Author Archives: Michael

About Michael

SOSM board member and admin of the osm.ch server.

New colocation sponsor Nine

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At the end of 2024, we had to give up our server hosting in Winterthur due to reasons beyond our control and that of our former sponsor. Some readers may have seen our announcement on this topic last year.

Thankfully, Nine very promptly agreed to support the Swiss OpenStreetMap community and SOSM with their colocation infrastructure. As a result, we relocated from Winterthur to Zurich in mid-December.

With the two servers we operate, we offer a variety of services that enable the OpenStreetMap community to improve the map and make valuable contributions. One of these servers is now hosted at Nine, and we would like to take this opportunity to express our heartfelt thanks for Nine’s generous support.

The colocation sponsorship allows us to operate the services on our own hardware in Switzerland. The second server remains with our longstanding colocation sponsor, Adfinis.

A big thank you to Nine and Adfinis—for their sponsorship, trust, and support!

OSM Birthday Party on August 11 at Badi Rheinau

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The plan for August 11 is becoming more concrete: We will meet at Aquarina 4 in Rheinau. In the Badi for cooling off. I hope for good weather.

My idea is to do some mapping on the way there, like a star hike: Each person or small groups will walk the last few kilometers, mapping as they go.

Arrival between 1:00 PM and 3:00 PM, birthday cake around 4:00 PM.

Here are two suggestions for hikes:

Hike A

Very beautiful!

Rüedlinge → Rheinau Time: 2-3 hours

Route:

  • Start at the Flaach/Rüdlingen bridge (newly built, needs to be updated in OSM), bus: Flaach, Ziegelhütte
  • Follow the west side upstream along the Rhine
  • At Ellikon am Rhein, take the ferry across the river
  • Possible stop at Rhygarte Node 356692523 (not Restaurant Schiff, same building at the front side)
  • Follow the east side upstream along the Rhine to the lower auxiliary weir Way 39763717

Hike B

Also beautiful, with the Rhine Falls.

Rheinfall → Rheinau Time: 2 hours

Route:

  • Start on the Zurich (south/east) side of the Rhine Falls, train: Schloss Laufen am Rheinfall
  • Follow the east side downstream along the Rhine to the main weir in Rheinau

Many thanks to Loremo for helping with the planning and the hike suggestions!

Please share your route on the wiki or forum so not everyone maps the same area.

Map on osm.ch now includes contour lines

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The default style on osm.ch now includes contour lines and is updated to the latest version of the openstreetmap-carto style sheet.

(c) OpenStreetMap contributors

Elevation data created from a mash-up of SRTM and ASTER GDEM data. ASTER GDEM is a product of METI and NASA. Post processing was kindly provided by Yves Cainaud from opensnowmap.org.

Updates to overpass-turbo and routing

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 overpass-turbo is an easy to use data mining tool for OpenStreetMap. To reflect the continued improvement of the tool, we have updated this software on the SOSM servers to the latest version. Thanks to Martin Raifer who is the developer of this tool.

routing.osm.ch also got an improvement: Now the link to the debug map works correctly and shows the routing speeds and turn weights used by the currently selected profile.
To access the debug map, click on this icon  in the lower left corner: rectangle with magnifying glass

server outage

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We had a server outage from Saturday evening June 24th until Monday afternoon June 26th. The main reason was that three disks had failed in the production server and had to be replaced. Fortunately, we had enough spare disks. Sorry for any inconveniences this outage has caused. Everything should be back to normal now.