Martijn van Exel

ETL With OpenStreetMap: Simple Things Are Simple, But Then What?

Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

OpenStreetMap (OSM) data comes to you unfiltered, raw. OSM, being a crowdsourced map, gives you no guarantees of completeness, accuracy, or generally fitness for use. It’s up to you to design a data pipeline that gets you the geodata you actually need. Entire teams at large companies have broken their collective brains on the multitude of challenges faced when trying to sanitize OSM data. Fortunately, for a lot of geospatial systems I’ve helped build, it proves to be entirely reasonable to keep things simpler than you might expect. I like to reason about systems from the simplest possible solution outward, rather from enterprise architectures inward. I like to bring a toolkit of well documented, battle-tested open source geospatial software to design and build systems that fit the job at hand rather than industry-dictated “cloud best practices”.

POI classification and OSM, a match made in hell

Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I am not the first poor soul to attempt this, nor will I be the last: mapping OpenStreetMap features to a sensible POI classification scheme. First off, the OSM free form tagging folksonomy can be inscrutable, even for experienced OSM data users and contributors alike. One of the most active channels on the OpenStreetMap U.S. Slack is #tagging. The OSM Community Forum will have at least a dozen lively discussions about tagging conventions going on at a time. It is a fantastic process to take part in or just observe; contributers care a lot about the things they see in the world that they want represented, from pilgrimage route checkpoints to filming locations and everything in between. Because of OSM’s open data model, there is a place for almost everything on the map. It’s also one of its main barriers for adoption. Data consumers like predicatbility, standards that are well defined and adhered to. Arguably the most important standard for OpenStreetMap would be a deterministic road classification. Yet, this is a topic within OSM that suffers from the Eternal September Syndrome, the same arguments being regurgitated over and over, to the extent that an exasperated OSM veteran begs the community to never bring it up again.

What The Quad update

Tue, 16 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I wrote about What The Quad, a little tool I wrote to quickly get relevant, copyable information about a map tile, in a previous post. I added a few features today:

Bounding Box Mode: you can now draw a bounding box and get its coordinates in the standard, comma-separated format.
Copy as WKT / GeoJSON: you can now copy the bounding box, in both the quadkey mode and the new bbox mode, as GeoJSON and WKT strings.

That’s all! Let me know if you find this useful.

Meet Your Mappers 1.2 is out

Wed, 03 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I updated the Meet Your Mappers tool to version 1.2. Meet Your Mappers is a website I made a while ago that lets OSM mappers find active peers in their area. I use it myself to find new mappers to invite to OSM Utah meetups. I wrote about Meet Your Mappers in more detail elsewhere on this blog. I also talked about it at The State of the Map U.S. conference in Boston earlier this year. My slides from that presentation are here and you can watch the session here^youtube.

I built a little command line tool to track my time

Tue, 19 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Non-geospatial post alert!

As much as I love maps, I do like to take a break from them from time to time to scratch a non-geo itch. I like little side projects, because they give me an opportunity to learn something new, and find out how well my engineering skills, such as they are, translate to a domain I am not quite so comfortable with.

One side project that has been on my list for a while is a simple time tracker. I am doing paid consulting work from time to time (while still looking for a full time position, ahem) so it is important to keep track of what I spend my time on. It is also valuable for me personally to keep track of where my time goes. I am always in a fight with my ADHD brain about applying some structure to my work, resulting in me spending little chunks of time on things throughout the day on different projects. This makes it hard for me to close out the day (week, month) with a sense of accomplishment, because it feels like I started a lot of things but finished few.

Pedestrian Accessibility in OpenStreetMap

Fri, 15 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

If you are interested in custom OSM data quality analysis with actionable results that can be used to engage the OSM mapping community, or guide your own teams to solve specific quality issues you care about for your use case, you can hire me!

One area where OpenStreetMap (OSM) really shines in United States cities compared to other, proprietary maps is the quality of pedestrian infrastructure. OpenStreetMap United States has a dedicated Pedestrian Working Group that meets regularly to talk about ways to further improve the quality of pedestrian infrastructure and engage the mapping community. To learn more about their work, I recommend watching Chad Blevins’ talk at the recent State of the Map U.S. conference.

