Steve Bennett

Ok, here's a mappy challenge: where is the pen pointing on this map? Maybe South Australian outback somewhere?

From youtu.be/U9zq_4ED-pI?...

nine.com.au -- the new ninemsn - News, Sport, TV, Entertainment, Lifestyle | Latest Breaking News Headlines from Australia and the world Meet the new nine.com.au. Get the latest news, sport, TV, travel, fashion, fitness, recipes, celebrity news and exclusive content, all for free at nine.com.au, the home of Nine

Weirdest thing: if you go to www.nine.com.au, watch the main menu bar. When it first loads, the first three items are "Watch TV | News | Sport" then it quickly changes to "Watch TV | National | World | Sport". Wonder what internal chaos led to this hacky JavaScript.

Heidi Meudt & I will give a FREE virtual 1hr Wiki webinar focusing on plant biodiversity. Open to anyone wanting to improve their digital outreach skills by enriching #Wikipedia, #Wikidata & #WikiCommons.

Tuesday 14th of October at 3pm NZST.

Register to get link:
tepapa.zoom.us/meeting/regi...

I just really, really want a "no politics" toggle for all social media platforms. Strangely, YouTube and Facebook are where I see the least, without having to do anything. X and Bluesky show the most, despite my efforts to block all the relevant keywords.

I love Shakra’s singing and wanted to play along - 🎶🪡

MapLibre Tile: A Next Generation Vector Tile Format The Mapbox Vector Tile (MVT) format is widely considered the leading open standard for large-scale map visualization, as evidenced by its widespread adoption by major technology companies such as AWS, Meta, and Microsoft for their products and services. However, MVT was developed nearly a decade ago and, consequently, does not fully align with the capabilities of new geospatial data sources that are characterized by rapidly increasing data volumes due to advancements in geospatial sensors and automated detection through artificial intelligence. In this paper, we introduce the MapLibre Tile (MLT) format, a novel vector tile specification designed from the ground up to address the limitations of MVT. Our experiments, simulating user sessions on widely used basemap datasets, demonstrate that MLT achieves up to three times better compression ratios compared to MVT on encoded tilesets, with over six times better on certain large tiles. Additionally, MLT offers decoding speeds that are up to three times faster and significantly enhances processing performance. MLT also introduces new functionalities and is specifically designed to lay the foundation for the next generation of map renderers, which we expect to entirely offload processing to the GPU, thereby overcoming the stagnation of Moore`s law.

MapLibre Tile: A Next Generation Vector Tile Format

I have to consider the possibility that the pain in my little finger is caused by a very awkward keyboard shortcut I keep using: Ctrl-shift-1.

What's with all the Meetup comment spam lately? One of the groups I'm in is spamming out 1-2 comments, always casual job opportunities. And it's a big group, 10k+ people, 10+ organisers...

Is creating my own private Discord just to have conversations with myself weird? Like note taking, but...in chat form.

Frustrating thing about OpenLibrary's tagging scheme is a tag like "Novels" is used for books that *are* novels and books *about* novels.

Now there's a pretty datavis accident

It's been like 20 years since Macbooks flipped the orientation of the Apple logo on the lid, but I still open mine the wrong way half the time :/ Such an infuriating design decision, prioritising Apple's branding needs over ease of use.

duckdb-tinyorm TinyORM for Duckdb, easy setup. Latest version: 3.0.1, last published: 3 months ago. Start using duckdb-tinyorm in your project by running `npm i duckdb-tinyorm`. There are 1 other projects in the npm...

Ok this is weird. I can only find one NodeJS ORM for DuckDB: www.npmjs.com/package/duck...
At first glance, it looks pretty reasonable. But it has basically zero uptake: no weekly downloads, no open issues. Why not?

Can anyone remember why we used to put gradients all over our websites in the 2000s?

Ha, yep, they've changed it to that now.

Does @theguardian.com think "spores" is a verb? Confusion with "spurs"?

I seriously cannot comprehend the mindset of shutting down a site, hiding behind the euphemism of "important changes", and claiming that this somehow demonstrates your "respect" for the users. Then claiming you're thinking deeply about the community, before weeks later announcing your funemployment.

Important changes are coming to Glitch We’ve got an important update for the Glitch community today: We’ll be ending web hosting for your apps on Glitch.

Whoa, Glitch is ending app hosting...in a week! Not sure why I didn't get an email. This is bad news - I use Glitch as a (very low traffic) backend for a couple of hobby projects. Not sure what I'll use instead.
blog.glitch.com/post/changes...

9 months after announcing the impending shutdown of PivotalTracker, the pivotaltracker.com domain is completely dead. Weird.

So cool to see my humble site, opentrees.org, cited and even screenshotted in academic journals. In this case, an article in Urban Forestry & Urban Greening. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

The part that blows my mind is "$136.7 million cost blow-out" - naively I would have thought the whole project would cost less than that.

GitHub - maplibre/maplibre-tile-spec: Next generation vector tiles format Next generation vector tiles format. Contribute to maplibre/maplibre-tile-spec development by creating an account on GitHub.

MapLibre Tiles github.com/maplibre/map... a potential replacement to MVT

For the first time, a client has asked me take over a project they vibe coded with Cursor. Eep. It's a whole new world out there.

Ah, thanks! The z in Quincy is certainly surprising.

Can you explain the gag, to a non-American? I get that the pronunciation of Harvard ("HAR-verd") doesn't match the stereotypical r-less pronunciation, but is there more to it?

It's wild to me just how fast "vibe coding" has caught on and become an absolutely accepted term. It was first used just 3 months ago.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibe_co...

For anyone else trying to find it @archive.org :

web.archive.org/web/20250104...

We’re now sharing a space with The Londonist on @tripgeo.bsky.social Scrambled Maps Collections tripgeo.com/scrambledcol...

Lots of fun for geo puzzlers

One of the greatest sporting moments of all time.

A little disappointed that Boobs surf beach is not on the eastern Australian map. (www.surf-forecast.com/breaks/Boobs)

It's also a bit weird that beaches to the west and east of the bay are completely smooshed together, despite being many hours of driving apart.