Back Side of Rastatt Castle

Today’s trip led from Karlsruhe to Rastatt, an ancient german town with several baroque buildings. I decided not to make it a grand mapping trip, but to use openrouteservice.org to find the way. This means I expected not to find new ways because the route was calculated based on existing ones.

The way led through the woods and fields between the two towns. Many of the ways originally have been mapped by me several years ago and needed maintenance. Tracktypes for example didn’t exist in those days yet. Surprisingly I found some new ways anyway while others meanwhile have been paved.

Unfortunately my bike caused some trouble again. I’ve been at the shop three times, but they just don’t manage to get their stuff done. I’m already looking for another dealer and a new bike. I wanted to avoid spending the money, but today it broke my neck. It’s just no fun when your vehicle of choice doesn’t do its job.

Ottenhöfen, Black Forest

Around Ottenhöfen, a Black Forest town, some ancient watermills have been restored. A hiking trail connects all of them. Today’s weather was not that great, e.g. too cold for May, and it was a cloudy and windy day. We grabbed the occasion anyway, stuffed eleven people into two cars and entered the black forest, leaving the cars at Ottenhöfen station. Here’s one of the watermills:

Watermill near Ottenhöfen (wikimedia commons, Andreas Frick, public domain)

Meanwhile I know why I’ve been elected to book and drive a van of the local car sharing provider. Along the trail, a lot of fountains are sited, and some of them act as a very special selling point (called »Schnapsbrunnen«). The black forest aborigines place bottles of schnapps in the water, add some drinking glasses and an offertory box. Hikers just serve themselves and leave some money. Needless to say that some of us served themselves very well :) .

Of course I used the occasion for some mapping. Most tracks and ways already have been mapped, but not very well. I added some ways, details along them and fixed some broken crossings. I’ve also modelled the water mill trail for appearance in the hiking and bridle map, but it will take some time until it gets rendered.

Finally we had some coffee at a local restaurant, enjoying local cake. This is a typical black forest cherry cake (»Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte«):

Black Forest cherry cake (»Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte«)

A great trip, and it begun raining just as we returned to the cars. An excellent timing :) .

Lœwenstein Castle

As the weather is fine at the moment (and my bike is broken again), it is hiking time. Slowly it becomes difficult to find unmapped terrain, as openstreetmap.org meanwhile does not only attract car drivers but also hikers and (mountain) bikers. In the region where I grew up a lot of medieval castles can be found, and I visited them all. Time to resurrect the hobby of my youth as long there are still trails missing in the woods.

The first trip was near a homestead called Gimbelhof. Leaving the car there, it was easy to visit the Lœwenstein (see the above picture), the Hohenbourg (next picture) and the Wegelnburg. The latter one is sited in germany, which means you will cross the french german border near the source Maidenbrunnen, a spring.

Hohenbourg 1

Hohenbourg 2

This seems to be the main entrance, nicely decorated:

Hohenbourg Entrance

Nearby there’s another castle called Fleckenstein:

The Fleckenstein as seen from Hohenbourg

This is the Wegelnburg after passing the border. I find it quite interesting that they used relatively small rocks to build their residences upon:

Wegelnburg

Yesterday I visited the Blumenstein and the Wasigenstein castles. Due to the trees, you cannot see much of the Blumenstein castle:

Approaching Blumenstein from Uphill

I guess this stair is not as old as the castle, but a later addition. Unlike this one, the original stairs often show steps which are very different in size and shape:

Medieval stair inside Blumenstein

Thousands of lizards are populating the ruins nowadays:

A dinosaur on Blumenstein

This pine found it cool to grow on top of the ruins, enjoying the marvellous view over the valley:

A pine on top of Blumenstein castle

This last picture of Blumenstein shows how most of those castles are built. A languet on a hill got truncated to create a fosse. The rock then was uncovered from earth and the buildings put on top of it. As they only had hammers and chisels, the whole process must have been painful and surely took ages:

Leaving Blumenstein

Wasigenstein is built on top of a notched rock, and two castles have been built upon, Gross Wasigenstein and Klein Wasigenstein. The first one is hillside:

Approaching Gross Wasigenstein

Here’s the rather impressive fosse they built by dismantling the rock:

Fosse of Gross Wasigenstein

They also built a basin on the ground. Nowadays the water hosts frogs, newts and other animals:

Newts in a basin near Gross Wasigenstein

That’s the top of Gross Wasigenstein. It’s a really quiet place, so it was time to enjoy a little sunbath:

On top of Gross Wasigenstein

Klein Wasigenstein is much smaller:

Klein Wasigenstein ahead

Here are two doors inside it. I wonder if those are still romanesque or already gothic. In my opinion it’s in between. Big romanesque walls, but more elegant doors and staircases:

Doors inside Klein Wasigenstein

Here it is again, the alsacien castle lizard. I think it is endemic, as I only have seen them there :) :

An inhabitant of Klein Wasigenstein

This picture provides an impression of the tightness of such a medieval castle. Thus they tried to use any square inch:

Leaving Klein Wasigenstein

From the opposite side it is possible to see the two castles on the split rock:

The Wasigenstein castles as seen from the opposite sited hill

Here’s the last one for today, the Frœnsbourg. I’ve never seen such a bug before. A medieval remain, I guess :) . Anyway, the N900’s macro mode did a very good gob:

Bug near Frœnsbourg

The Frœnsbourg is a very narrow one. The rock partly only provides a thickness of about 6 to 8 feet:

On top of the Frœnsbourg

Here’s a picture showing it from bottom up:

Frœnsbourg bottom up

The various remains of workmanship shed a little light on the former usage of the castle. I guess that there have been a lot of wooden booths and buildings around the rock:

Frœnsbourg caves

I really enjoyed the trips. The N900 is a perfect general purpose companion. The weather was nice, and other hikers used several languages like english, french or the local german dialect of the french people who live nearby.

Jester (openclipart.org, by Johnny Automatic, public domain)

It’s not the first time it happened, but I was surprised anyway. I was hiking along the french-german border. I only ran Mæp and Waypointcatcher. I didn’t use osm2go to save some battery power. Even without Waypointcatcher not running, Mæp caused the device to crash four times. This usually happens when the device’s interface is locked, so you just notice that the device does not respond as soon as you try to unlock it. The only thing that helps is to remove the battery and boot anew. As data roaming is about 7¢ per 10KB of data (sic), I could not use AGPS. Thus the device needs up to twenty minutes to get a GPS fix after a reboot.

Unfortunately Mæp drops the recorded track after such a forced reboot. But hey, no prob, I have the WBT-201 running as a backup.

Was it really running? Yes, it was. The weather conditions have been excellent, many trees still had no leaves, and the valley was not too narrow. No problem. Really? Well, back home I was baffled. That’s what the track of the WBT looks like in JOSM, the Java openstreetmap.org editor:

A track of a WBT-201 in JOSM

This track is totally weird and requires a lot of imagination on my end to recognize the tracks and trails I’ve been using. The WBT is a cool device, but again I’m disappointed by the quality of its tracklogs.

The question is why the device crashed. I already mentioned the »Big Bug« (#8689 has been closed as a duplicate). Let’s see whether Nokia manages to provide a bugfix via a maintenance release. In the worst case they won’t, as they might be busy as bees working on MeeGo. Sigh.

Anguis fragilis

This weekend was an excellent one, providing very good weather conditions to do some mapping by bike. The Bienwald, a huge area of wood where I still seem to be the (almost) only mapper who collects data, still serves me well to combine three hobbies of mine – nature, riding my bike and mapping for openstreetmap.org.

I really love the smell of the pines during warm days in spring. You can see all kinds of animals – including crane flies, though. The Bienwaldmühle, including a traditional german restaurant, serves great food. The rest in their biergarten took too long, so the way back home included twilight – which was a good thing, because you can see even more animals (like foxes, roe deers etc.) which usually are not seen during daylight.