Meet Your Mappers

Tue, 24 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

These are the slides and cleaned up speaker notes for my lightning talk about the Meet Your Mappers tool at State Of The Map U.S. in Boston.

Hello everyone! Excited to update you on a new tool I wrote, Meet Your Mappers!

I have been running OSM Utah for a while. We have a great group with some of the most active mappers in the Salt Lake City area. I am always looking for more active mappers to invite!

MapRoulette at 13 years old

Mon, 23 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I have presented on MapRoulette quite a few times over the years. I started the project 13 years ago. MapRoulette has evolved a lot in all those years, but so has OSM, and so has the geospatial domain, and so has technology and society as a whole. Today, I would like to take stock and take the opportunity to look ahead and explore how MapRoulette may adapt to meet existing and new challenges in the years to come.

OpenStreetMap JOSM Turn Lane Tagging Tutorial Video

Tue, 08 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This tutorial demonstrates how to tag turn lanes in OpenStreetMap using JOSM. Starting with a fresh install of Linux Mint and JOSM, I walk through installing the necessary JOSM Paint Style and plugins. Clicking the thumbnail below will take you to Youtube.

Meet Your Mappers - Discover OpenStreetMappers Around You!

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I organize a monthly Map Night for OSM enthusiasts in Salt Lake City. There is a small group of regulars, but I actively try to reach out to people who might be interested in joining. One thing I wish I had to do this more effectively is a list of active mappers in my area, but there is no easy way to get such a list. So I built a website that will create that for anyone who is interested in a list like that for their local area, or any area they are curious about. It is called Meet Your Mappers and you can try it out here!

Building an OSM Tools Quick Access Browser Extension

Sun, 30 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

As an active OpenStreetMap (OSM) contributor, I often find myself switching between various OSM-related tools while mapping. Each tool serves a specific purpose - from editing with different editors to analyzing data with specialized visualization tools. I frequently found myself manually copying coordinates from the OSM website URL and pasting them into other tools, which was tedious and time-consuming.

To solve this problem, I decided to build a browser extension that would provide quick access to these tools directly from any OSM map page. In this post, I’ll walk through the technical aspects of building the OSM Tools Quick Access extension, explaining the architecture, key features, and challenges encountered along the way.

My Obsidian Daily Note Template

Fri, 28 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I spent too much time today on tweaking my Obsidian daily note template. Here is the final thing, read below for a chunk-by-chunk explanation.

<% tp.user.motivational() %>

> [!todo]
> - [[Tasks#In the future]]
> - [[Tasks#Anytime]]
> ### ⚠️ Overdue
> <%* if ([0,6].includes(tp.date.now("d"))) { %>
> ```tasks
> due before today
> not done
> ```
> <%* } else { %>
> ```tasks
> due before today
> not done
> tag does not include work
> ```
> <%* } %>
> ### Inbox (Aim for zero!)
> ```tasks
> no due date
> not done
> no tags
> ```
> ### Due Today
> <%* if ([0,6].includes(tp.date.now("d"))) { %>
> ```tasks
> due today
> not done
> ```
> <%* } else { %>
> ```tasks
> due today
> not done
> tag does not include work
> ```
> <%* } %>

<% tp.file.cursor() %>

A fresh daily note page generated from this template looks like this:

Obsidian Tasks

Sun, 23 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I have been using Obsidian for note-taking for a while now. I love that its backend is just your file system with regular markdown files. I have only recently started looking into the rich community plugins ecosystem. One particular plugin I’ve particularly enjoyed is the Tasks plugin. I love you you can just use a Markdown checkbox and it will pop up an attributes dialog that lets you add due date, priority and so on. You can also access Tasks-related commands, like creating a new task at the cursor, using the Obsidian Command palette.

Frontend / Full Stack online learning paths

Sun, 15 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I’m looking to improve my front-end / full stack development skills. With help from my online friends, I am coming up with this list of resources. Some loose criteria:

Focused on React. Nothing against Vue etc. Just the most common framework, and the one all of my recent employer’s web properties use.
Not just videos.
Updated or recent. Knowledge gets stale quickly and so do courses teaching it.

