jmkb

"Black" was a label applied to persons of many different cultures in the context of colonialism and slavery. In some places, such as the USA, Black became a cultural identity because it was a legal one; these people and their offspring were governed by a separate set of laws and only legally allowed to raise families with each other.

"Asian" is too broad a term to be much use outside of geography.

"Latin" is a little more coherent, based on both geography and language. It's still pretty broad though; there are common threads but I don't know anyone who identifies simply as Latin.

"White" as a cultural identity is a relatively new invention. Personally I don't see much in the way of a shared culture here. It's problematic for many because in the USA it's been very prominently used by persons and groups who've been opposed to increasing civil rights for non-whites. It's distasteful to others because it represents a flattening of culture -- in my experience, white Americans will generally more readily identify with a particular subset of European heritage and/or with their own state or region. But this may be changing.

> there’s no way to trickle a toilet

If you have a tank toilet you might be able to adjust the floater (bend the rod upwards) so it never quite turns off the supply valve. Failing that, you can just manually prop the flap open with something.

If you have a flushometer, remove the nut over the valve and adjust the screw underneath until the valve never quite shuts off.

Warning: Take careful note of exactly how things were before. A toilet that never stops running can be just as hard on the spirit as a toilet that doesn't work at all.

OSM is like a bunch of volunteers refurbing a city park, all working different schedules, with no manager. Alice starts sanding off rust on one end of a swingset. Then Bob shows up and starting painting the other end that hasn't yet been sanded; consternation ensues.

There are a lot of attempts to solve this problem with documentation on exactly how things should be done. The wiki, the stackoverflow-style help site, subreddit, tips in the editor software, mailing lists, slack... There are too many and they often don't agree. The information in some places changes quite rapidly, or in other places goes stale over time.

So we're bound to end up with incompatible approaches now and then. I've found it's often (certainly not always!) useful to politely communicate with other mappers. This works both ways -- I've stepped on toes, and I've had toes stepped on.

When you're staring at something ugly in OSM, the last person to work on it might have finished 5 minutes ago, or 5 years. But the tools to find out do exist. As the map gets more and more filled in, I expect that documentation aimed at new mappers will need to focus on communication and cooperation as much as direct editing of the map data.

Mapping OSM in NYC, I've run into about a dozen one-way streets that have changed direction at some point, sometimes for just a block or two.

I think that would be even more likely to snag on something.

edit -- but of course danging by something other than a neck might be preferable...

My cat will remove them within 20 minutes, never to be found. I've reluctantly settled on the non-safety collar after losing a half dozen. Although if I equipped one with RFID I could at least have a shot at locating his stash!

In particular, the current NYC vaccination phase includes all "public-facing" grocery store workers (but not restaurant workers!)

Not sure how that plays with stores like Dollar General, which carry some groceries. Don't believe there are any Dollar Generals in NYC, but what about the bodega workers?

It's a writing-focused word processor for MacOS and iOS.

https://ulysses.app/

The closest thing to "reveal codes" in Word is to save as .rtf and open in a text editor. But you're in for a wild ride.

And creating a nuisance.

You're quite correct, I should not have described GNOME maps as offline, and my edit window has expired. Rats.

OsmAnd+ (or the free OsmAnd~ version available on FDroid) is definitely the primo consumer-facing OSM-powered map. I haven't tried getting it running on desktop via Android emulation but that might be workable.

Another desktop app worth mentioning is Garmin's Basecamp, a free download (Windows and Mac) for managing Garmin GPS units. It also functions as a desktop map viewer that supports search and routing, though the interface is a little awkward. You can buy maps from Garmin, but you can also convert OSM data into a Basecamp-compatible format. This is very offline -- for any updates you'll have to pull fresh data, reconvert, reinstall. Or you can find someone else who's done the work for you. See https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OSM_Map_On_Garmin

The "How did you contribute" dashboard from Pascal Neis [0] is a good place to explore some possible metrics. IMO some good predictors of mapping quality are:

- Focus on specific regions

- Both creation and deletion of map features, but more creation than deletion

- Unique and descriptive changeset comments

- Engagement in changeset comment discussions, both of your own and others' changes

[0] https://hdyc.neis-one.org/

1. Not currently, the only semi-decent offline OSM map for desktop OS is Gnome Maps. [0]

2. You can't configure the way maps appear on openstreetmap.org. You (or someone) will have to render the map tiles to display all names in English instead of the local language. [1]

3. If you mean keeping a personal list of map and route bookmarks, no. The primary reason to create an OSM account is to contribute data to the map.

