Today I made my first Open Street Map edit. Open Street Map is a global map, created by its users (which includes lots of open government geographic data). My first edit was triggered by Peter Rukavina’s call to action. He wrote how he wants to add or correct Open Street Map data for a location when he mentions that location or business in his blogposts. He also calls upon others to do the same thing.
I don’t think I mention locations such as restaurants often or even at all in my blog, so it’s an easy enough promise for me to make. However, I did read and copy the steps Peter describes. First installing Alfred on my laptop. Alfred is a workflow assistant basically. I know Peter uses it a lot, and I looked at it before, and until now concluded that the Mac’s standard Spotlight interface and Hazel work well enough for me. But the use case he describes for quickly searching in a map through Alfred made sense to me: it’s a good way to make Open Street Map my default search option, and foregoing Google Maps. So I installed Alfred, and made a custom search to use Open Street Map (OSM).
The next step was seeing if there was something small I could do in OSM. Taking a look on the map around our house, I checked the description of the nearest restaurant and realised most meta-data (such as opening hours, cuisine, etc) were missing. I registered my account on OSM, and proceeded to add the info. As Peter mentions, such edits immediately get passed on to applications making use of OSM. One of those applications is a map layer showing restaurants that are currently open, and my added opening hours show up immediately:
My first edit also resulted in being contacted by a OSM community member, as they usually review the early edits any new user makes. It seems I inadvertently did something wrong regarding the address (OSM in the Netherlands makes use of the government data on addresses, BAG, and I entered an address by hand. As it came from a pick-up list I assumed it was sourced from the BAG, but apparently not). So that’s something to correct, after I find out how to do that.
[UPDATE: The fix was simple to do. The issue was that in the Netherlands the convention is to add meta data about stores to its corresponding address node (not as a separate node, unless there are more businesses at the same address). So the restaurant node I amended should not have been there. I copied all the attributes (tags) over to the address node, and then deleted the original node I edited. The information about the restaurant is now available from the address node itself. If you follow the link to the earlier node, you will now see it says that I deleted it.
I think it’s also great that within minutes of my original edit I had a message from a long time community member, Eggie. He welcomed me, pointed me to some resources on good practice and conventions, before providing some constructive criticism and nudge me in the right direction. Not by fixing what I did wrong, but by explaining why something needed improvement, and linking to where I could find out how to fix it myself, and saying if I had any questions to message him. After my correction I messaged him to check if everything was up to standard now which he acknowledged, ending with ‘happy mapping’. This is the type of welcoming and guidance that healthy communities provide. My Wikipedia experiences have been different I must say.
/UPDATE]
For 2019’s Q1 I want to do a ‘weekly hack’. There are many small odd jobs around the house, on my computer, our network, or in my workflows. They often are in my todo lists, but never get done, simply because they never have any urgency attached to them and so the rest of my life goes first. Yet they often do hinder me, and keep nagging to be resolved. Either that or they are the small wished for fixes (I really should have a page for X / I really should make a template for Y).
So 12 ‘hacks’, fixes or odd jobs in Q1 2019 it is. If it becomes a habit after that it will mean doing some 4 dozen small things to make life easier per year. That’s a lot of things done incrementally over time. A first braindump gave me some 20 things to choose from (and the one I ended up doing first wasn’t even on that original list, but came to me later ).
19#01 Create and use a template for the first read through and note taking of a non-fiction book.I made it in Tinderbox, which is an outliner plus mapping tool by Mark Bernstein. The template is mostly based on this WikiHow page on reading non-fiction, with some added questions (e.g. concerning assumptions made by the author)(the template in map and in outline view). For each book I copy that template. Each element in the outline/map is also a note which can have text, images etc. Tinderbox then lets you export the whole thing as a document, in this case the summary of my reading notes of a book. Which can then be blogged or published in other ways. [Category: workflow, habits]
19#02 Do an edit in Open Street Map. For a long time open data consultant and activist, I actually do very little with data. My focus is on helping government entities change, so that their data becomes available routinely and at high quality. So, while Open Street Map (OSM) is a re-users of large amounts of Dutch open government data I never actually edited something in it. Peter’s suggestion this week triggered me to change that. [Category: learning]
Welcome. Happy mapping 🙂
Welcome. Happy mapping 🙂
An interesting post from Ton Zilstra, on his first edit to Open Street Map, prompted me to do the same. I have two main motivations. One is that checkins on my stream use OSM and I like the idea of giving back. The bigger reason is that those checkins are often not very accurate, at least with respect to the place, rather than the pure location, and I thought it would be good to know how to add places even if they become visible only after the event. More generally, I want a better understanding of geographical information and how to use it.
The whole process was as easy as Ton said it would be. For my first edit, I corrected a segment of a local road. OSM showed it as two-way. It is in fact one way, not that everyone pays attention. My second edit was like Ton’s; I added my local corner bar. I’ll have to go back and correct it when I have the correct street address.
I think I could enjoy this.
My Saturday afternoon activity yesterday in Greater Crapaud was seeking out the Tryon River Trail, a trail maintained by the Tryon & Area Historical Society that runs through the woods and along the salt marsh beside the Tryon River.
The main trailhead is on Route № 10 before you go around the bend to the church, across the road from the Tryon Museum.
