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Offline Android OpenStreetMap mapping

Last year I did my first mapping during my holiday. I guess any reason would be a valid reason to contribute spare time to OpenStreetMap (OSM), but in this particular case the bird zoo we were going to was hardly mapped on OSM. For OSM mappers this can only mean one thing: a great opportunity to bring value with a mapping contribution. And so I did.

Last year

Without an internet connection at the time (last year), it was hard to get a GPS fix, and even then my battery would run out of juicy pretty quickly. So I finally ended up writing some notes, taking some pictures, and do the final OSM mapping with the Bing sattelite imagery and the zoo’s map I got at the entrance. I was able to crank out the zoo roughly, but I know things could have been better. Well, a good initial step.

This year

We went to the same place, and decided to visit the same zoo. That again meant a clear opportunity to contribute to OSM. Looking at the current state of the mapping, little to nothing had changed since my mapping last year, so every improvement would be a clear win. And I already knew there was still some low-hanging fruit.

Preparation

I still lack a mobile internet connection internationally, and from experience I know my Fairphone 2 without network assistance or WIFI maps (which I assumed would be of no use at the park) would take about 15 minutes to get a proper fix. So unless I would get a hold of some powerbank solution, using GPS and mapping with OSMTracker for Android would be a no-go. I went looking for a solution in my solution provider F-Droid.

Tabulae

Most notably I came across Tabulae which should be able to download OSM map tiles locally for offline viewing, and enable some point of interest commits. I was able to get an initial preview, but downloading the tiles failed on multiple occasions. My best bet is that the shipped version of Tabulae is no longer compatible with the latest OSM tile URL’s.

OsmAnd~

Eventually I came back to my trusted OSM client OsmAnd~. Lucally my changes of last year were already included in the map version I had loaded, so I could use it as a base.

Mapping with OsmAnd~

Although OsmAnd~ offers an explicit plugin feature to take video and audio notes, my approach was much more makeshift. I created a seperate category in my favorites, dedicated for mapping notes. To add a note on a particular place on the map, I would touch the location and add it as a favorite in the mapping category. The name of the favorite, which can be quite long, would hint me to what was going on. Mapping the final outcome was also supported by pictures I took, to provide a better reference.

Steps summarized

1. Install OsmAnd~, download the latest map of what you are about to map (as a reference).
2. Create a seperate favorite category in OsmAnd~ to prevent interference with your normal favorites.
3. Navigate in the app towards the location you want to put a note, select it, and add a favorite.
4. Name the favorite to give the most useful description.
5. Take additional pictures, notes, video, and sound recordings seperately to provide more information if desired.
6. Use your favorites and additional notes to make your contribution to OpenStreetMap.

Static site with separate source branch

This post is dedicated to the use-case where there are 2 different branches in a project. Typically one branch is for the source files, and one is for the generated output files for publishing. This use-case matches the way in which this website is currently hosted, via GitHub pages. Then the master branch is eventually published, whereas other branches remain in the repositories only.

Typically generated websites have a dedicated distribution directory like dist in which the generated files end up. This use-case covers a different use-case where the generated .html files end up next to the .adoc source files.

Setup

Just some prepwork is needed to get this working.

Branches

We have two seperate branches, one for the source files src, and one for the generated output for publishing master. As there is little to no correlation between both branches, the --orphan option can be used during the git checkout to prevent branches from forcefully bing associated with each other.

Git branches

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$ git branch -a
  master
* src
  remotes/origin/master
  remotes/origin/src

Gitignore

Part of the trick is not to ignore the output .html files in the src branch, to make it available for the git commands. The source .adoc files can be ignored from out of the master branch, but that is mainly to reduce the effect of those oops moments.

Doing the transfer dance

To successfully generate the output files and have them end up in the master branch we need to do a little dance. The actual transfer is being done via git stash.

From source to stash

💡 TIP If you are unexperienced with Git, just know you can always run git status to get an overview of the current state of the repository.

Checkout src branch

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$ git checkout src

Generate output files

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$ make html
asciidoctor index.adoc
asciidoctor posts/index.adoc
asciidoctor posts/2016-08-02-static-site-with-separate-source-branch.adoc

Put output files in stash

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$ git add *.html **/*.html

From cached to stash

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$ git stash

From stash to master

Checkout master branch

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$ git checkout master

Remove previous generated files

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$ git rm *.html **/*.html

Apply stash

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$ git stash pop

The new and modified files are automatically added as staged in git, so making a commit will do.

Commit the new files

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$ git commit -m "chore: site update"

If your use-case covers more or different files than the HTML files in this example, then replace the *.html **/*.html globbing patterns with different patterns that match your output files.

Batch YouTube-dl task

YouTube music

There is just so many music available to people on YouTube, it’s amazing. And with the advanced screening and copyright infringement reporting policies, as a user you can rest assured that the music on YouTube is available for you on purpose.

