Easter mapping (and fishing)

Open source and outdoor life; I’m trying to include both of these fabulous things during this weekend when I’m visiting my parents over Easter. This post differs a little bit from my normal programming- and electronics posts. But hey, it’s important to sometimes take a break from what you’re working on and get some variety!

Open Street Map

I use to be a sporadic contributor to the Open Street Map project. Overall I think it’s one of the greatest examples of the power of open source solutions. At http://osm.org you’ll find one of the very best online maps available. And it’s all open source and created by people like you and me. Everyone (you’ll need to register for a free account though) can easily contribute to the map by adding buildings, streets, terrain etc. in an easy to use browser editor or one of the available stand-alone editors. OSM features a lot more detail than other alternatives like Google Maps and it’s much more useful for outdoor activities like hiking or mountainbiking as you’ll
find many smaller paths and tracks which are most likely missing from almost any other map available.

© OpenStreetMaps Contributors

Personally I use to dedicate some of my spare time now and then to contribute to the project. Right now I’m mainly working on adding buildings and paths for the town I’m currently living in. I’ve for example added most of the buildings you can see on the picture to the right (I’ve still got a lot more to add though). Mapping buildings is easily done in the online editor using Bing aerial photos as the background layer. If you haven’t checked out OSM I think you definitely should! It’s a great project and an easy way to get started in contributing to open source projects.

Ice Fishing

While visiting the very small village, in which my parents live, me and my brother seized the opportunity to go ice fishing. The sun was shining but it was a bit windy. Though to my surprise I managed to catch a nice whitefish (“sik” in Swedish) weighing 0.72 kg. Quite nice for ice fishing! At least for me who almost only use to fish during summer.