Episode: 1137
Title: HPR1137: Open Street Maps
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1137/hpr1137.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-17 19:38:38

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Hello, hackerpublicradio, this is the New Year's Techno Happy.
We're going to show you today on Open Street Maps.
I just wanted to give a shout out to this excellent community project out there on recently
one of my vacation with my family and I was using Marble, which is the KDE, Google's equivalent
application on my Nokia 900 and the Open Street Maps.
You need to be able to cache all of the maps there.
So I hadn't ready to travel with me so I didn't need to buy any like data plans when we
were traveling was really really cool.
So I figured I'd do a hacker roller gravy episode just sort of calling out this really
wonderful community project that's mapping so much of the world and in such great detail.
Trying to get more people out there just sort of looking at possibly contributing a few
points in your hometown.
It's one of the areas that is really helpful to the project I think is being able to have
people in their town go out and sort of list out where some of the shops are and stuff
like that's of interest.
You can go obviously further and map out like you know walking past and roads and stuff
like that.
So many of the roads have already been done and a lot of the major areas is just really really
amazing.
I'll have links in the show notes that kind of give you an idea of where to get started
and links to see some of the maps in action but I mean they're all over the place tons
of Android applications and iPhone applications use these maps already is their basis for the
mapping and the geographical situational stuff that you get applications.
But I figured I'd throw out this episode out there called attention to it, PENSEAN episode
it was done about it and I thought it was really worthwhile to put out there yet another
wonderful thing that sort of this whole community and and all the adjacent communities really
just from a great work that's being done out there.
So if you have an opportunity and you have a little bit of time consider maybe you know
get account and throw in a few points of interest in your town.
I've done it in some of the areas that I visited.
There's some really easy ways that you're going on your favorite mobile device whether
it's Android or an Apple or one of the key internet outlets you can track where you're
at and just with a few clicks of a button you get a GPX file which traces the the GPS
that's in the unit and you can use that to go back in and kind of figure out where things
were at and put down that you know the your favorite coffee shop is you know on this corner
or you know a restaurant you like's on that corner and it's really really helpful.
Yeah and one of the things that you know I noticed when I was traveling around was that
how many tourist locations were sort of marked out like and you know as somebody that you
come into a new town you're traveling around to have those right there on the map for you
to have like where the you know the things that are just kind of neat to see in your town
it's like oh there's a neat statue here or you know cool building there those having those
marked out on there really helps you get to get around to and find some of some of the off the
beaten path not necessarily always in the in the tourist book type of places that are nice to see
so just want to throw it out there they have several different editors there's some that you can
download they're probably in your you know favorite package manager if you're on Linux and they
also have an inbuilt have editor that that runs JavaScript and stuff so you can run that on
inside the web browser editor open stream apps as well takes a little bit of um if you're
if you're trying to do you know on a decent size area so it mean it's really really nice
resource to have out there for everybody to have this sort of mapping data out there that you
can use and it's nice because you know you can use it and it's the knowledge is out there for
everybody to use and if you use that knowledge then you're not getting hit with speed if you
were like a developer or something um and then that the more developers that you get the more
that people realize that it's out there and consider possibly you know going out and contributing
so thanks for listening and uh i hope you guys go check out open stream apps it's a really really
cool uh resource to have out there thanks have a good day
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