Two new CDs this month:
While browsing through the documentation of tangoGPS I found the the relief map at maps-for-free.com. The map is free (licenced under the GNU FDL) and generated from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) data:
Sure, you can chose from numerous implementations if you want to render GPS tracks. But for scalable online maps, nothing I found was good for my purposes. The available on-demand renderers are too slow and need too much memory processing a data set with aproximately 100,000 fixes from all over California, Nevada, Arizona and Utah. Thus, I had to render the tiles offline. Basically, two free solutions for that exist: Mapnik and Osmarender.
I've replaced the lamps in my living room today, as the light was too faint to read a newspaper. This is how cheap IKEA lamps look like after approximately 10,000 hours of operation:
...sollte sich mal ein Bild von der Internet-Kompetenz ihrer Abgeordneten machen. Von der Dünnhäutigkeit des Abgeordneten Heilmann mal ganz zu schweigen.
Handling three weeks of GPS data collected on an RV trip through the American West is quite a challenge. Roughly 930,000 GPS positions are far too much to process directly. There are lots of wrong fixes that need to be removed, lots of identical or nearly identical positions, and a huge amount of fixes located on a straight line. Feeding the data unfiltered to Google Earth either results in GE drawing nonsense, locking up or crashing. The gpsbabel filters don't help, either. Thus, I wrote my own filter. It performs several steps:
Happiness is a warm flat, and…
The plumber just fixed the the heater. The pump was broken (mysteriously directly after the yearly maintenance) and it had to be replaced. It'll take an hour or so to get warm and cosy in here again, though.