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Straatview

chrisdye — 2010-05-04T00:23:46-04:00

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.

2008 Lux Awards

dustin — 2008-10-23T16:41:39-04:00

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!

Do White People Love Maps?

vinny9 — 2008-03-17T17:29:47-04:00

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.

Daycare, Groceries, Prostitutes, Post Office, More Prostitutes, Health Clinic

vinny9 — 2008-01-10T10:02:52-05:00

Using google maps to find optimal paths when making multiple stops.

Sweet!

Map Porn

dustin — 2007-12-14T17:23:31-05:00

This post has screenshots of some of the hottest maps for the computer strategy game Lux. Images below the cut (work-safe).

US Map aka USA Map aka Map of US

Map of Iraq

Hey, you made it to the bottom! Share the wealth and spread this post on your favorite network. Your friends will love you for it!

PS: Map porn? Oh yeah, baby. Deep, wet, glistening rivers. Rock hard mountains. Trade routes spread wide open. Yours to dominate. This stuff is nasty dirty. ;-)

Time Zone Map

dustin — 2007-10-02T14:46:18-04:00

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.

Luxtoberfest 2007

dustin — 2007-10-01T05:40:03-04:00

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...

Google Maps misses the park

dustin — 2007-07-24T02:32:20-04:00

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?

Super Happy Vancouver Lux Map

dustin — 2007-05-15T00:01:12-04:00

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.

Map of single men versus single women

dustin — 2007-04-10T18:00:03-04:00

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.

West Coast USA Trip

dustin — 2007-03-29T02:20:58-04:00

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...

Okanagan BC Trip

dustin — 2007-03-29T01:44:41-04:00

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.

The Dark Ages Maps

dustin — 2007-02-06T02:59:47-05:00

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.

The Rise of Islam

dustin — 2007-01-29T23:11:36-05:00

The Rise of Islam is the next Lux Deluxe map of the week. It was created by Evan Wiliams.

The Last King

dustin — 2007-01-23T03:31:09-05:00

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.

GDP Density Map

dustin — 2007-01-15T03:57:03-05:00

From Econbrowser: The distribution of world income comes this map of "GDP density", calculated by multiplying GDP per capita by the number of people per square kilometer.

Chrtistmas Cruising

dustin — 2006-12-28T21:12:14-05:00

Here's a map showing where I went on Christmas holidays with my family:

We were on the Costa Magica cruise ship, with the route:

I had never been to Central America before, so it was a great experience going down there. Belize City fits my image of an old British Empire outpost, except it has been somewhat taken over by rastafarians. Roatan is an island that's part of Honduras, and it's beautiful. Lush greenery covering hills dominate the land. We visited the Roatan Institute for Marine Sciences and were able to get up close to some dolphins in the water. All in all it was an excellent holiday.

In checking out the route, I have discovered that Yahoo Maps has much better city/road information then Google Maps about Central America. Props to Yahoo! for that.

1155 Haro Street, here I come

dustin — 2006-08-31T14:57:15-04:00

UPDATE: I have now lived at 1155 Haro for 2 years and counting. It's a lovely building in a great location.

If you're moving into 1155 Haro, send me an email. I love knowing neighbors. There is a friendly varied community of people living here.

[September 2006] Today is moving day:

I really enjoyed living near Commercial Drive. I would have been happy to stay in this area, however I felt moving somewhere else in Van would help my education in the ins and outs of the city. So for the next year I'm living on the downtown peninsula.

My new address is:
94-1155 Haro St,
Vancouver, BC, Canada
V6E 1E4

Map of the Week bling-bling

dustin — 2006-08-16T22:51:15-04:00

Online Lux has included a variety of awards for winners for a while now. However, the regular weekly ones have only been given out to the top 3 ranked players or the top 3 map of the week players. Most of the hundreds of Lux players didn't have any, since it's quite hard to get into the top 3.

This week I introduced a expanded set of medals awarded to all game winners on the Map of the Week. It comes in 3 levels, for added scale, and to encourage MOTW games with lots of humans. I also put up a new awards page where you can see the most recent awards given out. The weeklies all come in on sundays, and now the new MOTW badges will fill up the week!

An exploration of human emotion

dustin — 2006-08-10T04:58:54-04:00

We Feel Fine - An exploration of human emotion, in six movements. During the past months, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Go explore them.