To utilize this music availability, I use YouTube-dl. YouTube-dl is a tool that allows you to (batch) search, select, download and convert video’s. The tool itself is not constrained to the use-case of YouTube, but that is just the provider this posts focuses on.

Commandline power

This is the command I’ve been using thus far for youtube-dl to download multiple tracks based on the tracksearch.txt file.

youtube-dl command

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$ youtube-dl --default-search ytsearch2: -a tracksearch.txt --max-filesize 10M --min-views 1000 -f bestaudio -x --audio-format mp3 --audio-quality 192

tracksearch.txt

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lee rosevere - earthmover
brad sucks - making me nervous

Breaking it down

Search

Selection

Download

Conversion

Room for improvement

Now if multiple video’s (2 for this case) pass the viewcount and filesize selectors, all videos will be downloaded and converted. Ideally only 'the best' video will be downloaded. Likewise, appending the --get-duration option to the command will show the duration for the video, to ensure the downloaded song will not be too short or too long of a duration.

A free music alternative

Although this solution works well for several use-cases, I want to use this post to direct you to the Free Music Archive, a curated selection of free (as in freedom) music. A lot of music is actually CC-NC, so NonCommercial usage allowed, but let this not ruin your party. There are a lot of great artists on this platform, and there are several ways the platform supports discoverability of this great music.

Starting a blog in asciidoc

This year I revamped my personal blog. Part of the reason is my involvement in the Asciidoctor project, which drove me to test the limits on this great markup format.

Writing a blog or a static site in asciidoc is no longer an innovative occupation, as this has been done for many years now. In particular the Jekyll static site generator has great support for asciidoc, based on Asciidoctor. Less feature-rich is the Awestruct framework, which is most notably used for generating the Asciidoctor.org website.

In do however believe that both these great Asciidoctor oriented static site generators fail to subscribe to the great toolset that is Asciidoctor. In particular the Asciidoctor diagram and Asciidoctor Extensions projects provide great features for enriching the plain but well-defined base of Asciidoc(tor).

Taking the LaTeX ecosystem as a parallel universe, there is a large difference in the number of integrations available. Although the syntax of Asciidoctor and the Ruby code-base are easier to read and understand compared to TeX based packages, still the number of tools available for LaTeX is vast. A notable benefit of the ecosystem is the way in which all the packages seem to tie into the generic LaTeX rendering layer, resulting in an ecosystem where all packages can be mixed and matched, regardless of the output format. This is unfortunately not so much the case for Asciidoctor, which has several content add-ins and several redering back-ends, but no complete support for all possible combinations.

In order to bring such compatibility, a larger development effort is needed. And I consider this blog revamp my personal motivator in this regard. By refusing to rely on static site generation tools other than a Makefile for easy 'making', all the magic has to come from Asciidoctor itself. I assume this will result in me having to stretch the possibilities of Asciidoctor to the max, and write a number of extensions underway, but that will be for the better.

So expect this blog to be changing more frequently in the coming period, if only for the underlying Asciidoctor tooling.

Gajim and GPG Agent

Since I’ve started using Gajim I’ve been trying to get it working using the GPG Agent rather than the built-in GPG option. The practical benefit is that I’m no longer required to insert my passphrase each time I open up my laptop, as the passphrase is part of my keychain, just like I have enabled from my Evolution email client. It took me quite a while to get it working, and looking by the number of reported tickets others had difficulties as well. I finally got it working by ultimately trusting the receivers key. In order to keep others from having similar issues, I’ve filed a ticket on the trust level and a ticket on the error.

My C720P upgrade to freedom

A couple of years ago I started using my own laptop at work under the policy of bring your own device although to me it wasn’t about the device, it was about bringing a free computing platform I can trust, a GNU/Linux distribution, and many free and powerful applications, all to improve my short-term and long-term effectivenes as an engineer. This however changed my needs regarding battery life, screen brightness and form-factor. And with the recent dying of my Lenovo Thinkpad T60p, I desired an upgrade, to be able to destine my current Lenovo Thinkpad T61 to become my backup.

Currently there are plenty of interesting developments regarding more free laptop projects, which are even destined to pass the FSF Respects Your Freedom certification. Specifically the Novena laptop, the Libreboot X200, other corebooted Thinkpads, the Librem laptop, and the EOMA68 15 inch laptop. Of this set only the Libreboot X200 and the Librem seem to provide the desired technical upgrade relative to my T61. The Librem seems more ideal, but import taxes would drastically increase the already hefty price. Eventually the Libreboot X200 seemed to be the best deal around, and that’s probably why it is used by many FSFE contributors.