Conditions weren’t the best for a hike yesterday, so I could only make it about halfway through the first trail segment before I had to double back to Samuel Holland Lane and walk up the road a bit to where the trail continues along the river on the other side. About 5 minutes into that stretch of the trail there’s a lovely bench in a sun-filled glade that was about the most peaceful place on Earth I’ve come across in a long while.
I added the trail to OpenStreetMap, so it’s now available on Waymarked Trails should you like to seek it out one winter afternoon yourself; adding trails like this is another daily OpenStreetMap habit, like updating the hours of your local restaurant, that can be built into a blogging routine with positive spin-offs elsewhere.
Trails | Prince Edward Island | Tryon
Earlier in the year, in response to a post I wrote about salted capers, Jeremy Cherfas left a helpful comment.
Jeremy had found his way here, across the ocean from his home across the sea, via Ton’s link to my post about editing OpenStreetMap.
In the process of figuring out who this Jeremy was, and why he knew about capers, I came across his Annual Report for 2018, which he started with:
I followed that link to Exist and found, on the other end, a delightful Australian project that enables one to aggregate personal analytics and, in theory, to gain insights:
Both as a researcher and someone increasingly prone to seeking insight, this was a good tree for me to bark up, and I immediately started a trial, converting to a paid subscription after the 30 day free window. I’ve been using Exist every day since, and I’m just now, after 4 months, starting to see the faint glimmer of useful insights on the horizon.
Here’s a taste of what I track in Exist.
The Android phone in my pocket is running Google Fit, which counts the steps I walk each day.
I can see my steps per day, averaged by the week (the harshest part of winter was not good for my activity level):
I can see which days of the week I’m most active (there’s a clear pattern here, with my activity level falling over the course of the work week, and then picking up on the weekend):
And I’m given a set of correlations between steps and various other things that I’m tracking. For example, I use Exist’s “custom tracking” feature to mark days with various tags of my own choosing. I use “Receiver” on days I visit Receiver Coffee, for example, “Lunchathome” for days when I eat lunch at home, and “Napeve” for days when I have a nap in the evening:
These charts tell me things like “I walk more when I travel” (common sense) and “I walk more when I don’t have a nap in the afternoon or a nap in the evening” (good to know).
Because I don’t wear a fitness or sleep tracker, but wanted to track my sleep, I used the Exist API to code up a tiny web app to allow me to manually enter my bedtime and wake time each day.
I’ve been tracking my sleep for two months now. The bump in late March and early April was due to vacation and work travel where, apparently, I get about an hour more sleep a night (I didn’t know that).
The bottom chart confirms that I sleep an extra hour on the weekend, that I get an average of 7:30 a night, and that I sleep a little more on Thursdays (for reasons unknown).
The sleep correlations that are surfaced are a combination of the not-very-useful (I may spend more time asleep when I’m in Salem, but I was only there for a single night), the curious (why do I sleep more when it’s sunnier?) to the delightful (the Max Richter album I have downloaded on Spotify is his eight and a half hour Sleep, “a piece that is meant to be listened to at night”; obviously it works).
I bought a Withings wifi-enabled scale in January when it was on sale, and I’ve been measuring my weight at the same time every morning, about 30 minutes after I get up.
I think the readings in early January were an aberration caused by my entering a best guess for my starting weight into the Withings app, so it’s really only the week of January 27 onward for which I trust the data.
There’s not much to be gleaned from Exist’s attempts to correlate my body weight to other things, perhaps because it’s remained relatively consistent. It does tell me “your weight is higher after you’re not listening to music,” and “your weight is higher after you don’t tag Travel,” which are intriguing. Body weight, I think, is something best analyzed over a longer window than a season, so I’ll keep at it; certainly the ease of the wifi scale makes it dead simple to do so.
Another thing Exist is well setup to allow me to track manually is my mood. It’s a relatively blunt instrument, with only 5 gradations. And I’m not sure I’d ever dare to tag a day with a rating of “1,” as that would admit the depths of complete despair. But after 131 days of tracking my mood, I find myself surprised by the results:
I’d been under the impression, perhaps because I’ve had a good run of mood, that I’d tracked almost every day as a 4, but, I learned from this chart, that only happens 68% of the time; 18% of the time I have a “perfect” day, and 13% of the time I rate my mood a 2 or a 3.
Along with entering a numeric mood rating, Exist also prompts me for some words or phrases to explain my mood; I found the aggregation of this really interesting:
The closest that Exist comes to out-and-out recommendations for lifestyle changes is the “What affects your mood?” chart.
Following its advice I should travel more, to warmer places, stay up late, listen to music, stay active and sleep in, and I should avoid sketching, going to Leonhard’s for coffee, eating lunch at home, eating at Mad Wok, having a nap in the evening, and being dizzy.
While Exist is primarily tailored to allowing me to compare me to myself, it does occasionally venture into letting me know how I compare to the global average for all Exist users:
So I’m more sedentary than others (warning sign), but I go to bed and get up around the same time as everyone else, and sleep just a tiny bit more than average.
Beyond the joy of measuring, I enjoy using Exist because of the small team behind it, their sense of design, their openness to openness, their blog, and their quick turnaround for addressing support questions.
If you want to try Exist yourself, follow this link to get an extra month tacked onto your free trial, and to earn me a $2 credit against my subscription.
Exist.io | Jeremy Cherfas | Capers