[0] https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Maps

[1] https://help.openstreetmap.org/questions/60673/display-names...

(Although with Doyle in the giant head roster, the Thinker's choice of Poe to deduce Batman's identity is notable... speaks to Bats' gothic nature I guess.)

Hah, I'm sure you're right. The mustache threw me.

"There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact." - A. Conan Doyle

I think the 4th head in the Batman comic is supposed to be Arthur Christopher Benson. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._C._Benson

The Toshiba T1000 was the first portable computer I ever used, touched, or saw. It was a miracle: LCD screen, battery power, real keyboard. It felt like something snatched from a time traveler. (Except it booted from MS-DOS 2.1 hard-coded in ROM. I had to boot DOS 3.2 from a floppy.)

See also: https://demo.f4map.com/#lat=40.7113593&lon=-74.0034646&zoom=...

Also highly hyped, also bombed, but severely influential. IMO has a better claim to "coolest" than the Mac cube does.

"Damage control" would be my guess.

Last century "network" and "web" were metaphors that meant nothing to the uninitiated -- I feel that ".onion" has a shot.

Brave bought the brave.com domain from the band Brave Combo, whose homepage was listed as http://brave.com/bo since the early days of the web. Last year I was pleased to see that they kept a redirect in place from https://brave.com/bo to band's new site https://bravecombo.com but it appears they've discontinued that courtesy. Too bad.

Meanwhile, tiny Lesotho (a landlocked enclave entirely within, and distinctly less affluent than, South Africa) has a passionately active OSM community uniting locals on the ground and international mappers who use satellite imagery. Last year it was officially declared[1] the first country to be "completely mapped" in OSM -- a moving target obviously, but impressive nonetheless.

[1] https://maplesotho.wordpress.com/

Cobble Hill, corner of Court Street and Congress, https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/6414917575

edit -- I guess I should close it on OSM ;)

I doubt this will be any kind of soul-searching moment for the OSM community. OSM contributors make use of hundreds of different imagery sources from volunteer, corporate, and government sources. Few mappers will be particularly interested in the nitty-gritty of the funding. If the imagery is available with a compatible license, it will be used in mapping. If not, mapping will still happen, possibly more slowly. (On-the-ground survey is always the gold standard.)

Admins, consider changing the link to https://blog.mapillary.com/news/2020/06/18/Mapillary-joins-F... -- the current link implies that this is directly related to OpenStreetMap, when in truth it's just a blog ("diary") of a Mapillary employee hosted under his OSM user account.

Also really enjoyed Satyajit Ray's storyboards for the Apu Trilogy. Sketchier than Kurasawa's, but thrilling nonetheless and greatly increasing the pleasure of watching or rewatching the films.

Unfortuately I can't can't seem to find them online aside from a few thumbnails. They were published in book form a few years ago; maybe that's why.

> For years now, cooking has been marketed as a waste of time and effort like hand-washing clothes (think fast food advertising).

Maybe that's the marketing message that hits some demographics, but there's also plenty of marketing push in the other direction: All the food channels on cable & youtube, amateur cooking competitions, prosumer kitchen renovations, gourmet grocery stores, dozens of cooking magazines and thousands of cookbooks. Not to mention emphasis that cooking skills are desirable for those in the dating scene.

(Now I'm looking forward to a competitive clothes-washing show... no, that's too absurd. Maybe competitive tailoring.)

The Swiss topos are seriously beautiful. Half of the fun of hiking in the Alps is collecting these meticulous hand-illustrated maps. They are shamelessly artistic, and at the same time give a much better feel for the character of the landscape than "drier" maps.

And the middle digit was the biggest factor in dialing length, because before 1995 is was required to be 0 or 1. But the fastest "0" area code (202, Washington DC) was still two pulses faster than the slowest "1" area code (916, northern California.)