Dear Garmin, I know you’re a mapping company, but I though I should alert you to a basic truth about maps you seem to ignore – they’re wrong and will always be wrong. Maybe it’s the temporary inaccuracies that you can’t do much about – the council closing a road or restricting it to light vehicles only while there’s a… Read more →
Garmin announced an update to their free-online mapping site. Once again, they demonstrate that they don’t understand that they don’t understand how to manage customer relationships, as the upgrade significantly deteriorates the usability of the site. Basically the problem is the move from Google Maps to Bing – the much poorer quality Microsoft alternative. There is a thread on the… Read more →
Since it’s been a bit wet to ride as consistently as I have been lately, I decided that some better local mapping is in order. While I have been driving roads and correcting local data on OpenStreetMap, I felt that the map still looked a bit bare, especially given the bridge and fords crossing nothing. Free satellite imagery unfortunately doesn’t… Read more →
Blue Knob Originally uploaded by wamblicious I was wandering along the Casino to Uki route using Google Earth, and realised that the only peak that matched the profile in this photo was Blue Knob. Homeleigh isn’t even really visible, as there’s another range in the way, from where I was riding. It was then I realised that I had a… Read more →
I decided that today would be the day to take the N800 and GPS and do some more mapping for OpenStreetMap. First I went up Upper Wilson’s Creek, which has the feel I recall for the whole valley during my adolescence – numerous creek crossings all in flood, small windy roads where cars have to pull over to let others… Read more →
One of the mapping blogs I follow, CloudMade, turned up a cute little diversion in the form of a way to generate trihexaflexagons, where each of the three faces is a layer on the map: “hexaflexamaps”, so to speak. It’s a nice way to switch between (say) a cycle map, a topographic map, and a street map. OpenStreetMap is good… Read more →
I’ve just added some extra “functionality” to show map links on any reference in the blog to a location that can be placed on a map. They should be visible as a globe beside a place name like this: Mullumbimby. Obviously issues will arise where the place name is ambiguous, and I may get pissed off with the feature and… Read more →
Edge 705, originally uploaded by wamblicious. The new Edge 705 is available in Australia, finally. While it’s not perfect, it’s much better than the old 305. You can see the map screen, with the OzTopo Roads map being shown. I got it bundled with the maps from GPSOz, so I wouldn’t have to depend on the crappy default maps that… Read more →
Well, the data has finally been rendered for the north coast mapping I did over Christmas. There’s further work to be done south of Casino to turn the GPS traces into map data, but I’ll get through that soon. Here’s a cropped image from OpenStreetMap, linked back to the site itself. Basically everything between Mullumbimby, Lismore and Bangalow (apart from… Read more →
Not really, I guess, given that I cycled 280-ish kilometres to come on holidays. However, it’s a different type of fitness that is required to climb mountains. Today, we’d arranged that Danya, Ben, Ramon and I would go to the top of Black Butt, led by Barbara Stewart, to see the snow lichen. I took the Garmin Etrex so that… Read more →
I was reading the Google blog and found a link to a page where Dan Catt, who works for Flickr, has information about using the Flickr API to generate KML, which can then be opened in Google Earth. It doesn’t work so well in Google Maps, but if you create a network link in Google Earth you can get –… Read more →
Unfortunately, I realise now, I didn’t make any GPS markers for Mullum or other easily recognisable places, or I could have geocoded a local map with them and produced a better record of the walk across the property. That means that we’re stuck with the low quality Google satellite imagery or me finding an already geocoded map. Anyway, here’s the… Read more →
For the last week or so, I’ve had issues with [tag]Google Earth[/tag]. In May, this year, I purchased – from idle curiosity – a Plus license to see if it offered anything really useful above the functionality from the free version. Since that time I installed it on my linux laptop, my linux OS at home, then the windows partition… Read more →
Reading through the MotionBased forums, I saw a reference to a new tool and instructions for working with GPS units on Linux. Martyn at Marengo has created another Google Maps tool for creating GPX documents, which seems simple and effective. Unfortunately there still seems to be some issues with uploading the data to the Edge305 using GPSBabel. Still, that’s not… Read more →
The number of tools using Google Maps seems to ever increase. I saw Bikely mentioned in the latest Australian Cyclist and had a look. It’s a nice community site that allows you to document your favourite bike path with annotations at intersections etc., so that others can take advantage of your experience. It’s still rough – in particular, the forums… Read more →
Obviously a play on the name of the site Wikipedia, Wikimapia is a nice looking search application build on Google Maps. You can search for a city or place and the map will show a containing map with a bounding box around the result. It also allows you to add places to the database.
I saw this a while ago, but the document was crashing my installation of GE. It now seems to be fixed, so I thought I’d post it here. Link and document.
Have you ever imagined what the world would look like if we sized the countries in terms of the origin of refugees, or the number of elderly? Look no further
I’ve signed up for an account at MotionBased, which is an online repository of cycling stats. I can upload data from my new toy – the Garmin Edge 305 – so that I can access them some machine other than that running the Garmin traning centre software, or share them with others. The unit is nice – a combined heart-rate… Read more →
Having bought my Garmin GPS receiver a while back, collected some data, and played with the mapping software available for it, I have loaded waypoints and route data onto the unit. Now I just need to collect the actual ride data when I’m there, and I can display some maps for where I have been. Here are some screenshots from… Read more →
