Ryedale Linux User Group Previous Meetings
Our May meeting was held at the Brooklyn Centre in Norton.
Attending:
Al Girling, Steve O'Neill, Dave Richards, Paul Teasdale and
Martin Wheldon. A first meeting for Martin - I hope you enjoyed yourself
and will come again!
I managed to get my machine to the meet so I might show a couple of things. The first was Gramps, genealogy software, I've been using for a couple of years now. I currently have two hundred and sixty six people in my family tree. Not all of those direct relatives, some are only connected through marriages, but I'm not leaving them out because of that! Still, suffice to say the tree is getting fairly twiggy in places.
It was a fairly simple demo. with everyone crowded around the screen while I showed what I had done and roughly how I'd done it - including the html report generated by Gramps. In the end I'd not had time to try and create a proper presentation, but the informal style was well received and I'll use it again for other subjects.
Using the same style I showed a very basic how to get started with the Open Street Map Project. This was rather hampered by the lack of an Internet connection, something we hope to rectify in the near future.
I've been mapping the area south of Malton recently using a NaviGPS kindly loaned to me by Neil Baillie. So the merits of various GPS devices and their capabilities received a fair bit of discussion. From this I showed how I get the data from the GPS to my machine and convert it to .gpx format ready to use with JOSM the Open Street Map (OSM) Java based software for creating the map. It's also this format that is used to upload the track the GPS creates to the OSM servers. A demo of how I use JOSM to turn the track into roads and other features in the map and how, if the Internet had been available, you upload the newly created section of map to the OSM servers to join the main map available for all to see.
I hope I've raised sufficient interest in the project to be able to go ahead with organising a mapping party for the Malton and Norton area. More info for this on these pages and on the mailing list!
Steve O'Neill had made a long trip to join us and made the exchanges required for signing his GnuPG key. I'm very pleased to say he's been very prompt with this and we've completed the signing process as I write this. Cheers Steve.