NewTLUG / Open Street Map follow-ups...

[Colin McGregor]

At last evening's NewTLUG Richard Weait gave an excellent overview of
Open Street Map.

For those who are interested in getting your toes wet with doing
mapping, it is worth noting that Microsoft's (yes Microsoft's)
"Streets & Trips 2006 with GPS Locator" is on sale at "Factory Direct"
( with several locations in southern Ontario) is on sale for "19.99*".
The asterisk meaning the package is $34.99 with a $15 mail in rebate.
The sale is on until the end of Friday. I have bought one. The idea
being in essence, buy the package, toss the software and keep the
locator as their is a Linux driver to support the GPS receiver. The
receiver is about 5cm x 5cm x 1.5cm and plugs into a USB port. Any
mobile mapping will require that one have a laptop, set-up / powered
on, not good for backpackers, but great if one is in a car/truck...

Of further note "Factory Direct" does carry the 2007 edition of the
above package. The receiver included with the 2007 edition is smaller,
by eye I would say about 1/2 to 2/3 the size. But the price was $50,
far to much for my tastes...

Of further note, I gather there will be a massive open street mapping
session to coincide with "Software Freedom Day", 20 September 2008.
Should a Toronto effort get rolling I gather Richard Weait has offered
to loan some GPS hardware to GTALug folks to help us expand our
reach... Is this something that GTALug would like to do?

Thoughts?


Colin McGregor
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists