h2g2bob @h2g2bob@mastodon.dbatley.com

Similar to our population calculator, we also make the Parkulator https://open-innovations.github.io/parkulator/ It is a tool which finds all the car parks (parking lots) within an area (from OpenStreetMap) then estimates alternative things you could do with that land such as build homes, build parks, or generate solar power.

Making a brew using the awesome tea bot that @biglesp gave me. Another friend said it looks like he is being waterboarded. He doesn't seem bothered 😁 #teatime

#introduction I've been running my Beholder website since 1995, with projects such as #Planetarium

https://www.beholder.uk/planetarium

Planetarium is an online story-puzzle in 12 weekly instalments, starting from the moment you log in. Registration is free and anonymous. You don't need to solve, or even attempt to solve, any of the puzzles to progress (although most people do, entering solutions as they go along).

Planetarium has been running since 9/9/99.

#puzzle #puzzles #OnlineStorytelling

Matt Gray is Trying: Pyrotechnics.
My new begis now, and I'm starting off with a bang!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZVRK1kZK_E

Amazing news out of the UK!

@owa has the details, but TL;DR: Apple's attempts to block iOS browser competition on hilariously thin grounds (essentially "you didn't regulate us soon enough!") just took a huge hit:

https://open-web-advocacy.org/blog/apple-loses-on-appeal/

Expect Apple to appeal the appeal because delay is their strategy any time regulators find that their rent-extracting, anti-competitive nonsense is...er, nonsense (browsers, right-to-repair, charging cables, etc.)

You can now buy my South Up, Aotearoa Centred, Equal-Earth Projection Map
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2023/12/you-can-now-buy-my-south-up-aotearoa-centred-equal-earth-projection-map/

I'm delighted to announce that I've actually finished a project!

Over the last few years, I've been designing a custom map. As per the credo of the "Organization of Cartographers for Social Equality", this map uses the Equal Earth projection to ensure proportional land-mass size, the South is at the up, and - of course - the globe has been rotated to 150°.

I've had it printed and I think it looks glorious!

Hanging on the wall

You can buy these maps from RedBubble.

Details

Buy

Buy the Country Name Map
Buy the Emoji Flag Map

This is a large poster - I recommend buying the 120cm by 60cm version. It needs to be that size in order to make the country names legible. The cost per poster depends on your locale and whatever promotions RedBubble are doing.

These are not limited editions! I will print off as many as people order. Each one comes with a small inscription in the corner saying what the map is, and some other metadata.

As per below, you can download the assets in vector or raster format if you'd like to try printing them yourself.

Disclaimer

Maps are contentious. Some countries don't recognise other countries. Some borders are disputed. Some people clamour for reunification, some for secession. Some countries have a name given to them by their colonial oppressors. Some have been renamed by mad tyrants. Some countries have multiple names in different languages. Some are still fighting bloody wars in order to be recognised. Flags also suffer from the same problem.

The good news is that this is not an official map - my choices have no geopolitical consequences. The even better news is that the code behind the map is open source - so you can redraw it to your heart's content.

I have used the borders from Natural Earth, the country names from OpenStreetMap, and flags from Twemoji. If you dislike any of those, please direct your complaints to them.

Bugs

There are a few of things which have left me slightly dissatisfied.

By convention, most maps use Shaded Relief with the light coming from North-West. However, because this map is flipped, it cause an optical illusion which make mountains look like ravines and vice-versa. As noted:

Viewing images that do not conform to this convention may show a form of convex–concave ambiguity.
Wikipedia page on "Top-Left" lighting

If you know how to redrawing or recalculate the shade, please let me know.

Secondly, in their default placement, country names and flags overlap. For example:

I manually adjusted the placement to keep labels and flags roughly in the right place without overlapping. I think I was accurate, but if you spot any mistakes - or know how to automate this - please let me know.

