• 6 Posts
  • 170 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • There’s a number of different methods to check that may help.

    The first being that StatCan has an Open Database of Buildings with a compatible license for OSM. There’s a chance the area you’re mapping might already have a lot of the buildings mapped, they just need to be imported. That itself is a bit of a process so not necessirily the best if you’re just starting or haven’t used JOSM. If you want to send me a DM of the general area, I can check it out and see if there’s data already there.

    Using the JOSM editor with the BuildingsTools plugin, with that you can select the road and then really quickly draw rectangles that are square to the road. You can add a couple different rectangles overlapping to match the shape of the building or go back over the first square with the x shortcut and double clicking, then dragging to extend rectangles out from the first shape.

    The Rapid Editor was already mentioned, I have no personal experience with it so I can’t say too much about it.

    The other, more unfortunate, step can be to lower your standards of detail. Instead of mapping every edge of the rooftop, you can simply make a rough shape and then hit the shortcut to square the angles and then move on. Details can be added later and by others. If you’re trying to add 10,000 buildings then even just 5 seconds on each building will take almost 14 hours, 10 seconds per building doubles that to 28 hours.



  • I’ve been trying to find some good examples of how to structure the files, and whether to combine the photos from everyone or to keep them separate. Obviously there’s different systems for everyone, but your method of syncing, tagging, and displaying/sharing photos is almost identical to how I’ve been wanting to go about it.

    Do you mind sharing how you structure the photo files and naming in your Gallery directory?

    I was thinking of implementing the Copyright tag to keep the data of the original phototaker, and then combine all the photos into a Gallery/YYYY/MM structure, with the filenames being YYYYMMDD-CameraModel. There aren’t many events we go to, so albums aren’t a big priority, but on the occasion, I was thinking if using a folder like MM-Event in the respective year folder.

    I’m just putting my thoughts down because I don’t often see this part of people’s photo organizing.



  • Maps are for documenting the location of things in the real world relative to each other. It could be anything, like roads and buildings, or rivers and bodies of water, or electrical lines.

    Then there is all the information that is added to all those objects; adding names to the roads, buildings having an addtess and what type of building they are, the direction a river is flowing and how many rivers flow into or out if a lake.

    All of that is just information, where an what things are, it doesn’t actually do anything. That is a map.

    Navigation software takes the information about the roads and how they are connected together along with their names and combines it with addresses to show you how to get from one address to another.

    You could also have software that simulates the ecological effects of rerouting a river from a lake, or damming a river.

    You could take data from a map to show you all the power lines that are near trees that will need to be trimmed and give estimates to your employer on how many people to hire for tree trimming, and then combine that with a map of buildings to show how many customers would be without power if a tree branch triggers a circuit to open.

    Navigation is just one part of what a map could be used for, and probably one of the only parts that most people would use a map for.

    OpenStreetMap started out just being a map of streets, hence the name, but it has grown to be this massive collection of information. Then there is all of tools that decide what to do with the information. OsmAnd is a good tool for simply displaying the data. It can provide navigation but it’s not the best.