VeloViewer Explorer Score and Max Square

[paddyirish]

I've been working my way around and North of Perth picking up tiles and enjoying the autumn colours.

Yesterday I went past a road closed sign to get 3 tiles, just about managing it.  The road petered out into the building site for dualling the A9 and to get the last tile I ended up having to cross a big slag heap.  Ended up hitting a sinky spot, ending up knee deep in mud and losing a shoe when I extracted my leg.  Had to reach in with my hand to remove the mud surrounding the shoe to get underneath it so I could pull it up. All good fun . Anyway 14 new tiles and cluster up 21 to 1090.

20201108

[Pingu]

...Ended up hitting a sinky spot, ending up knee deep in mud and losing a shoe when I extracted my leg.  Had to reach in with my hand to remove the mud surrounding the shoe to get underneath it so I could pull it up. All good fun ...

Good effort 

[Pingu]

Managed to sneak a tile by going slightly off-route on yesterday's audax. Cluster now 1606.

[trickedem]

I'm new to this, so currently trying to get all my local tiles. I headed out to the Isle of Grain today and I have now got all the tiles apart from 2!
The NE tip of the Isle is an Army Demolition Range, so may involve a night time walk along the shore. The missing ones on the South are on private land, so will be very tricky. 

I might need to ask your advice on routes... are the bits round the north side walks or rides?

By the way, if you look back through the thread you'll see some discussion about how to get the tile in the far northwest corner of Sheppey - I think the only way is actually from Grain, with a walk out along the causeway to the Battery Tower at low tide.

Thanks. The North Side of the Isle of Grain is mainly a footpath, but easy enough to visit with a mountain or gravel bike.  There is also a couple of  tricky tiles to get near the Container port. I went on some waste land for one of them, but there is a big area of hard standing that is being turned into a lorry park.

[trickedem]

Just been planning a ride to pick off some tiles on the Isle of Sheppey. Unfortunately, the northwest tip of Sheppey is inaccessible as it's part of the port...



...but looking more closely at the map, I noticed a path heading out to what looks a tiny island off the Isle of Grain, just across the water, which conveniently lies in that inaccessible tile. Hang on, I thought, I know what that is - it's the ex-military fort I read about in the local news just this morning:
https://www.kentonline.co.uk/medway/news/no-1-the-thames-back-on-market-for-1-5m-232289/

Might have to pose as a prospective buyer for an excuse to visit!

I took a look at what Jonathan France did to get this. Looks like he went along the beach at Sheerness, so I will probably try this when I head over there.

[PeteBart]

The road petered out into the building site for dualling the A9 and to get the last tile I ended up having to cross a big slag heap.  Ended up hitting a sinky spot, ending up knee deep in mud and losing a shoe when I extracted my leg.  Had to reach in with my hand to remove the mud surrounding the shoe to get underneath it so I could pull it up

Are they really tiles if you don't have some sort of difficulty like this?? Great job .

[citoyen]

The North Side of the Isle of Grain is mainly a footpath, but easy enough to visit with a mountain or gravel bike.

Did a nice circular walk from Cliffe today, using a route found on Viewranger, very enjoyable. I was expecting the paths to be a lot more boggy but they weren't at all, and there were loads of people out on bikes (all making essential journeys, of course - as were we). Grain is actually a fair bit bigger than I realised - our 14km route only covered a tiny corner of the "island".

I took a look at what Jonathan France did to get this. Looks like he went along the beach at Sheerness, so I will probably try this when I head over there.

Yes, you can go along the beach, but judging by my investigations on Google Street View, I don't think you can enter the tile in question without going beyond the big scary signs threatening that you will be zapped by sharks with frikkin' lasers or something if you go past this point. Good work by Mr France if he braved it.

I quite fancy a visit to the Battery Tower anyway, so will try to time any walk/ride over that way to coincide with low tide.

[PeeJay]

I seem to be planning my DIY Audaxes purely as an excuse to venture out into unchartered tile land.

Yesterday's 200 netted me 50 new squares and upped my cluster by 96.

I went out into North Leicestershire and found some great lanes in the process.



Now on 3 overlapping 50x50 max square, cluster is 3573.

[simonp]

How do you render the before and after views? I assume this is done within Veloviewer settings?

[citoyen]

How do you render the before and after views? I assume this is done within Veloviewer settings?

I assumed it was done in photoshop or similar (animated gif with multiple screengrabs).

[Pingu]

How do you render the before and after views? I assume this is done within Veloviewer settings?

Filter on date in the Activities tab in VV.

[citoyen]

Filter on date in the Activities tab in VV.

Of course! Seems obvious now you mention it.

Now I'm going to have fun making an animated timeline of my entire veloviewer history... 

[simonp]

The before view generated this way doesn't show the new ride overlaid, which was the part that didn't seem so easy to do with built-in Veloviewer settings.

[citoyen]

The before view generated this way doesn't show the new ride overlaid, which was the part that didn't seem so easy to do with built-in Veloviewer settings.

That'll be where the photoshop trickery comes in.

I was thinking you would have to do it by taking a screengrab before updating, then do another screengrab after updating. Didn't occur to me that you could use the filters in the way Pingu mentioned, so that's a great penny-dropping moment for me. The trick is to make sure you have the same zoom level selected when you take the screengrabs so you can match them up neatly.

[simonp]

The before view generated this way doesn't show the new ride overlaid, which was the part that didn't seem so easy to do with built-in Veloviewer settings.

That'll be where the photoshop trickery comes in.

I was thinking you would have to do it by taking a screengrab before updating, then do another screengrab after updating. Didn't occur to me that you could use the filters in the way Pingu mentioned, so that's a great penny-dropping moment for me. The trick is to make sure you have the same zoom level selected when you take the screengrabs so you can match them up neatly.

Yep. I was hoping for something easier tbh, but this all makes sense. I might be too lazy to do this.

[citoyen]

I took a look at what Jonathan France did to get this. Looks like he went along the beach at Sheerness, so I will probably try this when I head over there.

Yes, you can go along the beach, but judging by my investigations on Google Street View, I don't think you can enter the tile in question without going beyond the big scary signs threatening that you will be zapped by sharks with frikkin' lasers or something if you go past this point. Good work by Mr France if he braved it.

Just had another look - it might just be possible to dip a toe into that tile without going too far past the sign (tides permitting)...

[simonp]

PS I'm up to 19x19. I didn't get in the sea. I filled in gaps around the SE corner. The eastern side of the square needs a lot of filling in now, and pretty much every ride out there involves crossing the Mendips.

[PeeJay]

How do you render the before and after views? I assume this is done within Veloviewer settings?

The before is done in the routes tab.  I generated the route in strava so it gets synced with veloviewer.  Then I just filter on the route name and it overlays it over my current squares.  I did this before the ride was synced.

No photoshop trickery needed.

[simonp]

How do you render the before and after views? I assume this is done within Veloviewer settings?

The before is done in the routes tab.  I generated the route in strava so it gets synced with veloviewer.  Then I just filter on the route name and it overlays it over my current squares.  I did this before the ride was synced.

No photoshop trickery needed.

Thanks! My routes tab is empty as I generate my routes in RideWithGPS.

[Pingu]

How do you render the before and after views? I assume this is done within Veloviewer settings?

The before is done in the routes tab.  I generated the route in strava so it gets synced with veloviewer.  Then I just filter on the route name and it overlays it over my current squares.  I did this before the ride was synced.

No photoshop trickery needed.

Thanks! My routes tab is empty as I generate my routes in RideWithGPS.

I once found some method of getting routes into Strava from RWGPS, but involved jiggery pokery on another route planning site to get date/time data added then importing that to Strava as a ride, then saving it as a route, then deleting the 'fake' ride in Strava. All a bit of a faff really.

[simonp]

I just uploaded a gpx from RideWithGPS directly into the Strava route creator, and then produced the same view as PeeJay has shown. So I think the experience has improved.

It's useful to try this before riding anyway, as it's easier to check you're not going to accidentally miss a useful tile.

Edit:



Probably would be better with a different map layer/colouring. The NCN routes in red don't look much different to the route.

[psyclist]

How do you render the before and after views? I assume this is done within Veloviewer settings?

The before is done in the routes tab.  I generated the route in strava so it gets synced with veloviewer.  Then I just filter on the route name and it overlays it over my current squares.  I did this before the ride was synced.

No photoshop trickery needed.

Thanks! My routes tab is empty as I generate my routes in RideWithGPS.

I once found some method of getting routes into Strava from RWGPS, but involved jiggery pokery on another route planning site to get date/time data added then importing that to Strava as a ride, then saving it as a route, then deleting the 'fake' ride in Strava. All a bit of a faff really.

With a paid Strava account, based on the above I can see that you can import a GPX created from RWGPS, and that works in Veloviewer. I've previously used Google MyMaps to closely check planned routes, but  importing into Strava I can see is a whole lot simpler.

[simonp]

Sub goal: collect all the accessible sections of the Fosse Way.

[Pingu]

How do you render the before and after views? I assume this is done within Veloviewer settings?

The before is done in the routes tab.  I generated the route in strava so it gets synced with veloviewer.  Then I just filter on the route name and it overlays it over my current squares.  I did this before the ride was synced.

No photoshop trickery needed.

Thanks! My routes tab is empty as I generate my routes in RideWithGPS.

I once found some method of getting routes into Strava from RWGPS, but involved jiggery pokery on another route planning site to get date/time data added then importing that to Strava as a ride, then saving it as a route, then deleting the 'fake' ride in Strava. All a bit of a faff really.

With a paid Strava account, based on the above I can see that you can import a GPX created from RWGPS, and that works in Veloviewer. I've previously used Google MyMaps to closely check planned routes, but  importing into Strava I can see is a whole lot simpler.

I do it all in Basecamp with the KML of unexplored tiles from VV and routes created in RWGPS.

[PeeJay]

All this is the main reason I keep paying for strava.  I actually quite like the new version of their route planning tool and being able to overlay tiles with the veloviewer plug in is a big bonus to me.