Non-Contiguous countries aren't handled well. For example, Alaska is unlabelled because it physically separated from the rest of the USA. The same is true of overseas territories like the Canary Islands and French Guiana.

The various seas, oceans, and other bodies of water aren't labelled.

I'm sure you will spot a few other errors. Either leave a comment here or raise an issue on GitHub.

How

This was a multi-stage process - mostly involving R.

Background

The background image comes from "Color terrain art without type halos". It's a TIFF which has been rotated and converted to PNG.

mogrify -rotate 180 Equal-Earth-Physical-Relief-No-Halos-150E.tif convert Equal-Earth-Physical-Relief-No-Halos-150E.tif EE-SU.png

Country Names

Natural Earth only provides country names in English ☹ - but it also provides 2 character ISO codes. So I grabbed the country codes and names from OpenStreetMap and merged them into the data set using R.

The Code

This produces the country borders and names onto an SVG.

Manual placement

I used Boxy to edit the SVG and place all names in roughly the right place.

Conversion

Inkscape was used to open the resultant SVG at 72dpi. I then used Gimp to autocrop, canvas expanded to 16000x9000, and saved as an uncompressed PNG.

The Emoji wouldn't import to either Gimp or Inkscape. So I viewed the file in Firefox and then printed it to a PDF. That PDF was cropped using pdfcrop` and then imported to Gimp.

Some print shops require CMYK colour spaces - convert Export.png -colorspace cmyk Print-CMYK.tif

Copyright

All of the Equal Earth data has this copyright:

The Equal Earth Physical Wall Map is in the public domain. You may use the map any way you like, including modifying the content, reproducing it on any type of media, republishing it, and selling it for profit. Consider the map as yours.
By downloading and using this map you agree that the map author (Tom Patterson) is not legally responsible for any errors that the map may contain. You are solely responsible for all problems that may arise from reuse of the map and its redistribution to third parties. Tom Patterson does not endorse the individuals or organizations that may use the map, nor does he endorse their positions on various issues.

It builds on Natural Earth, which is also public domain.

The Emoji flags are either CC BY or MIT - depending on whether you think SVGs are images or code.

In a similar spirit, the code that I've used to create my variation of the map, and the resultant output, is also hereby placed in the public domain. You may treat it as CC0.

South Up, Aotearoa Centred, Equal Earth Projection Map by Terence Eden is marked with CC0 1.0 Universal

Download

You can download all the code and assets from GitHub.

Buy

Buy the Country Name Map
Buy the Emoji Flag Map

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2023/12/you-can-now-buy-my-south-up-aotearoa-centred-equal-earth-projection-map/

#art #ForSale #map #OCSE

🗳️ We're tracking Prospective Parliamentary Candidates for the next UK general election.

📝 The next election will take place no later than January 2025, and parties are selecting candidates for each constituency.

🔢 Our volunteers have already identified over a thousand candidates.

👀 Browse the full list now: https://whocanivotefor.co.uk/ppcs/

#ukpolitics #elections #democracy

@politicalscience @elections

Sharing how I use RSS to track weak signals of what my local council (and other local public bodies) is up to (and/or what my fellow citizens care about w.r.t. them)

After a random lunchtime conversation with @zarino here in @DoESLiverpool

http://www.mcqn.net/mcfilter/archives/liverpool/weak_signals_of_local_civic_democracy.html

#weeknotes #CivicTech #FreedomOfInfromation #mySociety

This should be required reading for anyone developing auth systems.

https://cohost.org/mononcqc/post/3647311-paper-you-want-my-p

Policy Lessons from the Official Monster Raving Loony Party

Not long ago, I heard a Tory grandee giving a speech in support of a political rookie. As the occasion demanded, he offered some advice. Life in politics would be hard, he warned, but success was possible: just look at Screaming Lord Sutch and the Official Monster Raving Loony party.

