GeoPlaying
Follow-up of previous hacks around OpenStreetMap and geodata, with a pair of new tool implemented primarily to find an answer to some of my own curiosities.
First.
I live in a big city, I don't own a car and relay on public transports for most of my movements. Recently Car2Go - a popular free-flow car sharing service - landed here too, and I joined the party for maximum convenience: to be able to move even at night or in case of strike, when public busses stop to run, or to quickly reach appointments when I'm late and cannot wait at the stop.
I began to notice Car2Go vehicles parked in the streets near my home, and I got fashinated by the idea to know where my neighborhood was going using the same cars I use. So, using the public API provided by the service, I've built a visualization of the most recent travels within my city: informations about available cars are refresh every 5 minutes, retained for 24 hours, and used to guess viable paths within points (using the previously mentioned self-hosted Routino instance). The result is an interactive map with coloured tracks crossing all over the city: useless, but good looking!
Second.
Planning a four-days vacation with my girlfriend in Liguria, I had occasion to say "We cannot get lost in Camogli [iconic small fishers village, best known in the Italian pop-culture for the Autogrill toast named after it], it is more or less big as Tesoriera Park [small park in Turin]". And immediately after this declaration I began wondering if my approximation was correct.
So in an hour I've created a small tool to overlap two independent OpenStreetMap boxes, to visually see how those match.
By the way, I was almost right in my statement.