First, make sure you have downloaded navilink.pl (see my earlier post) and installed JOSM. On Ubuntu you can install JOSM with the following command:

apt-get install josm

You will also need to register with the OpenStreetMap site and wiki.

1. Map the Road

First record the trackpoints and waypoints. On the BGT-31 I did this by going to track, pressing the main button and selecting mark. To record a waypoint, just hold down the main button until it bleep.

2. Download data and Open with JOSM

First, I’ll change to my OSM project directory and create a folder for the information:
cd ~/Projects/OSM/
mkdir track$(date +%G%m%d)
cd track$(date +%G%m%d)

Now extract the data from the BGT-31:
../navilink.pl -o trackpoints.gpx gettp
../navilink.pl -o waypoints.gpx getwp

Now as I’m a firm believer in DRY, I’ve put the above commands in a script which you can download here.

You may want to upload the trackpoints.gpx to OSM before you start editing. A HOWTO is here.

You can now start JOSM with the command: josm

Open the gpx files you created.

3. Edit data with JOSM

The OSM guide for JOSM is here

After you’ve edited your gpx files, you’ll want to zoom out slighty and download (Ctrl-Shift-D) from the OSM servers to put your edits into context, you may want to merge some nodes after this to get everything merging properly.

4. Upload to OpenStreetMap

Press (Ctrl-Shift-U) and follow the prompts.

After a while you should get an email with notification of success/failure.

Thats it, all done!

After some googling, the best way was to download a perl script from splitbrain.org called navilink.pl

You’ll probably need Device::SerialPort for perl as well. Ubuntu has a package for this which you can install by running this command:

apt-get install libdevice-serialport-perl

Then, after connecting the BGT-31 USB lead and setting it into NAVILINK mode, you can download your waypoints with:

./navilink.pl getwp

and trackpoints with:

./navilink.pl gettp

Once I’ve had time to map out a road I’ll be writing about using this device with the OpenStreetMap project

A link to the Hiran’s blog is here and UbuntuGeek.com has installation instructions for Intrepid and Hardy here.

1. If you don’t have the medibuntu.org sources ready, add them:
deb http://packages.medibuntu.org/ hardy free non-free
deb-src http://packages.medibuntu.org/ hardy free non-free

As the versions in hardy-proposed are newer than the medibuntu versions, we need to force and then lock the package versions to install.

2. Run synaptic and search for ffmpeg.
3. Select the ffmpeg package, press CTRL+E, select the medibuntu version and then press “Force Version”
4. Select it again and press Package -> Lock Version. This will make sure that you don’t update it to the hardy-proposed version by mistake.
5. Do the previous steps for the libavcodec1d package
6. Install both packages

You can now use the following command to convert all files in the working directory to PS3 format videos:
find . -name "*"  -maxdepth 1  -exec ffmpeg -y -i {} -acodec aac -ac 2 -ab 128k -vcodec mpeg4 -r 24 -b 800k -mbd 2 -aic 2 {}.ps3.mp4 \;

You can change the -ab 128k to the audio bitrate you want and the same for the video bitrate by changing the -b 800k

You can download it for free from www.blenderart.org

The final exams today seemed to go well so I now await my final degree classification after my exam results come out in December.

Revision is going well at the moment and I think I’ll get my target results. The one thing I’m worried about is how my hand is going to respond to six hours of almost non-stop hand writing.

As I use email and messenging as my main form of non-verbal communication I don’t physically write that much normally, so my revision has been as much about getting my hand writing legible as it has about studying the course!

In other news Entertainer 0.2 is very much on the horizon, hopefully we’ll see it released before the end of the next sprint over this coming weekend.

I’ll be going now to type my notes out…

I’ve been helping set up a music website/blog for a friend of mine.

After uploading all the music over at last.fm where you can listen to the tracks, we took a while finding a simple way to sell the music on the site.

The main requirements were for an easy way to sell downloadable products and accept paypal payments.

We finally came up with a plugin for wordpress called e-commerce which works well, and we used that to create the shop.

You can see the finished website here.

We are in the top 10 “most prominent FLOSS projects” for media center which is a really good result for such a young project.

The picture is from behind the right bunker on the first hole.

I got my first par score on hole 4 which is a par 3 so I was quite pleased with myself.

Golf is one of those sports where even if you are playing pretty awfully (which I am most of the time) it is still great fun.

I’ve finally come up with a revision plan for my exams in October. I’ve taken the specimen exam this week and as there aren’t any past papers I’m re-reading the 12 textbooks and then taking the specimen again.

Hopefully this will show up the areas which I’ll be needing to work hard on in the last week leading up to the exams.