You might think that th

https://timharford.com/2023/11/policy-lessons-from-the-official-monster-raving-loony-party/

#UndercoverEconomist

What an elegant, clear way to look at the trends of the top 60 power producing countries' changing energy mix. A toggle lets you see the total amounts. Beautiful presentation, troubling trends. By Nadja Popovich https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/11/20/climate/global-power-electricity-fossil-fuels-coal.html

A bit of an unofficial post-mortem on #Optus #outage yesterday (please BOOST for visibility!) I have no insider knowledge, all I can do is look at what Optus's networking gear told the rest of the world through #BGP, and make some informed guesses based on that.

The problem yesterday started at about 4am, when Optus told the world 'I no longer have any internet connectivity', and 'Do not send any internet traffic to me, at all'. The technical description is that they withdrew ALL of their routes from the #DFZ (Which is "The Internet", as seen by all the core routers that ACTUALLY control the internet).

However, as a precursor at about 3am there was a hint that things weren't perfect, as there was a flurry of changes from Optus to the outside world saying, roughly, 'Something has changed inside my network, but you can still keep sending me stuff'.

Now, as two final bits of possibly relevant information, the default for maximum-prefix on #Cisco #ASR9000 is 1048576 (this number is 'the number of routes that can be accepted by this router'), and MOST IMPORTANTLY the DFZ ("the internet") has about 980,000 routes in it at the moment. That's only 90k odd routes LESS than the default maximum.

I'd be amazed if Optus has less than 100k internal routes that aren't visible to the internet, but are visible internally.

So here's what I think happened. The at 3am, the first core #router was upgraded, and a new config was put in place. This did not join the network correctly, and things were half broken. What SHOULD have happened is that all the changes should have stopped, and either rolled back, or waited for further investigation (the cause being that more than 1mil routes were visible, causing it to shut down)

However, someone decided 'Well, maybe if we upgrade the SECOND one, that'll fix the first one' at 4am. That broke the SECOND one, and took Optus completely off the internet.

(Continued, see next for why this is far worse than it should have been)

More pressure on UK ISPs and telcos: a proposal to compel PECS providers to notify the ICO of suspected unlawful direct marketing

#surveillance #dataprotection #spam #privacy #telecoms #Internet

Google announced that starting in June 2024, ad blockers such as uBlock Origin #uBO will be disabled in Chrome 127 and later with the rollout of Manifest V3 (#Mv3).

The new #Chrome manifest will prevent using custom filters and stops on demand updates of blocklist. Only #Google authorized updates to browser extension will be allowed in the future, which mean an automatic win for Google in their battle to stop YouTube #AdBlockers .

#ManifestV3 is deceitful and threatening to your privacy, and now is a good time to switch to #Firefox (@mozilla) and/or #TorBrowser (@torproject) if you haven't done so already!

EFF (@eff) on Google’s Manifest V3:

⚠️⁠https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/12/chrome-users-beware-manifest-v3-deceitful-and-threatening
⚠️⁠https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/12/googles-manifest-v3-still-hurts-privacy-security-innovation

Chrome Manifest V3 Transition Timeline (2023-11-16)

🚩⁠https://developer.chrome.com/blog/resuming-the-transition-to-mv3/

EDIT for clarification: MV3 in Chrome will still allow some ad blocking extensions, but will severely limit their blocking ability and even restricts pre-set filters to 50 MAX.

The #HalfLife 25th anniversary update is awesome!
- HL: Uplink included
- HL: Further Data content
- new MP Maps
- restored beta models
- Steam Networking/rich presence support
- native Linux support (+steam deck verified)
- original menu
- bugfixes and modernisation

And there is a 1h documentary about the development made by the team behind noclip.
https://www.half-life.com/en/halflife25

Latest Covid situation in UK is out now on my substack

https://open.substack.com/pub/christinapagel/p/latest-covid-situation-17-november?r=8zv6v&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

TLDR: admissions falling, vaccine uptake plateauing, lots of cold virus around, no flu yet.