Language / Framework specific

Online Curriculums

Free / Open

MDN Curriculum - free, or paid through Scrimba with 30% off. I see this recommended on Reddit quite a bit
Full Stack open - from the University of Helsinki, free to complete, optional course credits through their open university system
Become A Job Ready React Developer - A collection of YouTube videos

Commercial

I am biased against these. Many dark patterns on web sites. I’ll try and sort them by first impression good to bad.

JOSM tip: filtering

Sat, 14 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The OSM map gets denser and denser as more people contribute to the map. In a typical urban or suburban area, you will find trees, houses and other buildings, transit stops, land use et cetera. All this data can make JOSM slow and it can be hard to find the features in the map you want to focus on.

That is where filters come in. Some I frequently use are buildings and land use. To add a filter, first make asure the filters pane is visible (Windows -> Filter or Option-Shift-f). Then click the + symbol. A standard JOSM search dialog appears:

Quadkeys are sometimes hard to find

Fri, 13 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Quadkeys are Bing Maps’s way of subdividing a Web Mercator map of the world into tiles. It is a simple quadtree-like system where each tile at a spcific zoom level has exactly four children:

I find myself needing to convert map location on earth in longitude / latitude to a Bing quadkey sometimes, and I found there is no easy web tool to do this, so I wrote one: What the Quad:

Running JOSM as a Java Web Start application on Linux Mint

Sun, 30 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

On a fresh Linux Mint install, JOSM, the Java OpenStreetMap Editor, is not installed by default. There are a few ways to install JOSM, but the most straightforward ones do not give you the latest version. The only convenient way to ensure you always have the latest JOSM installed is by using Java Web Start, or JWS. JWS is a framework “that allows users to start application software for the Java Platform directly from the Internet using a web browser” (Wikipedia). Oracle, who own the official Java runtime and development kit, deprecated JWS some time ago, but there is new open source JWS-compatible software called OpenWebStart. Here’s how to get this running on your Linux desktop.

street art

Thu, 30 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

OSM Pedestrian Density Visualization

Fri, 28 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been looking into a way to visualize the quality of pedestrian mapping in OSM. Sure, there are already many “How Good Is OSM” maps out there, but I hadn’t really done any GIS work in a little while so it was a good opportunity to stretch that muscle.

For the quality metric, I will consider the length of dedicated pedestrian infrastructure relative to the total length of road network. Consider these examples:

Capturing and uploading 360° imagery with Mapillary: 3. Front vs Side

Fri, 03 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This post is a follow-up on my series on GoPro Max panoramic imagery capture for Mapillary. Find part 1 here and part 2 here.

To capture true 360 degree images with a camera that has just two lenses, compromises are unavoidable. Optics dictate that a lens that captures a 180 degree field of view will have some image sharpness falloff at the edges of the field of view. I hadn’t considered this when I first started capturing with the GoPro MAX. I just mounted it the way I would a regular GoPro and didn’t give it another thought:

Keeping a thematic OpenStreetMap database up-to-date with osm2pgsql

Mon, 27 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Recently, I wrote and published Resto-Bot, a Mastodon bot that toots about a restaurant POI from OpenStreetMap that has not been updated for more that 5 years. It is backed by an OSM database populated by the osm2pgsql tool, and I learned quite a lot about modern usage of this tool along the way. This post contains some of my learnings, and I hope it is useful for folks who would like to have a special-purpose OSM database that they can keep up-to-date.

Capturing and uploading 360° imagery with Mapillary: 2. BIKE

Sun, 26 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I posted a couple of days ago about my first captures with the GoPro MAX camera I have on loan and uploading to Mapillary. This all went pretty smooth, so I wanted to capture while biking. I bike around town a fair amount and you can cover more ground in the same amount of time compared to walking, so I was eager to try it.

