About a month ago I started doing this thing called geocaching. I had heard about it from someone and was intrigued. We had one right outside our apartment so I took my family on a tiny walk and logged it. Since then I have continued to search for and log caches.

Because I am a geek and like gadgets I realized that I could buy a dedicated GPS instead of using my phone. So in true megalomania fashion I bought most feature rich thing I could find, the Garmin Monterra.

The thing is huge and heavy, not something you want to bring on a hike unless you have leg muscles like the ballerina Jean-Calude Van Damme. Apart from that though, I like the thing. It feels like I am back in the ninetieth when people were carrying around those huge phones, except I can not use mine for phone calls.

So now I end up going for walks all the time, to find caches everywhere. I also record the walks on my new toy.

So the other day I was going to checkout some maps for the device, OSM was of course on the table because who has not heard of that one. I downloaded an IMG file and put it on my device. Imagine my horror and chills going down my spine when the little arrow is placed in a mostly empty area with a single house standing lonely next to me. -This isn’t right! I am pretty sure I myself am located in a building, and that there are several apartment buildings in my area.

This took me to openstreetmaps.org. And there it was, the glistering, inviting, and mysteriously green Edit-button. I pressed it and I could feel my pulse increasing as my browser blacked out before loading the map. I made an edit, then one more, and then some. I sat reading tutorials and added things the rest of the day. I was home sick from work so I had the opportunity to at least exercise my brain. After a while I noted one could upload GPS traces, now there was something I could use I thought. Problem was though, that I wanted to make this as easy as possible. I downloaded and installed Vespucci on my Monterra. It felt a bit old but I found an entry where you could upload a GPS-trace to the OSM-server. I tried it and it worked. Only thing that bothers me is that it would be easier to just press share and have it upload directly to the server. I do have Locus map Pro on the thing as well, and that one can also upload the trace, among the other gazillion things it does. Maybe I could search the Google-Play store for more apps.

The issue at hand though is not my device but that I can not see all my traces, I can only see one at a time. They do get registered on the server, and I even get an email telling me that it has been imported. I see them under my traces, and there I can look at them one by one on the map. But I want them all, and at the same time of course! I marked the show public GPS-traces and some of them show up but strangely none of mine. Maybe it’s a bug, or a weird feature. But I want to overcome this so I map things better and let others use my traces.

Next task is to read how to make steaming fresh IMG files for my GPS device so I can enjoy the fruits of my labour.