I collected a lot of missing ways, names of ways and names of the wooden parcels. Though it is the third year I’m mapping there, still a lot of details are missing.

I used the WBT-201 as an autonomous logger to track the whole trip. The N900 did a good job, but I left it alone until I crossed the rhine to save some battery power. This is necessary as one of my two batteries only lasts for about three hours – though I switched the device to offline mode. The two batteries have been sufficient for the whole trip, but I now know I will need a third one for whole-day-trips.

Quelques Guis

Aujourd’hui j’ai éte en Alsace, pour cartographier quelques chemins au bord du Rhin.

The cold and dark winter months finally are over. At the Rhine, the temperature was about 22°C today. A warm and sunny day combined with a light northern wind. A perfect day to open the biking season.

Assuming the sun was not that strong yet I decided to avoid the woods and better cycle in direct sunlight. According to my mirror, this was a big fault. Red Hat is a Linux distributor, and Red Head is a Linux user :) .

I crossed the Rhine using the ferry near Neuburg and went down to Seltz. There was an almost 50 year old ferry until 2005, crossing the Rhine to Plittersdorf. It was a special construction, which was powered by the water flowing down the Rhine. In 2005, it has been rammed by a ship and never been restored. First there were rumors that there will be no replacement, as there is a bridge nearby, connecting Wintersdorf and Beinheim. The more I was surprised that there is some ongoing work to build a new construction:

New ferry construction between Plittersdorf and Seltz

From an economical POV, the ferry is unnecessary. Nevertheless, it helps to bring french and german people together. If you think that this is useless, consider that the german and french inhabitants share a long history, including many wars. Both Germany and France are the main protagonists of the european union, and germany pays a huge amount of money to make it a success. The new ferry will mainly be used by pedestrian and biking tourists – which is a good thing to cultivate friendships and to visit cultural events on both sides of the Rhine.

The delta of the Sauer a bit upwards is a quite interesting ecosystem. Here are two photos of the last segment of the Sauer, before it enters the Rhine (which can be seen in the background of the first image):

La Sauer entering the Rhine

This photo shows the other side of the bridge near Munchhausen:

La Sauer arriving in Munchhausen

All kinds of birds are busy copulating and nest building. Detect two storks in the image below:

Two storks building their nest

I mapped several tracks accompanying the Rhine, to make the osm data more complete. Those are not important for routing, but at OSM we are proud of the level of detail we can provide.

I really enjoyed the trip. It’s been a while since I’ve last been there, and due to a bug in the code of my very own software I wasn’t able to map all details. Seems I need a further trip to collect the missing data :) .

Plane drawing curves on the sky

Again I was mapping using the N900. I permanently had Mapper, osm2go, FM Radio (respectively an audio player) plus a text editor running. Additionally I took a couple of photos.

Some fungi catched with the N900's camera

Again I’m quite impressed by the quality of the device’s camera. The only thing I miss is a manual focus. Which IMO is a problem of luxury.

The fully charged battery powered the device for 3 hours. The N810 was capable to last up to four hours, but a comparison is invalid. The N810 did not provide cellular connectivity, I never used it to play audio and I seldom used it as a camera. Plus the battery capacity of the N900 (BL-5J, 1320mAh@3.7V) is almost one sixth less than the one of the N810 (BP-4L, 1500mAh@3.7V).

Additionally I was again trapped by “the big bug“, which I assume has an impact on the battery. I really hope this bug can be solved rather sooner than later.

All in all I think the power management of the N900 is excellent. If you think 3 hours is very poor, just use the N900 like an iPhone: Avoid multitasking whenever possible :) .

For the N810 I bought (and used) a second battery for mapping trips. I just ordered one for the N900 as well. If necessary I’ll order a third one, which will be surely enough even for all-day mapping trips.

