vehicle and contains roadprofiles. This way it is possible to define which ways a “vehicle” uses for routing. It is even possible to pass speed and routing weight parameters to a roadprofile. This actually means that one can define the routing behaviour via Navit’s configuration file, navit.xml. I immediately started to play with it to get bike routing:
Bike routing in Navit
I have updated the panorama picture of the pass of ambelos and added two more panoramas of the Lassithi plateau to the posting. If that’s not yet enough for you, I have some more panoramas.
Again I lost some tracks using MaemoMapper – which of course is all my fault, because I neglected Hakan’s tipp :) .
It usually happens when the device shuts down due to a drained battery while MaemoMapper is running. Though Sqlite supports transactions (actually it uses them per default), it seems that a system shutdown causes MaemoMapper to leave a defective database file. Of course, badman only appears if you have no backup available. If you do backups, nothing will happen :) .
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Taking pictures is an art of its own, and I personally know almost nothing about it. But what I’ve learned so far is that there are occasions where you need to use the flash light – and that there are occasions, where the auto mode of the camera will enable flashing but you shouldn’t use it.
Here are some further pictures I have taken recently. A tree suffering from cancer:
Subbersach wenn man gerade auf die Pizza wartet :)
Due to some unknown accident, Maemo Mapper (which is an excellent application, BTW) dropped a huge portion of the trackpoints of today’s hiking trip. I have no clue what happened. The remaining trackpoints start around an area where the tablet startet to complain about the battery being low. I exchanged the battery ca. 15 minutes later, so maybe the system notification triggered some unwanted behaviour. As I was mapping live using osm2go, it’s not really a severe loss, but I wanted to geocode some pictures I have taken.
What I learn from this is that I should make backups of the track while still on tour.
As the OSM servers are up and running since Tuesday, I did some live mapping using the famous osm2go yesterday. Unfortunately it has problems uploading the edited data. The error it emits reads as:
Uploading to http://api.openstreetmap.org/api/0.6
Create changeset failed, code: 417 (Expect rejected)
Upload done
Process finished.
Others also had similar problems, so it should be possible to locate the issue during the next couple of days.
