EirePreneur

Of golf course, estuaries, airports and the OpenEir

Files for this OpenEir tour are -

1) OE-LK-03-golfclub-N69tour.txt - the waypoints and trackpoints.

2) The same calibrated map file for Limerick as from this post.

So, yesterday's OpenEir tour demonstrates, I think, the utility of an open source map of Ireland in helping to find 'out of the way' locations. Like Newcastlewest Golf Club, Cahermoyle Nursing home and a great property for sale overlooking the Shannon Estuary. I also collected waypoints for beautiful forest park, a popular go-karting track, a few GAA pitches and a pituresque watering hole.

My journey started in the south west just a few miles outside Newcastlewest at the turn-off for Ardagh from the main Limerick to Tralee road (N21)

W003LK marks Ardagh village (origin of the famous chalice) church and graveyard, at the junction of the R521 and R523. Passing straight through I shortly come to Cahermoyle House Nursing Home, and former residence of William Smith O'Brien - founding member of the Young Irelander's. It's denoted H002LK

Z003LK marks the final junction leading to Newcastlewest Golf Club. Take a left turn, drive on a short distance and the club entrance appears on the right hand side, marked S002LK here.

To understand the advantages of compiling these OpenEir waypoints just take a look at the vague directions on this webpage for Newcastlewest Golf Club -  "9 km north of Newcastle West on the N21" - or this page - "6m N of Newcastle West, off N21" - and you'll understand why so many get lost! Even on my OSI 50,000 series map the flagpole is in the wrong place!

I did a u-turn at the club gate, drove back to the previous junction and turned left to head back towards the N21. This is the road that golfers coming from the Limerick side should take. A few kilometres brings us to the first junction - Z004LK - where a right turn takes us to the next junction Z005LK. This is a dangerous cross! Be careful to yield right of way to traffic on the R523. Now you've only a very short distance to go to Reen's Pike - X006LK - the junction with the N21.

I drove a mile along the main road until I got to Rathkeale where I took the left exit off the bypass at X007LK, turned left again past the junction - Z006LK - for the small sideroad to the soccer pitch. It's just a few hundred yards down there to the left. But I continue on straight, passing the GAA pitch - S006LK.

Then it was a long, relatively straight stretch of road due north to Askeaton. A left turn at Z007LK takes you into the town proper but I turned right to join the N69 bypass of the town at X008LK. I drove east along the N69, heading towards Limerick and saw Kilcornan GAA pitch - S004LK - going by on the right hand side, behind the school. Shortly afterwards I passed the entrance to beautiful Curraghchase Forest Park - V002LK,  and a local petrol station F008LK just before turning left at Y001LK off the N69 heading for Pallaskenry. There, up on a hill at the left is Kilcornan Karting - S005LK.

On up the road into Pallaskeny's where church sits on the main street at W004LK. Through the village and north again heading for the Shannon Estuary. 9001LK marks the location of this house which is for sale via Hamptons Estate Agents. As you can see it is in a beautiful location and I can confirm the views boasted on the Hamptons website. As I drove past, the steep fall of road and emerging view of the Shannon Estuary made me feel like was going to end up submerged very quickly.  Happily though I emerged at Ringmoylan Quay - V003LK - the remains of a large windmill tower, with fabulous views directly across to Shannon airport. I took this photo which if I'd had a decent zoom capability on my Nokia 6630 would clearly show the parked aeroplane in the background, across the way. By the way, the satellite basemap does clearly show the airport runways opposite the quay.

On my way back inland I did a small circle around the town of Pallaskenry before arriving back on the main street. Turning left on leaving the town I continued on and eventually emerged back on the N69 at Y002LK, a few miles further east that where I'd left it. I soon came to Kildimo where F008LK marks the Campus Petrol Station in the center of the village. Journey's end was at O'Deas De Bucket Pub situated next to the river Maigue, as can be clearly seen on the satellite basemap. Funny that my GPS receiver's battery should run out just at the entrance to a pub in the middle of nowhere ;-)

Extending an OpenEir map

After uploading the trackpoints and waypoints from Tuesday's OpenEir tour, to MyGPS, I realised that I'd cut the satellite image mosaic a bit short . I'd started too far east in county Limerick and some of the more westerly data was 'off the map'. But the beauty of using MapProxy satellite images for calibration maps is that you can retrieve and add more at any time simply by starting off with one of the pairs of calibration coordinates previously saved.

So, I just resubmitted the north east corner coordinates from my earlier post accepting the default 800 pixel, 10km distance paramaters as previously. The one thing to be careful of is that the resulting image is centered on these coordinates so you need to click the +- links to move left and down, two half squares, to arrive at an alignable image for placement on your 'chessboard'. I acquired two squares to the left (west) of the previous mosaic.

This is where GIMP comes in handy. I was able to resize the canvas of the previously saved collage and offset it to the right to leave room to paste the two new images in at the left. They aligned perfectly! Which meant I was able to use this newly extended map in MyGPS and upload all my previously collected waypoints and trackpoints as well. Here's a screenshot which stretches from Newcastlewest in west Limerick to Tipperary town, about 40 miles away. And from Limerick in the north to Kilmallock in the south.

