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Toronto restaurant-goers have a new reason to go out in the rain. Woods is open.

It isn't really, officially, open. They haven't had their Grand Opening yet. But Woods is soft open. The doors are open, the staff are welcoming and you can order a fine plate of food. I ordered a plate of food that turned out to be fine, indeed. I like a nice plate of food.

The Toronto OpenStreetMap Hack Weekend or, more formally, The Second Annual Canadian OpenStreetMap Developer Weekend, was held from Friday, 08 March to Sunday, 10 March 2013 at various venues. And it was wonderful.

The Toronto OpenStreetMap Hack Weekend is winding down. It has been three days of coding, outreach and socializing.

Telling people about OpenStreetMap is fun. Seeing the lights come on when somebody gets it is gratifying. And that sort of face-to-face advocacy has been the most effective way to add new mappers to the community. That has been the case since the early days in English pubs and it is still the case now.

It was time to make a change. The living room was becoming a shrine to technology. It was more a place for computing and less a place for living and that was a problem. So how do you make better use of available space, make your technology serve you better, and keep it from overwhelming your human plans for your space?

The challenge was to get the computers out of the living spaces. An additional challenge was to reduce the visual impact of the audio equipment. Space was limited. And the plan was to implement these changes without breaking the bank. The Secret Server Space was the solution. Here's what happened.

Several Garmin GPSes work well with Ubuntu as a mass USB storage device. Navigating the menu to enable the mass USB device can be a bit of a headache. Here is an alternative that takes less fumbling with the joyclick on the Garmin and that does a better job of grabbing the data.

Do you want a better map for your GPS? You can use a map from OpenStreetMap on your Garmin GPS depending on the model of your device. You'll find several devices listed on the OpenStreetMap wiki. I'll demonstrate with a Garmin etrex Vista HCx, other models may vary.

Garmin made the unfortunate choice of using a proprietary data format for their maps. There are several ways to convert map data to Garmin format.

Construction of the Doris Avenue Extension is continuing. Small sections of the Doris Avenue extension are open to local traffic as other sections of Kenneth Avenue and Olive Avenue have been removed. Most of the new sidewalks are in place.

Some further changes at the intersection of Finch Avenue East and Doris Avenue appear to be in order.

Kenneth is becoming Doris. This is something of an upset for those of us who know and love Kenneth but perhaps it is for the best. Let me explain.

Configure a database for OpenStreetMap on another disk

Perhaps you need more space for your OpenStreetMap database and decide to move it to your shiny new big disk or RAID array? Sound good? Here we go. We need to create a tablespace for the database, then use it.

Create a directory for the database
sudo mkdir /raid/newgis
sudo chown postgres:postgres /raid/newgis

As the postgres user
sudo -u postgres -i

Let's go to the park, and put the park on the map.