Years ago, I captured Mapillary imagery with my regular GoPro HERO 3+ camera mounted on my bike:

Capturing and uploading 360° imagery with Mapillary: 1. WALK

Thu, 23 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I have always been excited about the opportunities open street level imagery (SLI) offers to OSM. I helped launch OpenStreetView (now Kartaview) back when I worked at Telenav and was an early contributor to Mapillary as well. Recently, I’ve had the opportunity to work more closely with the great folks at Mapillary. This re-kindled my excitement for SLI & OSM! Good things are rolling out and will continue to roll out in 2023, so stay tuned! The Mapillary blog is the best source for announcements.

New Motiv

Mon, 30 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I was doing my usual overthinking on something meaningless earlier so I decided to replace my previous motiv (short for “Letter sized motivational poster with no images”) with this fresh one:

I’m not too happy with Google Docs’ complete ignorance about proper kerning, but I decided…not to overthink it. At least they do have Helvetica. Here it is in PDF form if you want to use it for your own purposes (CC-0 license).

RapiD Bookmarklets

Sat, 21 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Update: The bookmarklets are updated for the new 2.0 version

I’ve been testing the latest alpha version of the RapiD editor. RapiD is a web-based editing environment for OpenStreetMap that incorporates special layers with map features from other sources you can easily copy over to OSM. Examples include Microsoft’s building footprint data, missing roads generated with machine learning, and open data from government GIS sources.

Because RapiD is not included in the dropdown menu where you can select an editor on the OpenStreetMap website, I created a few bookmarklets¹ for myself that I hope come in handy for mappers who want to have quick access to RapiD. They are self-contained and don’t read any content from your browser other than the current URL. If you’re not currently on openstreetmap.org or actively editing in the default OSM web editor iD, the bookmarklets will simply do nothing at all.

trip to hawai'i

Tue, 03 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

We went to Hawai’i for a week over the holiday break. This was our second visit to Hawai’i, by which I mean the island of Hawai’i which is part of the state and archipelago of the same name. The first time we went was in 2014. Since then, a lava flow destroyed an area not very far from where we stayed back then. It was very impressive to see the destruction. I didn’t take any pictures of that specific lava flow, but the entire island is made up of it so you’re always reminded of the forces of nature that continue to shape the island.

adding high quality gis data to osm, one feature at a time

Tue, 27 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This is a cross-post from my OpenStreetMap Diary

RapiD is an alternative to the OpenStreetMap iD editor that adds the ability to easily add data from approved external sources to OSM. Chances are that you—like me—know RapiD from the MapWithAI initiative, Facebook / Meta’s effort to publish road geometry derived from aerial imagery using machine learning. RapiD started out to support this effort; a fork of the iD OSM editor, RapiD added a layer to display the ML-detected road segments, and a nice user interface to add these segments to OSM, connecting them with the existing road network where possible.

trip to kansas

Mon, 26 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

We went to visit my in-laws this weekend. They are huge college sports fans. Basketball and volleyball mainly, but they also go to lots of KU football games. There happened to be one, Duke was visiting. Sold out stadium! I do understand American football just a tiny bit better now!

Lawrence is a real college town. But college kids grow up. Some of them stick around or come back. Their needs and desires change: exit dive bars and basement pizza joints, enter quaint bakeries. This is a morning bun at 1900 Barker.

twitter break

Wed, 21 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Twitter has gotten a bit overwhelming. I’m taking a break!

Image source: Flickr Commons / National Library of Medicine

cruft

Sun, 04 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I purchased a Lenovo X220 laptop back in 2011, shortly after we first moved to the United States. I used it for years, even when I had access to snappier laptops I got from work. A few years ago, I purchased a Macbook Pro for myself, and the X220 was left gathering dust in a corner.

dealing with peaks and troughs

Wed, 24 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

In the past three hours I have

Caught up with my Twitter feed
Looked into food waste percentage by country (it’s complicated)
Organized a new Meetup for my Remote Workers Lunch Hour
Started a technical design document for work
Caught up on work chatter
Worked through 1/3 of the FastAPI user guide
Read up on typing and type hints new to Python 3.6+ (and to me)
Looked up a bunch of restaurants and hotels in Amsterdam to recommend to a friend
Had breakfast
Gotten dressed
Caught up on issue comments for one of my open source projects
Did a little OSM mapping
Looked into ski gear sales
Read up on ski boot sizing and other considerations when choosing boots, such as the flex index)
Read a couple articles in last weekend’s paper
Updated the household calendar with upcoming events and trips
Written this blog post (in progress)

