Tag: maps
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Geohashing expedition 2026-09-27 51 -1
I woke early and grumpy and, to try to shake myself out of a funk, went out with the dog in search of a geohashpoint near a trigpoint in a field near Tackley.
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Indian Food
On our last day out at our current AirBnB, we searched for a takeaway.
Google Maps found me a Chinese takeaway, but it had an unexpected suggestion when I asked for an Indian... -
Are you closer to Ireland or Scotland?
A throwaway comment in a WhatsApp group lead me to a deep dive into geodata encoding and drawing a big old line all the way across England (and a little way across Wales!). It's nerdsnipe time!
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I know how I'm SUPPOSED to read it, but when I see this I can't help but imagine a conversation like...
"What shall we call our car wash?"
/waves hand/ "I dunno."
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Google Maps screenshot showing the location of a business seemingly called Waves Hand Car Wash Cheltenham.
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Y'all seemed to enjoy the "overworld" map I shared the other day, so here's another "feelie" from my kids' ongoing D&D campaign.
The party has just arranged for passage aboard a pioneering (and experimental) Elvish airship. Here's a deck plan (only needs a "you are here" dot!) to help them get their bearings.
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In the style of a passenger ferry, a floorplan for a dirigible, weighted down by polyhedral dice. Fantasy world quirks like bilingual text in Common and Elvish and the emergency exit sign depicting a fleeing witch complete the effect.
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In preparation for Family D&D Night (and with thanks to my earlier guide to splicing maps together!), I've finally completed an expanded "overworld" map for our game world. So far, the kids have mostly hung around on the North coast of the Central Sea, but they're picked up a hook that may take them all the way across to the other side... and beyond?
Banana for scale.
(If your GMing for kids, you probably already know this, but "feelies" go a long way. All the maps. All the scrolls. Maybe even some props. Go all in. They love it.)
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On a dining table lies a old-style map comprised of 12 sheets of A4 paper, sellotaped together. The map shows the 'Central Sea', an inlet from the 'Terminic Ocean', around which various settlements, forests, mountain ranges, and swamps can be found. An underripe banana sits in one corner of the map, weighing it down.
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ChatGPT beats GeoGuessr
Given nothing more than a screenshot or two of my game screen, from the starting position only, ChatGPT plays GeoGuessr better than I ever could. Apart from cheating at GeoGuessr, what else could this mean? Is this going to be a scary new weapon in the toolkit of Internet stalkers?
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Thanks to finding a couple of geocaches here in Istanbul, my geocaching "2D convex hull" (the smallest possible convex polygon that covers an area), which I wrote some code to draw last year, just expanded a little further to the East. 🎉
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World map, with an irregular near-quadrilatral drawn such that it approximately connects Inverness (Scotland), Istanbul (Turkey), Cape Town (South Africa), and San Francisco (California, USA), encompassing the area within.
I've got a lot of the world left still to encircle, but I'm slowly extending my reach...
(previous map, for comparison: https://danq.me/_q23u/2024/04/dans-geoing-hull-2024-04-03.webp)
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OpenStreetMap rocks (especially on foot)
OpenStreetMap blows Google Maps out of the water for walkers and also for if you're trying to find a particular-named house in a rural area. I'm not saying never to use Google Maps (there's plenty of things it's the king at): but maybe consider giving OpenStreetMap a go next time you need a digital map?
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Trump's Strategy
I've worked out what convicted felon Donald Trump's endgame strategy is! And I can explain it... through the medium of a comic in the art style of Sid Meier's Civilization!
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EXIF geodata, and what if you took a picture on the moon?
Cassie Jones asks what EXIF photo metadata would - or should - look like for a photograph taken on the moon. It got me thinking, a bit.
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Multi-Phase Maps in FoundryVTT
Using FoundryVTT's powerful API and a little bit of JavaScript code, we can easily produce a battlemap that changes through a series of phases as the adventure progresses. Here's how...
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Water Science #2
For the second time, the kids and I had an outing to do some "citizen science" experiments on a local watercourse.
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My Geo*ing Limits
Let's use some self-data-mining plus a convex hull algorithm to plot a convex polygon onto a map that optimally encircles the entire corpus of my successful geocaching/geohashing expeditions!
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The Road (Segment) Less Travelled
I live near two junctions at which I can join the A40 trunk road. When I drive East, I use the Easternmost; when I drive West, I use the Westernmost; but I almost never drive the stretch of A40 between them!
It's inevitable I suppose that there should exist a "road (segment) less-travelled" right on my doorstep, but it still feels strange. Maybe I'm missing out on something great!