Magnificent Montage of Maps and More!

dustin — 2006-06-12T04:17:06-04:00

I put up a webpage with a montage of Lux map images. It's a great overview of all the different maps available (plus there are some AIs and Map Generator plugins on there). For the extreme view I also put the images of all 212 top rated plugins on one page (bandwidth heavy).

All of those maps (and most of the AIs) were created by Luxers and submitted to Sillysoft. This wealth of user generated content has been a big part of what has made Lux a success. Many thanks to all the Lux plugin creators out there.

Vancouver Manhunt

dustin — 2006-03-21T07:18:12-05:00

Last night I played MANHUNT!!!. As in, I played hide-n-seek with a bunch of people in downtown Vancouver. Fun fun fun! Check out the boundaries:

I lasted around 30 minutes (out of the 50-60 total) until I was caught. The longer it goes on the harder it gets, since more and more people become hunters.

I had a good sprint where I outpaced a solo hunter early on. I had a solid headstart when he saw me in the middle of a long alleyway near the waterfront. There was no side route escapes, so it was just a straight sprint to reach the end and maybe hide somewhere else. My lungs hurt pretty hard afterwards, but I got away (only to be swarmed later). Serious training should I ever be manhunted for real...

There also appears to be a Toronto Manhunt. Any Montrealers gonna start one up there?

Paradise Bay

dustin — 2005-09-21T02:01:40-04:00

I'm going to Mariana's mom's cabin on Paradise Bay for five days starting tomorrow (later today if you're a stickler). I am totally looking forward to it. Here's google's take on the route (it matches up with the directions that we were given):

Montreal to Champaign-Urbana

dustin — 2005-08-13T23:11:21-04:00

Starting tomorrow I'm going on a road trip, probably lasting a week. Here's a map of the route according to Google maps:

We might be stopping in Chicago, Detroit, or Ann Arbor. Do you know any cool stuff in these places?

Montreal satellite maps

dustin — 2005-04-21T05:02:59-04:00

Google's satellite maps are pretty awesome. Unfortunately, the ones of Montreal are of varying resolutions. There's one square somewhat north-east of downtown that's hi-res, but other then that it's lower. A good graphical example of this is a map of driving directions from my house to McGill College.

Battle for control of Montreal!

dustin — 2005-04-09T19:28:45-04:00

Here's the description of the Montreal Map for Lux:

This is the first public version of the "Montreal Metropolitan Area" board. It features 48 "countries" (cities or municipalities) and 8 "continents" (metropolitan areas or regions). The boundaries loosely follow the actual municipal boundaries; however, many smaller towns were merged. The bridges shown on the map are real (though I had to remove a few bridges to make the map playable). It is a good map for beginners looking for something simple, or for evil luxers who crave for a short but violent game. The map has been fairly balanced through extensive testing with both humans and bots.

THE STORY
"The year is 2000... and a nasty civil war is brewing in the Montreal Metropolitan Area. After an unsuccessful referendums on city mergers, a bunch of crazy gun-toting mayors and city councellors went on a rampage. It didn't take very long for this to escalate into a full-scale nuclear conflict. Chateauguay was nuked. So was L'Assomption. Nobody gived a damn. Half of the bridges went down after being hit by explosive-packed beluga whales trained by a secret terrorist group named 'Free Laval or Die Trying'. Mohawk indians decided to reconquer their homeland. In the end, people were fighting with their bare hands for control of the metropolitan region (well, at least, the remaining non-radioactive parts).

Unify Montreal and fulfill mayor Tremblay's crazy dreams of "One island, one city"!
Reunify half of the south shore into the Greater Longueuil, a super suburban megapolis filled with malls, boulevards, parking lots and video rental stores!
Try to defend the Laurentides region, yeah, try it... with the *huge* Mirabel airport in your backyard, you're heading for trouble!
And finally, you can also play the ever pissed-off Mohawks, who can (almost magically) smuggle armies between their two reserves!"

Google Sightseeing

dustin — 2005-04-09T07:29:19-04:00

Google Sightseeing is a weblog that's posting links to some cool views on Google's new satellite imagery. The motto is "Why bother seeing the world for real?"

America grows!

dustin — 2005-03-23T03:04:50-05:00

Here's a cool animated map of how the border of the US changed since 1650. I found it while researching american history for a new project I have cooking.

pop versus soda

dustin — 2004-06-08T08:16:18-04:00

It's not a clear-cut division, as this map of 'pop' vs 'soda' shows.