And I probably forgot a few things. It looks crazy but I have come to accept that productivity comes to me in huge peaks (and troughs).

weekend hack: photo page

Tue, 02 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I love it when more than one of my hobbies come together in a small, contained project. This time it was biking, photography, urban exploration, and programming. I am not extremely good or talented at any of them, but doing and enjoying lots of different things and being okay at them is a good way to roll. You never know when things will intersect in interesting ways!

I like to get out on my bike or on foot and just explore the city. You see so much more using slow modes of transport than you do driving around. I am particularly interested in observing and documenting how places are changing. Over the years I have developed a bit of a sixth sense for places that will look very different a few years from now. Sometimes, imminent change is obvious:

fujifilm x100f wide aperture problems

Sat, 23 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I had had suspicions for a while that my Fujifilm X100f has image quality issues when using wide apertures (f/4 and wider). Some reviews mention poor corner performance at large apertures, but I don’t think it’s just the corners. Shooting subjects at close distance, center frame performance seemed poor as well with loss of detail, some ghosting and chromatic aberration. So I thought I’d finally run some tests. It’s worse than I thought!

🚧 old posts below⬇ 🚧

Fri, 01 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I am reposting selected posts from my old blog below.

adding microsoft building footprints to OSM with MapRoulette: why, and how

Mon, 23 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Microsoft released a machine-generated dataset of building footprints for the United States some years ago. The footprints are derived from aerial imagery. This works well, most of the time. Where you run into problems is in rural areas, especially where there’s natural features and topography that throws the machine learning off. Then the machine starts to think all kinds of things are buildings:

This is one of the reasons why blindly importing this data into OSM is a bad idea. MapRoulette comes to the rescue, it can serve these footprints one at a time, and OSM mappers can work together to decide if a geometry does in fact represent a building and could be added to OSM. Here’s how:

rhodes mark 1 restoration - part 1

Thu, 24 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Back Story: 1994 - 2021

Back in 1994-5, a friend of a friend quit band life, and was selling his 1978 Fender Rhodes Mark 1. I didn’t know a whole lot about the instrument, but I knew I wanted a keyboard instrument to play at home. So I bought it off him for something like 500 guilders, or about €325 in today’s money. When I came to pick it up, I was surprised that it weighed almost 80kg (175lbs)! I’m glad I brought a friend and a car!

experiments with pyosmium, part 2

Thu, 03 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

You are looking at the second of a 2-part blog post exploring how to extract useful information out of OSM data using python and PyOsmium. Check Part 1 first and then come back! See you soon.

At the end of Part 1, we had a very basic script that would read an OSM file and filter out the ways that was part of our list of Highways Of Interest,

MAIN_HIGHWAY_KEYS = [
 'motorway',
 'motorway_link',
 'trunk',
 'trunk_link',
 'primary',
 'primary_link',
 'secondary',
 'secondary_link', 
 'tertiary',
 'tertiary_link']

Cool cool, but not even close to what we were aiming for which, remember, is this:

experiments with pyosmium, part 1

Wed, 26 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

You are looking at the first of a 2-part blog post exploring how to extract useful information out of OSM data using python and PyOsmium. Check Part 2 for the follow-up.

Osmium is a very powerful library and command line tool for OSM software. Among its capabilities are data format conversion, filtering by tags, diffing OSM files, and applying changes. Osmium does those things and many other common ETL tasks very quickly. We have Jochen Topf to thank for osmium, with contributions from many others.

oliebollen

Fri, 01 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Happy new year! On New Year’s Eve, the Dutch traditionally have oliebollen, ‘oil balls’. They taste much better than their name would imply. Compare them to donuts with raisins and apple in them. The Ducth typically get them by the dozen at mobile, seasonal outlets like the one pictured below, at bakeries, or even at the grocery store. However, nothing beats making them at home.