The Cubicle Escape Pod - a podcast for entrepreneurs

Adam Curry's latest podcast included a promo for The Cubicle Escape Pod - a resource for bootstrapping entrepreneurs -

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Ten Laws of the Modern World

Forbes' Ten Laws of the Modern World should be pondered by every entrepreneur.

OpenEir photos from yesterday's journey

All 23 photos from yesterday's OpenEir tour of east Limerick and south west Tipperary are now online at Flickr and retrievable under a tag search on 'OpenEir'. They appear in order from left to right top to bottom and you can follow on the journey by clicking on the left window (previous) in my photostream.

Its a short way to Tipperary via OpenEir

Here are the files for this section of the OpenEir adventure -

Trackpoints Text file

Waypoints Text file

East Limerick West Tipperaray Calibrated satellite map file.

First open the calibrated map file in MyGPS and then import the points from the trackpoints file to get a clear view of the route taken, starting towards the lower left, eastwards to Tipperary town, then in a northwest direction back to Limerick city. Finally import the waypoints text file and, optionally, remove the trackpoints to get a clearer reading of the labels after a few moments orientation.

So, we started the journey last evening at Rourke's Cross, about half way between Croom and Charleville on the N20, and we drove east along the R518. W001LK marks the church in Bruree and closeby is the the turn-off to the De Valera museum, where the former president of Ireland grew up (temporarily marked DevsX for reference. Exact Museum waypoint to come...).

The next cluster of points represent various places of interest in Kilmallock town. Use the F1 key in MyGPS to zoom in for clarification. F004LK is the Xpress Stop petrol station on the junction of the R512 - the main Kilmallock to Limerick road. Turning right, into the town and the impressive spire of a church appears on the right hand side - W002LK. A short distance on, right in the main road through the town is John's Castle - V001. On through the town, a left turn and then a right turn and we're on the R515.

Next village up is Elton, then a few miles further along is the Statoil petrol station - F005LK on the crossroads in Knocklong. Right behind the forecourt is head office for Dan Dooley car hire and Ford Centre. Straight through the crossroads and we quickly come to the 'border crossing' to Tipperary. It's alien territory from here on  ;-)

The first county Tipp town is pretty littly Emly. F001TS marks the Emo Oil Petrol station just outside. Next up is the village of Lattin, then a few twists and turns and we're into Tipperary town itself. A left turn and we're on the N24 heading towards Limerick city.

2 miles outside the town and we come to Tipperary Racecourse - S001TS - next to Limerick Junction. Just up the road is the vilage of Monard, then we cross the border back into county Limerick. Phew, made it safely ;-)

Oola is the firt Limerick town up, then Pallasgreen and Dromkeen with a few important crossroads in between. X005LK marks the turn off to Neolithic Lough Gur which is clearly visible in the satellite photo a few kilometers southwards along the R513. In fact, if you zoom out fully in MyGPS (F2 Key) it appears like we travelled roughly in a big wide circle around Lough Gur, at the center.

F006LK marks an Estuary Petrol Station all alone on the N24 a few miles before the left hand turn off the flyover down onto the new Limerick Southern Ring phase 1 (PDF). And finally back onto the N21 which I've covered previously on OpenEir.

Note: The above contained a mixture of waypoint designations for demonstration purpose. Once I've 'collected' a substantial number of each type of waypoint I'll upload separate 'layer' files for each - towns, churches, attractions, sports fields, petrol stations, etc.

GIMP to the rescue of OpenEir

I'm off for a drive to the town of Tipperary this afternoon so there's an opportunity for me to go 'cross border' with OpenEir mapping.

But seeing as my previous satellite mosaic covered only county Limerick I needed to revisit the brilliant Mapproxy tool for aerial photographs covering the landmass further east. A few minutes later I had downloaded a grid of 6 images, each 800 pixels square and of 10km radius in coverage.

All that was left to do was to stitch them together, so it was a double click on my Paint Shop Pro desktop shortcut and..... nothing...... my 60 day trial period had expired. Damn! And double damn! While I'm sure its an excellent overall graphics package I wasn't about to cough up the euro equivalent of USD$99 when all I really need at the moment is a way of stitching satellite photos together. And besides the whole point of OpenEir is to keep it open, using as much free software and services as possible.

Searching with Google for freeware stitching applications though was a frustratingly futile exercise. But then I remembered about GIMP -

"the GNU Image Manipulation Program.  It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring.  It works on many operating systems, in many languages."

And it works great! Here is my latest satellite background image and the calibration coordinates are -

Top Left
North: 52.754554249534
West: -8.7711762453472

Bottom Right:
South: 52.395226051398
East: 7.8854808840635

So, you can calibrate the map yourself on MyGPS or wait for me to upload the fully calibrated map myself, hopefully tonight.

UPDATE: I've just realised that Flickr doesn't go large enough to show the 2400 x 1600 image unaltered so that image will be no good for calibration. Sorry. I'll update the full images directly on this blog later.

UPDATE 2: I forgot to mention that Limerick city appears near the top left of the image at the mouth of the Shannon (obviously!) and Tipperary town can easily be seen towards the bottom right just above the dark patches where the Galtee mountains begin.

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Whatever you do, don't press the third button ;-)

[Via Adam Curry]

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