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Josh Carlson

@jcarlson@mapstodon.space

mastodon 4.6.4

He / Him

Likes: knitting, sewing, OpenStreetMap, foraging, dumpster diving, gardening.

Husband, father of three.

During the day, you can find me doing cadastral mapping and sys admin stuff for Kendall County, Illinois.

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15 Posts

Joined November 05, 2022

knitting style:

combo

OpenStreetMap:

https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/jcarlson

website:

https://jcarlson.page

Posts

Josh Carlson @jcarlson@mapstodon.space · Aug 04, 2026

Replying to @streetmeme@cycle.town

@streetmeme@cycle.town There is really nothing quite like blowing past a bunch of idling cars and parking your bike right outside the front door. What a treat!

Josh Carlson @jcarlson@mapstodon.space · Jul 26, 2026

Replying to @watmildon@en.osm.town

@watmildon@en.osm.town @SK53@en.osm.town natural=plant, perhaps? The description on the wiki is gold. "A plant." Mapping plants sometimes feels silly, but if it's a perennial, go for it. There are some perennials that will probably be there as reliably as any tree.

Josh Carlson @jcarlson@mapstodon.space · Jul 19, 2026

I rarely use Google Maps anymore, but has anyone else been seeing this kind of thing? SEO spam I'm used to, but these just seem like messing around for its own sake. Seems virtually anyone can add fake stuff to the map? But to correct the map, all you can do is submit a form and wait? So we get the fake mapping that people are scared of in #OpenStreetMap but with none of the transparency about who did it, and nobody has any real power to address issues they see. 😒 #gischat

Josh Carlson @jcarlson@mapstodon.space · May 12, 2026

RE: @OpenStreetMapUS@en.osm.town

Boundary relations are like middle children: they're probably not okay, and could use more attention than they're getting.

If you're coming to #SOTMUS2026, I would love to see you at my workshop! And if you're not, I'll be putting all the workshop materials online at some point anyway.

#openStreetMap #gischat

Josh Carlson @jcarlson@mapstodon.space · May 07, 2026

I write my work emails in plain text mode, because honestly, you don't need inline images, formatting, or a thousandth copy of the County seal in my signature. The information I want you to have is in the text.

And then we have my colleague. Email signature includes three tiny images for his contact info.

When I try to reply as plain text, it grabs all the images in the thread and attaches them.

Faced with removing all these attachments, I'm considering just not responding at all.

#MS365

Josh Carlson @jcarlson@mapstodon.space · May 06, 2026

Unexpected project for the day:

If we wanted to design our own variant of the board game Metro [1], how could we create the tiles with the least amount of manual drawing?

Square tiles feature 8 connection points, 2 per side. 4 routes cross the tile. They may intersect, but they do not branch or merge.

After figuring out the 8 unique connection shapes, a bit of looping code gets you there!

FWIW, there are 65 valid tiles. Back to work!

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro_(board_game)

Josh Carlson @jcarlson@mapstodon.space · May 06, 2026

Replying to @Bronwyn@sfba.social

@Bronwyn@sfba.social Purposely, multiple times. Successfully, also multiple, but it's a smaller number! I think my best success was getting the garment hot/wet and hang-agitating it in the places I wanted shrunk, rather than putting it in the laundry and hoping.

Josh Carlson @jcarlson@mapstodon.space · May 05, 2026

A GIS / network / routing problem has occurred to me:

Given a series of ALPR camera points with direction information, what is the optimal route to visit all of them from their blind side?

Like the "traveling salesman" problem, but with a bat.

#gischat

Josh Carlson @jcarlson@mapstodon.space · May 04, 2026

@AtanasE@mastodon.social

Just now up to 5

mastodon.social

Atanas (@AtanasE@mastodon.social) - Mastodon

Josh Carlson @jcarlson@mapstodon.space · May 01, 2026

Replying to @spatialists@mapstodon.space

@spatialists@mapstodon.space @shapefile@mapstodon.space You were already here, but now you've truly arrived.

Josh Carlson @jcarlson@mapstodon.space · Apr 26, 2026

Replying to @afterzoe@aus.social

@afterzoe@aus.social That is absolutely lovely. I'll have to try out two-color seed stitch like that in a future project. Thanks for sharing!

Josh Carlson @jcarlson@mapstodon.space · Apr 01, 2026

Replying to @fionag11@mapstodon.space

@fionag11 If it's north up, the arrow isn't really doing anything. But it also doesn't take up much space on the sheet, so it's a minor irk. What gets me are people who insist that every map has to be north-up.

Josh Carlson @jcarlson@mapstodon.space · Mar 16, 2026

Replying to @dmbaturin@functional.cafe

@dmbaturin@functional.cafe I mean, there's a filter on Ravelry for it…

Josh Carlson @jcarlson@mapstodon.space · Apr 09, 2023

Replying to @jcarlson@mapstodon.space

Oh! I turned on Google's "bike" layer, and HUGE sections of bike paths are just straight up missing now, paths that have been around for years and some which I used today. And it's highlighting "bicycle-friendly roads" that would definitely be dangerous to be on. Cyclists beware! Find another router! Or, you know, have a good working knowledge of your area.

Josh Carlson @jcarlson@mapstodon.space · Apr 08, 2023

I used to trust #GoogleMaps cycling routes near me, but two things have happened.

One I understand: I added every cycleway I could find to #OpenStreetMap

The other, I don't. For reasons that are opaque to me, Google's cycle routing has gotten so much worse.

Case in point: a route for tomorrow. Using OSM (Valhalla) routing, it suggests more or less the precise route I imagined. Google, though? Even forcing the route onto known cycleways, it keeps diverting off the cycleways and onto bad roads.

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