survey

I surveyed a small part of the Old City portion of Québec recently. It was much like many other surveys, but with the added interest of being somewhere else. It also had the benefit of being somewhere beautiful, feeling a little bit exotic and being part of a wonderful trip. I want to share a few pieces of it with you.  read more »

A question came up on one of the OSM mailing lists¹ about what to use as the name of a business. The name of a business is one of the key items that distinguishes that business from their competitors, along with location. Both of these things are important to mappers. We like to get location correct; that's kind of the point of OpenStreetMap. And once we have the location of an object, we generally want to name it.

So why are some businesses so hard to name? And what is a mapper to do about it? Let's have a look.  read more »

Several Garmin GPSes work well with Ubuntu as a mass USB storage device. Navigating the menu to enable the mass USB device can be a bit of a headache. Here is an alternative that takes less fumbling with the joyclick on the Garmin and that does a better job of grabbing the data.

gpsbabel does many wonderful and magical things for us as far as format conversion, but also can handle communication with the device for us. For example this tip from txwikinger:

gpsbabel -t -w -i garmin -f usb: -o gpx -F yourfilename.gpx
 read more »