I've been on holiday on the north coast of Norfolk for a few days so I though I would share what I was doing. We spent every day walking or cycling and were rather surprised to learn that the landscape was not as flat as we expected! The weather was up to the usual bank holiday standard, rain and lots of wind. We stayed in a very smart guest house in Blakeney. The footpath you can see leaving the map at top left was added by me :).

I received a garmin 60 handheld gps unit for christmas last year. Because of this I have become interested in geocaching and also Open Street Map.

Geocaching is similar to letterboxing and uses GPS to give the locations of hidden boxes containing logbooks and sometimes small trinkets. The idea is that you download the location of a cache from geocaching.com and then try to find it and log your visit. Before we went away I downloaded all the cache locations within 20 kilometres of our base. I then used gpsbabel to upload them to my gps unit. Sometimes the caches have complicated clues so you need to print them out (or carry a pda/umpc). Often all you need is the coordinates and your gps unit can lead you straight to the cache. At home we quite often go out cycling in the New Forest with the kids, they enjoy swapping trinkets with what is in the cache. There are quite a lot of caches around the area we were in so we didn't go out of our way to find them and just logged the ones that were directly on our route.

Open Street Map is a project to create maps that are available to use under the creative commons licence rather than the restrictive copyright normally applied by map makers. OSM is a very good example of the power of web 2.0, a map of the world built from small individual contributions in much the same way as a wiki. Many of the small lanes and footpaths in north Norfolk have not yet been recorded, so I wanted to make a contribution to these. Whilst traveling around I left my gps recording my track. When I got home I uploaded the track logs to OSM for other people to use. I have also used the java based JOSM editor to edit the map off-line. Doing it this way makes it possible to sync up a gps track log with photographs taken along the route as a memory aid. I now have the satisfaction of knowing that I contributed some sections of National Cycle Route 1, footpaths, small country roads and also a permissive footpath that even our Ordnance Survey map didn't know about. If you want to contribute something yourself you don't have to have a gps or install any software. The OSM website has a flash based editor that will allow you to very easily add extra details to your area. Just create an account and hit the edit button, I recommend that you choose the play option to start with to avoid messing up anyone else's hard work. Here is the suburb where I live.

It should go without saying that I did all this using puppy. When we got back from holiday puppy came to the rescue again. I had forgotten to pay my ISP before we went away, it was 9pm and they had disconnected the broadband. Luckily I had already worked out how to get online using my mobile phone so I logged into my ISP's website, payed the bill and 15 minutes later the broadband was back on. Go puppy go.