An olienbollenkraam. Source: Flickr / Franklin Heijnen / CC

aerial photography of the netherlands in the 1930s

Sun, 28 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Update 2022: I can’t find the collection described in this blog post on Flickr Commons any longer. The archive is available on the NIMH website.

Flickr Commons was launched in 2008, during the heyday of Flickr, with a mission “to share hidden treasures from the world’s public photography archives.” Some years ago, the Dutch Institute for Military History (NIMH, part of the Department of Defense) started publishing its collection of photography on Flickr Commons. The collection includes 1000+ aerial photos from the 1930s, showing a country very different from today: Steam powered trains, interbellum optimism (industrial expansion, growing cities, Amsterdam preparing for the 1928 Olympics) and small, rural towns and cities still much the same as 200 years before.

live openstreetmap mapping on twitch is fun

Wed, 24 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

With everyone at home and most in person events canceled, I wanted to find a new way to get together with my local OpenStreetMap mapping friends here in Salt Lake City. We usually hang out 1-2 times a month, at a bar or a coffee shop. I’ve been organizing these events since we moved to SLC in 2011 and I love it, and now I miss it.

After trying a Slack ‘hangout’ last month I wanted to try something new. I’ve been playing more PC games lately and spent some money on a nicer system and accessories like a gaming headset. This got me thinking, why not try streaming some mapping live on Twitch?

displacement

Fri, 06 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I am taking a Creative Nonfiction writing class. This is my work for one of the assignments.

Bellevue. Something pretty to look at. Perhaps Mount Hood in the distance—you can only see it on a clear day—or the lakes both to the west and the east. I stroll along the busy downtown streets on my way to a meeting in a 27th floor conference room. There I will see the Bellevue, but not here at the surface level, where there’s only traffic noise and imposing, bullying tall glass buildings shoving out the last strip malls and single-story office plazas that have no business here anymore.

google map is wrong

Fri, 06 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Taken near Tooele, UT. Feb 17, 2020.

announcing maproulette challenges for fixing up tiger in utah

Tue, 03 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I wrote a how-to recently on “Cleaning up” after the OpenStreetMap TIGER import. As a reminder, here’s what TIGER data used to look like when it was imported into OSM in 2008:

Fortunately, the OpenStreetMap community has fixed most of the alignment and road classification issues connected to the TIGER import in the past 12 years. (With some help from tools like Battlegrid, which I wrote when at Telenav.) Yet, problems remain. In that previous blog post, I outlined an easy to follow set of steps to identify and start fixing problems in your area of interest.

create your own maproulette challenge: updating deprecated tagging

Sat, 22 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I am really proud of how far MapRoulette has come. It is now really easy to create Challenges mappers can work on together to improve OpenStreetMap. Many OSM groups already use MapRoulette to coordinate mapping activities—both volunteer communities as well as corporate mapping teams. Read for example this recent blog post by Monica Brandeis of Critigen, where she explains how Critigen used MapRoulette to host Virtual Mapathons at their various corporate office locations. (The Challenges they created are all completed, but there’s many more to choose from!)

30 minutes

Sun, 16 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

It hasn’t been that long since we moved to this town, this new country. You are from here, know things I do not, move about this uncharted space with its unfamiliar and unwritten rule-set, and I follow you, mimic you, create my map. I speak the language—people comment on my accent, where are you from, Denmark—but I don’t speak the rest of it. When we arrived, the sun screamed at me, louder than I knew possible. Then fall, winter, six months and now there’s work, phone numbers, checks, routine. A Sunday is almost just a Sunday again.

openstreetmap how-to: clean up after tiger

Tue, 14 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been working on a new version of the TIGER Battlegrid, but haven’t had a lot of time to make progress lately, so in the mean time I’ve been thinking about quick ways to help mappers clean up after TIGER. I have a couple of ideas. One involves MapRoulette that will require a little bit of time to execute. The other one is for JOSM users; just follow the steps below!

