jmkb

GeoApify[0] is one of these commercial services using OpenStreetMap data. They have a no-friction isochrone "playground"[1] that's sufficient for casual exploration. You can switch the travel mode to "transit" to include train routes, but the maximum travel time for the demo is capped at one hour.

The results are very different, eg chronotrains-eu.vercel.app claims that Wittenberge is within an hour of Berlin Hauptbahnhof, but GeoApify won't take you further than Nauen. Possibly chronotrains-eu is showing a best-case travel time while GeoApify is attempting to calculate realtime travel using the current day's schedules?

I doubt the main OSM site would ever host an isochrone demo, as it's more of a reference implementation of very basic map and routing features that OSM data enables. Notably, the routing demos there do not (yet) include any kind of transit mode.

[0] https://www.geoapify.com

[1] https://apidocs.geoapify.com/playground/isoline

In the vein of principals, yes, privacy for its own sake is valuable to me.

In the vein of practicalities, both Google and the justice system (USA for me) are monstrously large bureaucracies known to make difficult-to-redress errors. Google's capricious account banning, police raiding incorrect addresses, eg. The decision to share with them more information than the law requires is one I'd prefer to make myself.

The language of coding is almost all metaphorical, some food & food-adjacent terms offhand:

  - bit, byte
  - server
  - curry
  - salted hash
  - spaghetti code
  - code smell
  - syntactic sugar
  - java

And the hardware world is full of fruit -- Adafruit, Apple, and many flavors of Pi.

You missed (at least) one: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:man_made%3Ddrinking_...

I've always imagined a solar-powered scientific calculator.

Many Houston neighborhoods are quite livable on foot and bike, if you don't mind a little perspiration. There are shops and restaurants scattered all around, sidewalks, even some multiuse trails.

The mainstream culture is still overwhelmingly automobile-centric, though. Travel to your place of work, or to any particular shop/restaurant, will likely require a car.

...Somewhat related: In Houston I lived within walking distance of two grocery stores, Kroger and Fiesta. A lot of customers walked to these stores, and they'd often use the store's shopping carts to transport purchases back home. So naturally the stores were always losing carts.

Kroger solved this problem by installing an electronic geofence and a wheel lock mechanism on each shopping cart, so they couldn't leave the parking lot.

Fiesta hired a man in a pickup truck to cruise the neighborhood and bring the empty carts back. And customers cooperated by leaving the carts near the road. IIRC different Fiesta stores marked their carts with different bright neon colors, so they could be returned to the correct store if they wandered afield.

Anytime I wanted to buy more than I could carry, of course, I'd go to Fiesta. (This was years ago; it's probably all razed for condo development now.)

I tried it in NYC... the map says "Google." If I'm going to be using Google anyway, why not just use the real thing? (This thread lists some possible reasons, obviously.)

> Looking inside changelog of OsmAnd+ I really can't understand why Android 5.x support was dropped

It might have something to do with the requirements for the Android Auto integration, which was just added recently.

For hiking and biking, I like Windy Maps. It shows terrain contours and highlights foot and bike trail relations, and has an easy-to-use GPS track recorder. You can also ask for future weather forecasts along a navigation route, which is pretty keen if you're traveling long distances. Windy Maps does have a driving navigation mode, but I find that the extra map details that are handy for outdoors activities crowd the map too much for easy reference when driving, especially in dense areas.

For general map browsing, I tend to use Organic Maps. It does a better job rendering urban environments, and even shows primitive 3D buildings when OSM has the data. It's decent as a driving GPS.

Debatably, the best OSM-powered mobile app is OsmAnd, which is a more powerful application with the downsides that come with that -- slow, lots of settings, crowded UI. The killer features IMO are: 1) it's the only one (best I know) that allows users to zoom extremely close, which is vital to see all POIs in dense areas and also helpful to see details of parks and trails 2) it's the only one (best I know) that can interface with Android Auto enabled vehicles. (There's an iOS version of OsmAnd but I've never used it since it requires a subscription for map updates.)

There are particular use cases (eg hiking) when one of these OSM-powered apps will be an adequate or even superior replacement for Google Maps. These use cases are the exception. Google Maps has its own two killer features: 1) realtime traffic for car navigation 2) sophisticated public transit routing, again with realtime data integration.

All 3 of the above apps will attempt public transit routing, but I'd never use them. They don't comprehend train schedules, much less realtime data. They don't handle bus directions at all, though this might be down to the state of the OSM data in the locations I've tried them -- bus route relations are difficult to create and maintain in OSM, and easy to break.

I'm an OSM fanatic myself, so it's saddening not to be able to wholeheartedly endorse any of the current slate of apps. The good news is that the available apps have never been better and continue to improve. Sometime soonish it might be merely a minor inconvenience to de-google your mapping life. (Apple Maps is also pretty good with realtime traffic and public transit routing, if that's an option.)

The 3M "Aura" N95s have a generous and durable nose pad that's basically eliminated this problem for me. They do get extremely humid on the inside though; I have to carry two and swap them every hour.

It sounds like carrying Apple hardware may be the only decent way to detect an unwelcome Airtag.

Are there any Android apps that monitor bluetooth traffic for possible stowaways?

Here's a fun story from back in the decade-ago-ish days: My wife couldn't stand cellphones, so I got her hooked on Google Voice for texting, which was great -- texts would show up in the gmail inbox, and you could just reply to them like emails. Calls were forwarded to the landline, voicemails showed up as attachments. Elegant, and free.

