A Hoverfly watching me and the bugs
Today I was tricked by my own lazyness. I have two batteries for the N810. Each of them usually lasts for up to 4 hours while being mapping. I am used to charge them immediately when I return from a mapping tour. Seems I messed it up after the last tour. As the first one was drained, I put the second one into the device – and it immediately complained that the battery was low!
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It’s just good luck to live in Karlsruhe, as it is just about 80km/40min by car to get to some typical locations (like the infamous Mummelsee :) .
Day by day, more black forest tracks are being mapped by OSM addicts, but there are still a lot of gaps to fill and refinements are always possible. This weekend I have chosen the area between Seibelseckle and Hinterlangenbach.
Yesterday it began raining while being in the woods. The forecast and some webcam pics fooled me, so there was not much “outcome” concerning geo data. Today, however, it was a wonderful sunny late summer day, even allowing for some nice pictures. Here’s the area:
The track of the recently purchased WBT-201 bluetooth GPS receiver and logger IMO is again not as accurate as it could (respectively should) be. Unfortunately, I left my GPSMap at home, otherwiese I could compare the tracks. I am at least disappointed with its bluetooth reliability. Maemo Mapper often reports that it is looking for a GPS fix. The current position often is far away from the already existing objects, and if you go a way twice, the two tracks often are far apart.
But I’ll better put the typical krautish :) whining aside. So here’s the final drumroll, announcing some of the usual pics.
I really like moss closeups. It just looks a bit unnatural while it is the opposite:
Moss closeup
Even more, though not shot properly:
Moss closeup 2
I’m not the biggest fan of spiders, but I am not a chicken as many other people. I grew up in a rural area, thus being used to all kind of animals:
Spider in Moss
And finally a nice one. I managed to take a closeup of a grasshopper. Unfortunately, I could not remove the grass in front of the lens, as the grasshopper would have escaped:
Grasshopper
The above pictures are not public domain. The copyright is still owned by me, and copying is hereby not allowed except you got my written consent.
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.
Black Forest Hiking Trail
Under perfect late-summer weather conditions it was a joy to track some hiking trails of the black forest. The API has been down for maintenance this weekend, so I could not use osm2go for live editing. Instead I used some home-grown software to record (annotated) waypoints while being out. The API meanwhile is up and running again, so bringing the stuff into the database was done in a couple of minutes back home.
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.
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
Flagellants
Being at the black forest on a sunny day in July allowed to take some nice pictures. Unfortunately, I got trapped by a habit of myself. I usually keep images on the camera until I did the next backup of my hard drives. This time I left all my crete holiday pics on it, so the camera complained about the lack of disk space after taking a couple of pictures. It was not possible to delete the old pictures, as I renamed the default folder to something like DCIM-Backup, and the camera was not capable to access it. Mea maxissima culpa.
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.
I love spending my holidays on greek islands for several reasons. One of them is the excellent traditional food. I appreciate the simplicity and taste of the fresh meat, fish and vegetables. It tastes completely different than the food at greek restaurants in germany. It’s not that the latter ones do a bad job. It’s just the fact that the taste differs.
As tourists, we do wrong anyway. If greek people go to the restaurant, they tend to be a lot of people participating. So a lot of different dishes are put on the table, providing a rich variety of food. As tourists, we often are two people who just order two main dishes and that’s it. So the meals look a bit poor, just providing, for example, some meat and potatoes on the plate. Well, not exactly. If you have good luck, the operator of the restaurant also has a garden where she grows some vegetables. If so, also the main dishes will show some fresh vegetables like tomatoes, paprika, onions and olives.
So here are some pics to wet your appetite. The greeks are masters in preparing very tasty starters. Here’s the “Various Appetizers Plate” of the Mirtos Hotel’s restaurant (which was accompanied by an excellent dark, sweet red wine):
Various Appetizers in Hotel Mirtos
The Lassithi plateau is an interesting geoformation. It’s almost a circlar area, completely circumvented by some mountains, up to 2148m in hight like the Δίκτη (Dikti). The plateau itself is about 800m above the sea level. There are only a few passes to enter it. One is the pass of Ambelos, where I took a panorama picture showing (from left to right) the Lassithi plateau south, the pass with some ruins of its windmills and then the sea north of it:
Panorama of the pass of ambelos
Panorama of Myrtos, Crete, 2009
It’s the third consecutive year I visit Myrtos, Crete. It’s one of the southmost villages of europe with an almost tropical climate, where the swallows don’t leave towards africa during the winter months. It’s a quiet village with no clubs or big hotels. A small gravelled but nice beach and the usual infrastructure of cafes and restaurants make it the right place for some relaxing days. It’s sited at a primary road, so it’s easy to visit several locations in the east and north of Crete by car.
Bull’s eye. I spontaneously visited a concert of Céline Rudolph. Not the worst decision I did today. If you are, like me, a fan of scat singing and Flora Purim, you’ll like Céline as well.
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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:
I have been asked what still can be seen of the roman highway I mapped recently. The answer is simple: Not that much. It’s just a trail of about 3 to 5 meters in width, covered with trees and other plants, which is raised compared to the ground by approximately 70 centimeters. If you are not aware of its existence, you probably would not notice it. If you know that it’s there, you can clearly see it, but it’s difficult to see it on a photo. Anyway, here’s an attempt.
What spring, what april. The weather was warm and sunny for several weeks now, and reminds me of the extremely hot summer back in 2003.
The subject just means: More fungi pics. After yesterday’s biking trip, today’s weather invited for a hiking tour. There are still a lot of things to map in the Bienwald which I cannot map by bike. Today I mapped the Heilbach, a small stream which drains the Bienwald via the river Rhine. As this probably was the last hiking tour before autumn, I guess there will be almost no further fungi pics until then. So here we go:
Somehow reminds me of a butterfly:
The weather was really excellent the last two days, almost spring. So I did the first biking tour in 2009 yesterday. Only about 50 kilometers, but hey, it was the first tour this year – the season began :) .
In addition to former history mapping I visited an ancient roman highway. The remains I mapped are part of a huge highway, which went from Strasbourg over Speyer, Mainz, Cologne and Xanten to the north sea. There’s a project of the european union which aims at resurrecting this road for educational/recreational/touristic purposes. I started to the west of Hagenbach, where you can see a replica of a »Leugenstein«:
So here we go again, pictures of some fungi I found during today’s walk in the (rainy) forests. White ones…
…and a voyeuristic shot:
