Comments for Système D

Comment on The best tablet yet by Anj Green

Anj Green — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 21:17:09 +0000

Still got my NC200, although no plug for it. Wonderful times.

Comment on Hacking Ordnance Survey Meridian2 for beginners by scruss

scruss — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 23:03:21 +0000

Richard, for transforming the shapefiles to geographic, the de facto tool is the OGR Simple Feature Library – http://www.gdal.org/ogr/
Horrid command-line syntax, but works well and uses conversion data maintained by Serious People Who Know What They’re Doing.

(hey, and I think we met in about 1989 or so at one of the computer entertainment trade shows in London. I was with Jeff Walker of WACCI/JAM, writing about Amiga games after being a CPC game reviewer …)

Comment on First day of Skobbling by Harry Wood

Harry Wood — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 09:54:07 +0000

We a need a better pic to go on this page: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/IPad Forget screenshots. I want to see a driving-with-ipad action photo, preferably featuring said roundabout. Maybe get a passenger to take it though.

Comment on First day of Skobbling by David Cantrell

David Cantrell — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 18:59:44 +0000

I too used to be deeply sceptical about satnavs, but I’ve realised that they are terribly useful. Sure, I know the area around my house better than they do, and never follow their directions there. Where I need the computer’s help is getting the last few miles from the motorway to my destination in the middle of a town I’ve hardly ever been to before. Sure, I could use a map, but that either means stopping quite often to check it, or trying to read a map while driving. It’s safer and more convenient to have a nice young lady in a box tell me when and where to turn.

I’d love to use an OSM-powered navigation program. However, it has to work offline: you can only assume you have good mobile coverage in towns and along motorways, and 3G roaming internationally is way too expensive. Does Skobbler have any ability to download the mapping data that it needs for the current journey? What I’d really like would be for it to do that in the background once I’ve planned a route, including data for, say, 10 miles either side of the route in case I have to take a detour around an accident or whatever. While in my home country, I’d let it download that stuff over 3G as I set off, when I’m abroad I’d do it over my hotel’s wifi before leaving.

Comment on First day of Skobbling by davespod

davespod — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 09:35:51 +0000

If OSM-based sat nav takes off I think we’ll see a lot more than just de facto weight limits added. Picture this. It is the first day of the Reading festival. Some joker has downgraded the M4 to a farm track and upgraded some poor sod’s farm track to a motorway. The police predict it will take six hours to clear the tangle of thousands of sat nav sheep.

I think any company intending to go mass market with OSM-based sat nav, needs to take these risks seriously and give some serious thought as to how to minimise the impact of vandalism on their services. OK, the above example might really be fixed by the community within minutes, but I am sure a really determined prankster could be a lot more subtle.

Comment on First day of Skobbling by Forest Pines

Forest Pines — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 08:39:08 +0000

When I learned to drive, back in the mid-90s and well before satnav, my driving teacher explained the “nth exit” rules to me, and said that you don’t count service roads or other minor roads; you count roads shown with destinations on the sign. “What do you do then,” I said, “if there’s more than one sign, and the second one has more roads shown with destinations than the first?” He never managed to give me a sensible answer to that.

Comment on First day of Skobbling by Andy Allan

Andy Allan — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 08:30:51 +0000

I get a warm fuzzy feeling about your list of the other “great products”!

For the record, routeable OSM data in perspective mode was being shown off on a Nokia n800 at a CloudMade event in Feb 09 using Navit – see http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Navit . So not quite the first – in the opensource world there’s always someone more obscure that you haven’t come across yet.

From a personal point of view, I’d prefer that all the data was stored on the device, rather than relying on over-the-air routes and recalculations. I’m sure the change of being lost increases with the remoteness of the road and lack of phone signal.

Comment on First day of Skobbling by Andy Robinson

Andy Robinson — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 07:54:27 +0000

Question; did you check that the iPad floats before the purchase?

Comment on First day of Skobbling by Richard

Richard — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 22:38:05 +0000

Oh, sure. But that’s true of non-roundabout junctions as well – hence the number of rural junctions with names like Five Ways or Six Lanes End. If giving directions from the passenger seat I’d usually say “the exit at two o’clock” or something, but that may be a bit idiomatic…

Comment on First day of Skobbling by Tom Hughes

Tom Hughes — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 21:40:22 +0000

Saying “turn right” or “continue straight on” at a roundabout fails as soon as the roads aren’t arranged with 90ish degree separations – there are plenty of roundabouts with two “right” turns.

Saying “nth exit” is always completely precise, assuming a complete routing database. Note that even commercial systems like TomTom sometimes get this wrong due to missing service roads…

TomTom also does the “keep right” thing for some motorway junctions (mostly only interchanges with other motorways).