Splish splash

Swimmy stuff for today: the TriTalk massive have a simple March challenge: 20 swim sessions.  That's, er, every weekday!  I'm 1 for 1 and counting. 

And in case you're tickled by open-water swimming, the Great North Swim is waving its banner.  Windermere on the 12th/13th September, a mile swim, some elites to ogle and a good washing machine --  skean  we could put your birthday cake on the halfway buoy ;)  The last time I was near Windermere was in a longship!

Fresh map toolchain nerdgasm

It's a little thing, like the Beautiful Spreadsheet, but I do like my time-saving tools to be very, very time-saving.  So forgive a little 'squee' for finally polishing the OpenStreetMap Garmin script to an apogee of glittering sloth:

1. It downloads that day's fresh UK and Ireland data from the world map (20-30 minutes).
2. It does all the conversions needed to make routable maps (40 - 50 minutes).
3. It makes routable maps in a couple of different visual styles, combining the streetmaps with public-domain topological data (20 minutes).
4. It zips, datestamps and uploads them (several hours, damned asymmetric ISP).
5. It sends a Tweet gloating announcing the fact.
6. It shuts the computer down for a good night's rest.

Tools: wget and wput for the file transfers; 7-zip for the vaarious compression and decompression chores; osm2mp to make routable data; mkgmap to build Garmin maps; Say to natter throughout; Twitter.pl for the zeitgeist coup de grâce, and of course the OpenStreetMap.org free wiki world map for the original data and GeoFabrik.de for hosting the daily database snapshots.

Who says you don't get anything for free?  :)