notes.husk.org

Left: the Golden Gate Bridge in London, a scale comparison...

Tue, 21 May 2013 05:12:21 +0100

Left: the Golden Gate Bridge in London, a scale comparison from “Triumphs of Engineering” (posted by WP Wiles).

Right: a screen shot of MapFrappe, a tool by Kelvin Thompson that allows you to place outlines of one feature on another part of the world, showing the Golden Gate Bridge in London.

If MapFrappe had a rotation feature, I’d be able to more exactly match the 1940s illustration, but that’ll have to wait for vector maps, I suppose.

Two images from the United States Government Accountability...

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 23:30:59 +0100

Two images from the United States Government Accountability Office, showing the Air Force Satellite Control Network and Selected Shared and Dedicated Antennas at Locations Around the World.

Remember the ISS photography maps from Nathan Bergey? The ones...

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 01:24:00 +0000

Remember the ISS photography maps from Nathan Bergey? The ones where he asked “Draw a dot for the location of every photo of Earth taken from space what do we see?” Well, everyone loves an animated gif, so here’s the final “mission mapped separately” image rejigged as an animation.

It’s a little janky, because despite being a developer not a designer I ended up wrangling this in Photoshop, but hopefully you like it anyway.

Visualisations of all the (geotagged) photos taken from the...

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 16:46:36 +0000

Visualisations of all the (geotagged) photos taken from the International Space Station, by Nathan Bergey.

The full article is well worth looking at.

lessadjectivesmoreverbs: Cities Without Ground: A Hong Kong...

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 22:31:22 +0000

lessadjectivesmoreverbs:

Cities Without Ground: A Hong Kong Guidebook by Adam Frampton, Jonathan D Solomon and Clara Wong.

Axonometric maps revealing Hong Kong’s multi-layered elevated walkways, ramps, elevators and infrastructure interchanges. Definitely enbiggen.

(read more on the guardian and randomwire)

I love highwalks and axonometric diagrams, so of course I like this.

iamdanw: Pacific Ocean. G9230-1908. Sandy Island. (by Auckland...

Thu, 29 Nov 2012 23:10:25 +0000

iamdanw:

Pacific Ocean. G9230-1908. Sandy Island. (by Auckland Museum)

Sandy Is, Velocity, 1876. The source of the island that isn’t there? (See also.)

Top: China Basin parking lot, near AT&T Park, San...

Sun, 25 Nov 2012 21:11:00 +0000

Top: China Basin parking lot, near AT&T Park, San Francisco.

Bottom: roughly half of Soho, from Soho Square south and west, London.

The two screenshots of Google Maps were taken at the same zoom level (17). Due to them being at different latitudes, the full size London image has more pixels, but covers the same width (about 460m). (Unzoomed, the two images have the same distance per pixel.)

An animated GIF composed from the New York MTA hurricane...

Mon, 05 Nov 2012 04:20:00 +0000

An animated GIF composed from the New York MTA hurricane recovery maps from the first to the fourth of November, most obviously showing the restoration of service in Lower Manhattan and across the East River to Brooklyn. Full size version (1.3MB).

The map format changed on the third to not include the parks or some other details, but I neither have the software nor skill to remove them from the first two PDFs. If you do and want to do better, please go ahead.

Source PDFs: Nov 1, Nov 2, Nov 3, Nov 4 (midday); Nov 4 (evening).

"The Maps app is important because it is an essential phone feature, a feature that almost everyone..."

Sat, 29 Sep 2012 02:03:00 +0100

“The Maps app is important because it is an essential phone feature, a feature that almost everyone uses. Insofar as users have expectations, it’s shaped by how much they’ve come to rely on the app in their daily lives.”

- Raging Thunderbolt, in John Gruber Is A Smart Guy (Or, Maps).

He’s not wrong to state this, but a little historical perspective: at this point five years ago, the only phone that came with a mapping application installed was the iPhone, with its Maps application (coded by Apple, data from Google). Nokia at this point had begun to offer mapping applications (and built-in GPS), but my memory of trying to install one on an N73 (after they’d stopped charging for the app) was one of failing repeatedly.

If you go back just another five years, the state of the art was Streetmap and Mapquest, both of which had interfaces with what seems now to be startlingly primitive indirect manipulation: if you wanted to look a tile to the right, you clicked on the little arrow to the right of the maps. If you were very lucky you had a big enough screen to expand to a 5x5 view, instead of the default 3x3.

Nonetheless, maps are now essential. It doesn’t matter that this is a change that took less than five years; whether or not we deserve to feel entitled to them, we definitely miss it when they’re not there.

"Due to sensitivities over government and military installations, only 11 companies in China have..."

Wed, 26 Sep 2012 17:46:32 +0100

“Due to sensitivities over government and military installations, only 11 companies in China have licenses to do comprehensive mapping, and half of those simply exist to support the government.”

- WSJ: Lost in a Sea of Black: Apple Built Special Version of Maps for China. Previously: Baidu Maps and the Edges of the World.