She was also hooked on the brand new "Kindle Keyboard 3G", which came with unlimited cellular data so you'd be able to buy ebooks at any time, without wifi. It also had a primative web browser that was capable (just barely) of running the gmail web interface... so voila, it's actually an e-ink tablet, with email and SMS capability! She'd have to manually load the kindle browser to check for messages -- great, really, because who wants to be interrupted with a notification while reading a book?

But after a few semi-urgent texts went unnoticed, I dreamed up a solution: change the Kindle's name based on the number of unread texts. This wouldn't interrupt reading, but it would be visible on the kindle's home screen, a good compromise.

So I hacked up a python/applescript/firefox script running on my mac mini home server. every 5 minutes it would log into her gmail account, check for unread text messages in the gmail inbox, and then log into her amazon account and update the kindle's name from "Wife's Kindle" to "Wife's Kindle (x)". It was beautiful. It worked!

It didn't work forever. Eventually the gmail web app was updated with too much javascript for the kindle browser to handle. Eventually that kindle broke. Eventually the mac mini died too. But for a while I had a full 3/5ths of FAANG cooperating for my little kindle hack. Fun times.

personally I'm looking forward to "this gourd does not exist"

My favorite skit:

  "Hey, what are doing inside that crate? Where's the new loudspeaker I ordered?"

  "I *AM* A LOUD SPEAKER!"

I've spoken with both Amazon delivery workers and Amazon warehouse workers. Small sample set, but the delivery workers seem reasonably satisfied, and the warehouse workers seem abused.

In both cases former employees were more willing to discuss working conditions than current ones.

I've also spoken to Whole Foods employees. Those who were working at the time of the Amazon acquisition universally despise the new management, and those hired since the acquisition are indifferent. But everyone's afraid to actually discuss this inside the store -- they believe they're being closely monitored.

Certainly the phone manufacturer (and OS provider if different) can have a go at anything they want.

I'm not sure what all counts as "getting data off" the phone, but some other methods of smartphone tracking:

  - wifi (sometimes even if wifi is "off")
  - EXIF on photos you take and share
  - QR code usage
  - public USB charging ports

Then there's cross-tracking by other means. It's likely someone has enough data to associate your phone with your credit or debit accounts, or a public transit card, or vehicle plate numbers & toll tags, or with your face and voice.

Supports every written alphabet out of the box, including custom emoji. Compatible with any brand of stylus. Can run thousands of games. Can go years without a charge. Never needs OS updates. Sustainable, recyclable, compostable.

Flashlight mode doesn't last very long, though.

The notion of paella purity is powerful enough that Valencians successfully protested Apple's rendering of the "shallow pan of food" emoji because it evoked a non-Valencian paella (or, as they would say, not paella at all but just arroz con cosas.)

https://blog.emojipedia.org/apple-fixes-paella-emoji/

It usually features shrimp and chorizo, while the classic Valencian paella has chicken and rabbit. (There are many regional paella variations but don't tell a Valencian that.)

Everyone's still trying to top "Headless Body In Topless Bar" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Post#Style

When it comes to that sort of fine tuning, there's no substitute for JOSM, which is the all-powerful java-based desktop editor with a hundred plugins and a somewhat inscrutable UI. But it's great because it can load several sources of aerial imagery at the same time, and quickly cycle between them or set transparency levels. This gives good perspective when it comes to precise alignment of map features to imagery, and to each other.

Not really. I'm a very happy user of Go Map!! for iOS, which is a much more full-featured map editor but doesn't have the streamlined workflow of StreetComplete.

The last person to edit the page, of course! ;)

Hah, this was my jam in the day. I wrote mods and utilities, custom map generators, custom ship types, fixed a lot of bugs that cheaters would use. Stepped through the code in an assembly language debugger and reverse engineered all the data files.

One of my favorite memories was fixing a cheater's bug that was triggered by entering a negative number into a certain dialog. There were no legitimate features in the game that required negative numbers, so I figured if I could prevent the entry of all negative numbers, it would fix this bug plus any similar undiscovered ones. I was very much an assembly language novice, but I knew that somewhere in that executable had to be the routine that parsed ASCII strings to convert them to integers, and it most likely had the minus sign (ASCII value 45) encoded as a constant. I stubbornly changed each byte value 45 to 255 until I found the right one. Since it wasn't possible to enter ASCII 255 in the dialogs... bug fixed!

When Gary Martin finally released a new version (2112?), the executables and data files were all encrypted, so we couldn't make custom ships anymore. I wasn't able to crack the encryption but I wrote a "TSR" (=terminate and stay resident -- DOS's approximation of multi-tasking) that would wait for the Trade Wars program to unpack itself and then write patches directly into the RAM. Good times.

Hah. I assume the English were looking at the budding shoot (aka "garlic scape" [0]) when they named it, whereas the Germans were looking at the knobby root (Knoblauch = knob leek).

[0] https://ediblejersey.ediblecommunities.com/recipes/garlic-sc...

My favorite piece-of-land word is "gore," which is either a triangular parcel formed where roads intersect at an acute angle, or a narrow strip of land (usually also an acute triangle) of uncertain ownership resulting from inaccurate surveying. It's derived from the Old English word for spear, which also came to mean stab, and a stab wound, and eventually blood-n-guts in general.

Dispatch knowing drivers' locations in realtime would have made this a killer app imo. Car services used to assign pickups based on drivers reporting their location by radio.

Moving in the direction of The Congress https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Congress_(2013_film)

Most entrances do not have a human attendant nearby, and the general trend in NYC (and probably most places) has been to replace the humans with vending machines.

Had this in a 70s F150. A "Main - Aux" switch on the dash, right above the 8-track player. I used to let the main tank sputter out on fumes and then triumphantly shout "Rerouting auxiliary power to engine!" while sliding the switch. Letting them empty out alternately would have been a lot smarter.