First, open up the Download dialog in JOSM, and switch to the Overpass tab. This lets you selectively download data into JOSM based on an Overpass query. We will use this to only download residential ways that have not been edited since 2009, and have no name.

photography full circle

Wed, 01 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

When I first started taking photos, the results would be unpredictable and, on top of that, immutable after releasing the shutter. The entire process after that capture moment being a black box: take the film out of the camera, bring it to the camera store, where they develop the film and make prints, exposing them based on some average of the negatives’ exposure. Nevertheless, I was excited to document and capture my world in that way. I started to experiment with the variables I could control: different types of color and B/W film, depth of field, exposure, and different cameras when I could get a hold of them.

technical deep dive: creating the maproulette tesla parking lot challenge

Fri, 27 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

In a previous post, I talked about a new MapRoulette challenge to help identify surface parking lots that need more detailed mapping of roads and aisles within the lot.

In this post, I want to dive a little deeper into how a Challenge like that is made.

Challenges in MapRoulette

MapRoulette is the micro-tasking platform for OpenStreetMap. On it, mappers can select any one of millions of Tasks and make a small but meaningful contribution to improving the quality of OSM. Tasks are grouped in Challenges that cover a specific topic, like updating business phone numbers, aligning roads, etcetera.

granola v2

Sun, 14 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

My original attempts at making granola date back 2.5 years. Since then, I have improved and simplified my recipe subtly, so I thought I’d share the new version. The most obvious change is the removal of the egg whites, which make no discernable difference.

Preheat oven 275 degrees. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.

Add the following dry ingredients to a large bowl and mix well.

3 cups rolled oats (avoid ‘quick oats’)
3/4 cup hazelnuts, coarsely chopped
3/4 cup pecans, coarsely chopped
one cup shaved coconut, coarsely chopped or as-is
1/4 cup light brown sugar or coconut sugar
3/4 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp salt

Then, add the following wet ingredients to the bowl and mix well.

weekend ride to sun tunnels and transcontinental railroad

Mon, 29 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This weekend, I rode a S24O to Sun Tunnels with some of my bikepacking buddies. In the process, we rode a stretch of the abandoned original grade of the Transcontinental Railroad, which is celebrating its 150th anniversary next month!

Gassing up in Montello, NV, a remote railroad settlement with no cell service but a nice convenience store and gas station.

Making our way to Sun Tunnels. Trying to get there before sunset. The tailwind and slight downhill helped.

fun with fuji x100f advanced filters

Mon, 15 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I purchased a Fujifilm X100F a few months ago to replace my aging X-E1. Technically it’s not a replacement, because the X-E1 is a mirrorless interchangeable lens camera, and the X100F is more of a Leica M style fixed lens camera. Both are great in their own right, but having grown up shooting with the restrictions of a fixed 35mm camera, I prefer the shooting style that the X100F imposes.

my overnight ultralight backpacking gear list

Mon, 03 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Update 2022 Links checked and updated, some weights updated based on newer models of the stuff listed. Also, I don’t use the alcohol stove much anymore, it’s just too fussy for me. Instead, I use a simple compact gas stove.

I went on a nice quick overnight backpacking trip with a friend last night. Unpacking my stuff just now, I realized that I had never shared my ultralight backpacking gear list. You may find it useful if you like backpacking but don’t like carrying heavy gear you don’t need weighing you down. Here’s a picture showing everything, minus the food I already ate (separate story).

first granola

Sun, 26 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I change breakfast habits ~2x/year. I have two breakfasts I switch between. The first is two fried eggs, over easy, with toast. For toast I prefer Trader Joe’s sourdough sliced bread, for eggs I’ve settled on Vital Farms’ Alfresco Eggs. They are very pricy at $6.50 / dozen, but these eggs have beautiful deep yellow + very creamy yolks. This not only looks and tastes fantastic but is proof of chickens that eat, and are, healthy. I fry the eggs in about 3/4 tbsp of salted European butter (Kerry Gold or President). American butter is not very good.

hacking a standing desk for $114

Sun, 03 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

2016! A few more days of break, so time for a little project. Why not make myself a more permanent standing desk? I mean, this just won’t do any longer:

Sufficiently wide (60" or more) but not too deep (definitely <30")
Adjustable height between at least 35" and 45" so I can stand but also sit (on a stool)
No more than $200
Nice looking

I ended up with this: