So it's pretty compute intensive - my machine also doesn't love it. I wanted to get the general gist of it out there before optimizing, but I'll try my best.
For the below the horizon bit - that was the only way I could get the map to fully render when at a low tilt angle. If I enabled the stop at the ground layer, it would stop rendering the map at close distances (not fully sure why), so it sits like this for now.
The enter an address thing is a great idea, and definitely possible! I'll add it to the road map!
Definitely gonna implement some more clustering. The zooming in/out being annoying bit I hadn't thought of, but now that it's mentioned I kind of see it myself too.
I actually started with a sidebar that would then highlight the element on the map, but got rid of it to focus more on the exploration aspect.
Ah yes! So this is something I'm struggling with from a UX perspective (could use some feedback from anyone here).
News tied to a specific place gets pinned there (like an article about the Blue Jays being pinned at the Toronto Skydome). For stuff in cities, or larger areas like states, it tries to place it within the bounds of the state randomly, and if that fails, a random radius (which I think is what's gone wrong here).
The problem though is with the Toronto Star reporting on news in Jersey. The way I'm going about this right now is a filter I'm calling "Lens" which is just the country. Right now the only lens is Canada, but I want these to be filterable so you can easily see what other places are writing, or just get home grown news (but again, something I'm struggling with how to represent it).
Thanks! One of my favourite accidental things to come out of it was the "highlighting" of rural news. Stuff in a city like Toronto, which usually dominates my feed, gets kind of lost in all the other stories, while things in rural areas (which I never see) stand out.
This exactly. I find that I don't remember how to do some of the things I used to have more easily memorized, but I still need the fundamentals when things go horribly wrong and I need to dive into code myself.
I'm actually working on a similar ATC transcription project, but more along the lines of education / entertainment for non-pilots. I'm gonna be posting a YT video about it soon, but would love to chat if you guys are open to it!
mostly just because this was a weekend project and I needed to draw the line somewhere. I'm not necessarily opposed to it, but I reckon it'll take a good amount more time.
I did a bit of a deep dive on this over the weekend and left feeling more confused than when I started. From what I can gather, outside of CN's holiday freight train, most of the tracking is done by community members with SDR antennas and Raspberry Pis. They report to centralized servers (which I've yet to find), and the data indicates where trains are in signalling blocks. I'm the least knowledgeable person on trains, so I don't know if this is all accurate, but that's my best understanding.
I'd love to build some sort of service that takes this data, references a DB of signaling blocks, and establishes an estimated lat/lng - but that's a huge project of its own.
Yeah, I'm going to add a disclaimer about this. I've been watching the GO trains from my window this morning and they lag about a minute behind. My site grabs data on a minute interval, and I know some of the API's say they purposefully add GPS lag.
So it's pretty compute intensive - my machine also doesn't love it. I wanted to get the general gist of it out there before optimizing, but I'll try my best.
For the below the horizon bit - that was the only way I could get the map to fully render when at a low tilt angle. If I enabled the stop at the ground layer, it would stop rendering the map at close distances (not fully sure why), so it sits like this for now.
The enter an address thing is a great idea, and definitely possible! I'll add it to the road map!