However eventually I decided to go another route, in retrospect mainly driven by technical aspects of an even longer battery-life, an even brighter screen, and an even smaller form-factor. I decided to use a converted Acer C720 Chromebook, more specifically the C720P model bringing more RAM, a larger SSD, a touchscreen and a white housing. Also there are quite a number of copies available second-hand, reducing the cost. Having an X86-architecture supported by SeaBIOS, the level of freedom on the C720P can be increased rather easily. Removing an internal screw allows the BIOS to be reflashed, and thanks to John Lewis amongst others a free SeaBIOS payload is available to flash the laptop using coreboot. I must admit this laptop wouldn’t pass the FSF’s Respects Your Freedom certification, due to the Intel Management Engine and VGA BIOS, which are on the coreboot tasklist.

C720P buffed by Kevin

C720 BIOS reflash being enabled

Although I’m somewhat of a tinkerer, I left the freedomification to my Dutch FSFE Fellow Kevin Keijzer. He has flashed his own Acer C720 with coreboot, having used it since early 2014. We agreed on a fair price, as free software isn’t about free as in gratis, it’s about free as in freedom. I must admit I was pleasantly surprised by the level of service I was given. The laptop was buffed to remove scratches, reflashed, pre-installed with Ubuntu GNOME according to my specifications, configured with all the right shortcuts and device-specific configurations, and subjected to a test run to make sure everything was working correctly. As a finishing touch, to remind me about practices by other vendors preloading unwanted media, I was given my best preloaded media yet. I donated my defect T60p to Kevin’s effort on creating freedom respecting laptops from discarded Thinkpads.

Ubuntu GNOME on Acer C720P

Personal laptop sticker on Acer C720P

I strongly encourage anyone to contact Kevin for his Quiet Life Linux Services to experience his level of expertise and great level of service.

Freedom respecting Thinkpad T60

Now having two operational laptops with two slightly different use-cases, I’m even more encouraged to finish my syncing setup. So far my synchronization is done using Syncthing, Mozilla Sync, my own Freenas build, and a remote OwnCloud server, but more on that later.

Fairphone back to the drawing board

Previously I’ve shared my thoughts and concerns on freedom in mobile operating systems. The Fairphone project unfortunately has a bad reputation in this area. Not because they don’t care, but because they failed to deliver on this promise in their first version. Other people involved in open hardware design for mobile devices saw it coming as they’ve been struggling with exactly the same issue for many years already. Especially for them it shouldn’t have been a surprise that a perfectly fine hardware platform would be kept from future firmware updates.

But as in any process of innovation, a new version allows for improvements. And so will a new upcoming version of the Fairphone. For months the Fairphone has featured several lengthy threads discussing alternative, generally more free operating systems. As I tried to state with a lengthy forum post there are multiple interest in strong conflict with each other. So even whether there will be multiple OS flavours or one for all customers is not yet decided. The great news however is that the Fairphone team have taken on this challenge, big time! I’ve had some email conversations with Kees Jongenburger and Joe Mier regarding further plans and options. But more importantly, they went looking for alternatives at the Mobile World Congress. Over the course of the next months the plans will be finalized, so I’d like to encourage anybody with relevant information to contribute to the discussions. Let’s make the next Fairphone far more fair.

Confronting your digital self

July last year I’ve deleted my Facebook account, but not just by deactivating my account, but by removing each and every post, tag and like. This was a head on confrontation with my digital self. The little information I believed to have submitted proved to be an overwhelming pile of data with serious privacy implications. This wasn’t just a rigorous action, it was a treatment teaching me about privacy. Being convinced I would be one of the few crazy enough to make the effort of deleting the individual scraps of information, I was surprised to find out that some of my friends did exactly the same thing. And more importantly, they had a similar mind-boggling experience. What if there would be a tools continually reminding you about the information you have shared, in statistics as well as by highlighting some of that information? Giving this feedback would certainly help to make people more privacy-aware, the initial step towards a better common practice.

Dia, I love you

Poem for I Love Free Software Day.

Roses are red. Handles are green.
You’re the finest diagramming software I have ever seen.
Always there to help me out.
And you ask nothing in return.
Creating things together is all I really yearn.

Dia I know we will be a great team.
We can work together even upstream.
So let this be my tag line:
Would you be my Valentine?

Valentine letter in Dia

Glasvezelkaravaan

Gedicht over de vele storingen veroorzaakt door de aanleg van glasvezel.

Informatie met de snelheid van het licht, daar komt het aan.
Busje, werklui, zand, stoeptegels, kraan.
Daar komt het aan, daar komt het aan.
Gravend en wackend, de glasvezelkaravaan.

Het is gekomen, de vezel, licht erin.
Volle snelheid, brede band, al bij het begin.
Een wereld vol content, een leven vol zin.
Maar plots geen gas, elektra evenmin.

Daar komt het aan, daar komt het aan.
Telefoon, antenne, gas, water, elektra, allen erachteraan,
Busje, werklui, zand, stoeptegels, kraan, koffie.
De reparateurs, helden in hun kloffie.