| Straatview |
I previously wrote about Baarle-Hertog/Baarle-Nassau, a tiny town in Holland with a few dozen parcels of land belonging to Belgium. International borders run haphazardly through the town, dividing streets and buildings, like so:
View Larger Map
Well, it seems that Google maps has Streetviewed all of Holland and none of Belgium, resulting in Streetview stopping and starting at near-random intervals through Baarle-Nassau. My favourite part is that some of the Belgian parts have little parts inside them that belong to Holland. These tiny strips of Dutch land, some no bigger than a front yard, are streetviewed, while the Belgian parts are all cut off. |
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| 2008 Lux Awards |
The Luxtoberfest 2008 award ceremonies are being held inside online Lux Delux on Sunday at 1 PM Pacific / 4 PM Eastern / 8 PM UK / 9 PM Europe time.
All Luxers are eligible to vote for the best map of the year. Please vote now!
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| Do White People Love Maps? |
Strange Maps blog, a site dedicated to unusual cartography.
I love maps so this place is right up my alley. I was drawn there by this map of Ludacris' ho-by-area-code map. |
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| Daycare, Groceries, Prostitutes, Post Office, More Prostitutes, Health Clinic |
Using google maps to find optimal paths when making multiple stops.
Sweet! |
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| Map Porn |
| This post has screenshots of some of the hottest maps for the computer strategy game Lux. Images below the cut (work-safe). |
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| Time Zone Map |
Wikipedia has a really nice map of the time zone divisions around the world. Clicking the image will take you to the full 4779x1979 map. A number of interesting political-geographic choices have been made regarding time zones. China is huge, but keeps everything in the same time zone. Europe is pretty wide, but also keeps mostly in 1 time zone. The UK is close enough geographically to be in time with Europe, but is 1 hour off instead. India and some other countries are 30 minutes off the normal hours. It's an entertaining hodgepodge. |
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| Luxtoberfest 2007 |
Luxtoberfest is a series of tournaments and awards for my Risk inspired computer game Lux.
There are lots of maps (RSS) and people in the running for the Lux Awards. You have 1 month to send in your votes... |
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| Google Maps misses the park |
I noticed that the version of Vancouver seen on Google Maps is missing a bunch of parks that the real-life Vancouver has. Comparing it to the map from the Vancouver Park Board, I made a list of parks missing from Google:
Harbour Green Park
Barclay Heritage Square
Marina Square
Cardero Park
Portal Park
Discovery Square
Cathedral Square
Victory Square
Wendy Poole Park
May & Lorne Brown Park
Helmcken Park
Creekside Park
Sutcliffe Park
Granville Loop Park
Willow Park
Choklit Park
Some of them are small parkettes, but many are not. Harbour Green, Creekside, and Sutcliffe are all quite large. Added up, that's a lot of local green space that Google isn't showing. I only compared the downtown and false creek areas, so there are surely more. Maybe Google is missing your local park? |
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| Super Happy Vancouver Lux Map |
Last week I attended Super Happy Grow-op Dev House, a community hackathon party. It was plenty nerdy and plenty fun.
I went in with the idea of using some time to create a Lux map of Vancouver, since there wasn't one yet. It was a good scale project to do, since I was able to get it (mostly) done and also spend a bunch of time talking with the other nerds there.
I cleaned it up more after the event, and spiced up the theme with creative commons photos from kidcadaver and Jaako. It's now gone through the MapLAB and has been released to the plugin manager inside Lux. If any DevHousers want a copy, send me an email.
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| Map of single men versus single women |
From a post at Creativity Exchange comes this distribution map of single people across the USA. The comments there have some discussion of it as well. I would be interested to see how Canada measures up.
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| West Coast USA Trip |
Trip 2 with my brother was a longer road trip down the west coast from Vancouver to San Francisco. On the way we spent nights in Seattle, Eugene, Arcata, and the Jughandle Creek Farm/Hostel near Mendocino.
Google measures the drive at 1,651 kilometers. We actually headed over to the winding coastal highway 1 right after Eugene, so in reality it was longer then that. We were driving in a rented Toyota Corolla and measured our actual mileage at between 34 and 38 miles per gallon.
Our first 2 nights we found free lodging care of cool people on CouchSurfing.com. The name pretty much explains it, and the service worked out great for us. The next 2 nights we were in smaller towns and stayed in a motel and hostel/farmhouse. We stumbled onto some crazy adventures in both though. By the end the running joke was that we were taking a hippy-granola tour of the west coast ;-).
In the San Fran Bay area we crashed at a friend's house and later met up with Luxers Hoodie and STM for some food and drinks. I knew them from over the internet, and it was cool to meet in person. I've now met 7 Luxers in 3 different cities. It's a fun perk of running an internet-wide community. I expect photoshopped pictures of us to appear on the Lux Forums shortly... |
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| Okanagan BC Trip |
My brother came out west and we did some travelling together. Here's a map of trip number 1, from Vancouver into the BC Okanagan Valley. We stayed in Oliver with some relatives, went skiing at Apex, and then flew back to Van from Kelowna.
My cousin who grew up in the valley has a website about Okanagan Wine, which is one of the big things the region is known for. We got to do a little bit of tasting at dinner. |
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| The Dark Ages Maps |
The Dark Ages - Northwest is the first map in a seven-part series exploring Europe in the Dark Ages, created by Lux Delux map-maker SunTzu.
Along with the Northwest, there's maps of the West, Southwest, Southeast, Northeast, and Central Europe during the Dark Ages.
Their forms combine into a truly stunning 1541x1269 Europe in the Dark Ages map. |
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| The Rise of Islam |
The Rise of Islam is the next Lux Deluxe map of the week. It was created by Evan Wiliams.
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| The Last King |
The current Lux Delux Map Of The Week also happens to be the winner of the 2006 Best Map award. Castle Lux - The Last King is the fourth and final installment in the Castle Lux Series. It features a central Hex Stronghold guarding Lord Quasar's Castle, surrounded by Luxers villages on all sides, yearning for glory...
The Castle Lux maps were created by Mark Bauer, who also made the maps for all the expansion Lux games. |
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