The Heilbach meanders the Bienwald

I grabbed the occasion of today’s excellent weather conditions for my first mapping tour with the N900. I used it for my continued effort to map the Heilbach for openstreetmap:

I left all the other gadgets I used until now (mp3 player, Canon camera, external bluetooth GPSr, N810) at home and only grabbed the N900 to check if it really can replace the previously used armada. To anticipate the result: yes it can. I’m quite impressed and really content with the device. It’s a great digital companion. You should read on, though, to learn more about some pitfalls and shortcomings to avoid frustration.

Camera

I tried to take some pictures using the built in camera. I was especially interested in its macro mode and the result of close-up pics of fungi and the like. Less surprisingly it is not as good as my Canon A650. But it gets very close, so I learned my lesson. Here’s a picture taken with the N900, showing small deadwood fungi:

Small fungi on pine wood

Here are some small lichen. On the A650, I have of course more control over the focus. But the auto mode of the N900 does a good job:

Cladonia (cup lichen) near the Heilbach

The following fungi appeared in light red and black colours. The image did not preserve the original impression, but I doubt the A650 did better. Unfortunately I left it at home. Otherwise I could have taken a comparison picture:

Deadwood serving some fungi as a habitat

Additionally the camera software will automatically add GPS coordinates to the photos when geotagging is enabled via the menu of the camera software. No more struggling with correlating the photos to GPS tracklogs. I’m really pleased with the camera. I still need to test it under bad light conditions, though.

GPS Receiver

A track crossing the Heilbach

The GPS Receiver of the N810 was rather weak, so I always used an external bluetooth GPS mouse. While the G-Rays 2 was not that pleasing, the Blumax always served me very well, except for the one time it accidentally got bricked.

The more I was surprised concerning the accuracy of the N900’s GPS signal. Thanks to AGPS, it finds the current location quite quickly, and today’s mapping was a joy with the positioning signal that the N900 provided. I expected some deviations, but I would say it is almost as accurate as the Blumax. I will create a comparison track during the next mapping tour.

Mapper (formerly known as Maemo Mapper)

Maemo Mapper has seen some overhaul compared to Maemo 4, and I’m really grateful that there is some ongoing work. I’m not really used to the new version yet, which now provides some on-screen-controls:

Maemo Mapper on Maemo 5

It provides OpenstreetMap Mapnik tiles per default. However, unlike the version on the N810, it currently fails when trying to add To add a repository for tiles of Osmarender or the »Reit- und Wanderkarte«, a map which is optimized for horseback riding and hiking (available for de, at, ch and northern italy only), ensure you select the proper type in the dialog where you add the tile URL. The Reitkarte consits of two layers, one for the base graphics, one for the details. I added the following two tile sources, while marking the second one as a tile layer. The type I selected is »XYZ_INV«:
http://topo.openstreetmap.de/base/%0d/%d/%d.png
http://topo.openstreetmap.de/topo/%0d/%d/%d.png

Mapper currently does not support the plus-minus buttons on the top of the device, but there are on-screen-zoom-controls. Loading tiles and especially exporting the tracklog to a file is much faster now, and after a system crash (see below) the track has not been lost (which happened quite frequently on the N810).

It’s really a great “must have” application.

osm2go

Detail - Bank of the Heilbach

I used osm2go excessively on the N810. Sometimes I was struggling with it, especially when selecting objects. The preset menu was slow and sometimes hard to use.

On the N900, I was completely overwhelmed with its usability. It was snappy, selecting objects was a joy and it is much more finger friendly as on the N810. Of course it still requires a stylus to draw the geometry objects. Frankly, I hope Nokia will ship the next device with a resistive display and a stylus still. I cannot imagine that a tool like osm2go can reasonably be used with someones fingers only.

The Big Bug

Deadwood dams up the Heilbach

There is a known bug which will freeze the whole device, requiring a hard reset. It might be a driver issue and affects several applications, like Mapper, osm2go, and Mæp. I knew about the issue before the trip, and have been affected a couple of minutes after I started both Mapper and osm2go. I hope there will be a solution for it, as this bug is one of the main reasons why Mapper is only available via extras-devel.

