Withernsea
Wednesday is OpenStreetMap Mapnik render day.
Here’s what I was busy with this weekend mapping Withernsea. There’s more to do, and a few bits to correct, but the detail that you see on that link is all mine. Yay!
Recently I have been getting into photography in a big way, it’s something I touched upon at college but I never really progressed with it because I found design to be more satisfying. Black and white photography really appeals to me because it seemed to capture the ‘story’ and ‘passion’ better than conventional colour photos.
Now, I have never been overwhelmed with colour photos before until I stumbled across a style of colour photography that I have never seen before, which to be honest made my creative mind spin and juices seep through my skin. This style of photography is called HDRi (High Dynamic Range imaging), where a series of photos are taken of the same subject, adjusting the EV (exposure value) on each (starting with a minimum range of between -2 and +2 EV), most efficiently with AEB (automatic exposure bracketing) then processed together with ‘Tone Mapping‘ to produce a truely amazing photo, or in more simpler terms, combining a series of seemingly ugly looking photos together to create one outstanding image, with amazing detail, colour and depth of field.
The key to achieving a good HDR effect is in the software you use, rather than the camera gear you have. Anybody with a half decent point-and-click camera which has AEB and/or manual EV settings can achieve this. Now because I’m just getting into photography I challenged myself to see how far I can push my Panasonic Lumix TZ3 and bought some software called Photomatix Pro from HDR Soft.
Like all british folk I like to save some pennies if I can so I Googled for a discount coupon for Photomatix Pro and found two coupons that actually worked. The first offered a 8% discount VPG8 and the second offered a 15% discount beforethecoffee.
- Go to the Photomatix order page
- Click the buy button for the software version you need
- In the box where it says “Coupon Code (Optional)” put in: beforethecoffee
- Click the recalculate button
- It will show you the special discount applied with your new price
- Complete the rest of the order form
So very pleasingly I knocked off £8.13 off the price, making it £46.06 + VAT, result! It’s worth also mentioning that as standard, if you say buy 10 licenses, you automatically get a discount, equivalent to £40.64 a license, but then with this discount coupon you can get it down to £34.55 + VAT each!
This ‘Short History of Graphic Design’ describes individual movements, establishments, events and people who, when all put together, make up the history of graphic design.
Included in this article is:
Morning all, I’m very very excited, just had to write a quick post.
Today was my first attempt at gathering a serious amount of GPS trace data.
The cat woke me up at 05:20 which was what I had hoped. I got up, fed him, ate some bran flakes (rather than porridge as it’s faster to make – that is how excited I was!), and went out to the shed armed with my GPS tracer and digital camera.
I fitted the tracer to my bike, and off I went.
I explored about 75% of the roads in Withernsea which are accessible by road, taking photographs of appropriate street signs as I went.
Unfortunately the 16mb memory card with the kindly donated camera filled up and by coincidence the memory filled on my tracer too at the same time so I had to come home, but I have broken the back of it which I’m really pleased about. There is a memory card with the tracer but I’m still getting used it and for some reason it wasn’t recognising it.
Anyway, I’ve just uploaded my GPX trace from this morning.
I have also fired up JOSM and imported my trace, the existing mapping data and, much more excitingly my photographs – geotagged so that they overlay my map. The idea being that the timestamp on the photograph matches the timestamp on the GPX trace and it can overlay it. JOSM’s AgPifoJ import did this for me automagically – excellent!
Geotagged photographs in JOSM
The screenshot with this post shows JOSM. The white boxes on the trace are where I took photographs, you’ll see one highlighted in red – that’s the selected one and is showing up in the preview window.
So it all worked, I didn’t waste 3 hours of my life, and I can now add more data for Withernsea – yay!
I plan on doing a how-to at some point as there doesn’t seem to be a “beginners guide for the impatient and lazy” – for people like me. In the meantime get in touch if you want help.
And I should say a big thank you to Chris Hill. I contacted him through OSMs “mappers near you” feature (which you get if you signup for OSM)and he’s been very patient and helpful in helping me fix my early mistakes and get me going. He and his wife seem to have mapped a large part of Hull themselves and want to get East Yorkshire done – so hopefully I will be able to help them with that.
I got my NaviGPS BGT-11 in the post last week – yay!
To get it talking to Ubuntu I used this nifty perl script. And I could download all the manuals and things from the Locosys website.
Hurrah!
Had a problem last week where my editor was defaulting to using UTF-8 whereas the files i was editing were ISO-8859-1. This ISO character set allows for extra single-byte characters beyond those in standard ASCII – including 163 (0xA3), the simple UK ‘£’ sign.
This is nonsense in UTF-8, but my editor cheerfully didn’t inform me that it had made a ‘best guess’ at decoding the character and I ended up saving garbage back out when I wrote the file.
I might have noticed this when I did a diff but I didn’t because gnome-terminal was trying to use UTF-8 so I ended up comparing equally borked decoded characters and didn’t spot it.
Changing my editor’s encoding was simple enough, but changing gnome-terminal wasn’t quite so easy. I could change it for the current session, but had to re-select it each time I opened the terminal, which was far from friendly.
Thankfully this guy had figured it out.
Additionally there is a launchpad request to allow this setting to be changed more easily from within gnome-terminal itself.
