Deth

Visually impaired fitness and everything else in this shit show.

Open Street Map Is Awesome

A few years ago I rediscovered Open Street Map. I first saw it years ago when it was pretty bare here in the Central PA area. What a difference there is now.

It’s now pretty complete but there’s still plenty of improvements that can be made and I’ve done my share. It’s easy to update points of interest and I do my best to keep the ones in Mount Joy pretty accurate as places open and close or move.

I also enjoy adding or improving hiking trails as we geocache. There are lots of them already there but there can be always be improvements made to them too. The trails really make it feel like cheating when you’re geocaching sometimes.

I’ve found the roads to be extremely up to date when we travel to Cape may or where ever else we may wander off to. If there’s a new exit configuration it’s probably already updated on there even before it is on Google maps.

It’s great to down load them for your Garmin GPS units too since they’re more up to date then the older Garmin GPSrs. I don’t know how they compare to the maps on car GPS units but for the handheld devices you had to buy the maps separately and they were pretty pricey. There are several places you can download maps converted to a format that Garmin GPSrs can use but I prefer Open Map Chest. One of these days I will get around to generating my own.