Circa one hour later, both Mapper and osm2go started to behave weirdly again. The system was not frozen, but both applications didn’t respond properly but have been very busy to show all kind of weird stuff in their viewports. Restarting the applications did not help, so I rebooted the device.

Battery Lifetime

Water of the Heilbach flowing off

I left home with the battery not fully charged. The two reboots might have had an additional effect. I permanently used Mapper, osm2go, the GPS subsystem, cellular internet connectivity and took several pictures.

The battery was drained after two hours, which is very poor compared to the four hours the N810 did provide. But I think this is mainly due to the mentioned bug (and the reboots it triggered). Anyway, even 4 hours were not enough for a 100km biking trip, so I need to purchase a second battery.

Settle Down

Gravel bank in the Heilbach

Though I needed to perform two hard resets, I’m really impressed by the device, its capabilities and the software tools that are available for it. I’d like to give credit to the crowd of the @maemo-developers mailing list who helped me with some coding issues, Alberto Mardegan, the current maintainer of Mapper, who patiently helped me to get used to Mapper on the N900, and Till Harbaum, the author of Mæp and osm2go, for letting me play with his two N900 (I still apologize for having removed the weather applet from your desktop :) before I bought mine. Thanks, guys.

I considered the N900 too expensive for bying for some time. But I finally could not resist. Et je ne regrette pas.

I’ll be at the OSM booth (which is 4.216, dm-arena, near the GPS-Village) tomorrow. Garmin maps on 2GB Micro-SD memory cards are available for sale at 10€ each (which basically is the cost of the hardware).

I hope I can share some photos tomorrow.

Frozen Tarn

Every now and then, a mapping trip is not as successful as intended. And so was today’s. Here’s some C code describing my feelings :) :

Some code

At the end of the trip, the N810 reported that the battery was drained. To avoid data loss, I shut down Maemo Mapper, osm2go and the N810.

Back home, I did the usual stuff: connect the N810 to its power supply, boot it, start Maemo Mapper and export the tracklog, start osm2go and upload the edits. The usual steps after each mapping tour. But today, from now on the fun was over.

The first thing was that Maemo Mapper lost its tracklog. WTF?!? Not a problem, though, as osm2go provides a track, too, so I have a backup.

Next. Upload the edits of osm2go. I started the upload, but soon it threw some precondition failed errors. This message can, for example, happen in case you edited a way on-site and you try to upload it, but another user meanwhile removed it from the database. It was, however, very unlikely that this was the cause of the trouble.

I tried to upload the stuff again. The nodes appearently have been uploaded, but some ways failed. Again I’ve seen precondition failed errors, or alternatively server not reachable (or similar) messages. What the heck?!?

I inspected the data in osm2go and noticed that many nodes I had inserted into existing ways had disappeared. That might been a major problem, because I inserted the nodes into the ways in order to draw new ways joining the existing ones. As a consequence, the upload of the new ways failed. The other nodes of those ways, however, still were present as single nodes. Fortunately the other ways had been successfully uploaded.

I decided to draw the lost ways anew using JOSM. So I copied the tracklog and waypoints to my desktop machine and opened the files in JOSM. I tried to download the existing data of that area, but the server reported an internal error. After a couple of tries I finally got the data and did my edits.

When I tried to upload them, I got some errors again. Argh. I saved the stuff to a file in order to upload later. So I did. I opened the file in josm and pressed the upload button. And JOSM hang. I did the killall -9 java magic and tried again, but to no avail – I got a connect timeout error.

I tried to check wether the uploaded ways already have been rendered, but http://www.openstreetmap.org was (and still is) not reachable. The wiki however was and reported the »up and running« platform status.

It seems that some minor details came together. Maybe my DSL line was not stable, maybe a bug in osm2go, an temporarily unresponsive central server, some exceptions not properly caught in JOSM and my usual habit not to give up until the work is done. So the data still is not uploaded. What can I learn so far? Nothing new: Keep calm, and consider to accept that your edits are lost :) . Here’s the trip:

To get something done despite the obvious conspiracy, here are some pics of today’s trip :) :

Puffball

Fungi

Small fungi