Experimenting a bit with visualizing Open Street Maps and Digital Elevation Model data in QGIS.
Ran some OSM queries for highway and peak data and did the most basic of styling to get them to appear on the map. Got the DEM data showing (not elegantly though) in the background as gray.
Playing with the color scale on the digital elevation model data, I am and always will be a fan of the turbo color scheme, and when applied you can instantly see the mountains that run down the southeast of Orange County next to the Hudson River.
Once I could see the mountains my next question was "what the fuck am I looking at" – so I needed to try and pull in place names from OSM. I tried to size them by population but it didn't seem like the OSM data was consistent enough to get the look I wanted.
Is this number for the size calculation correct? No, no it is not.
If you make the town labels arranged vertically, it suddenly gives the map a bit of a japanese vibe, which I like, but probably a bit too experimental for this project.
Now let's start converting the DEM to contour lines that we can style into 10 different layers.
I suffer from having a ton of half-completed ongoing coding projects, so many that I needed to draw myself a little map so I can remember all the things that I have laying around waiting for me to give them the 10% of energy to push them into temporary completion.
One of my projects is a little Electron AI chat app I made for myself called Vulpecula Loom. I've been trying to fix the icon on it, and it's finally working! It almost looks like a real app!
The last blocker on this project is the log-in / onboarding process, which is annoying to test and made even more complicated by the fact I have combined all of my prototypes into a single Supabase project, trying to share authorization schemes, which is borderline ruining my life right now.
There's still a bunch of weird issues with the vulpecula onboarding I need to work through…
IssueBuilder is another project I want to get over the finish line soon! Strangely, when you log into Vulpecula, the auth redirect sends you to IssueBuilder. I need to fix this.
In order to fix it, I guess I will make separate supabase projects for each of the apps, like supabase wants. They tell me this will cost $10/month per project, probably. That is too much money for projects that make no money. But of course projects that no one can see or use make no money. So I think to myself, I will give them the opportunity to find users, who may theoretically make up for the cost at some point. Or I could self-host each supabase project on my own VPS. But I just wanted to punt so I could get something publishable.
So many of my projects are open-ended and creative without hard definitions of completeness. My organized brain rebels against this, and so I feel compelled to do these little leetcode puzzles where I can just make the little cases turn green. This is only my second question, and it's among the easiest, but I liked the way it made my brain work in a slightly different way. I want to start redoing these in Python soon.
Another short, repetitive, easy skill to measure and improve is typing speed. This brings me joy. This is one of the things I'm good at, so it's nice to be able to have a nice little tool to come back to. The stats are then imported to <ejfox.com/stats>