Just to be clear: this is an individual user's "diary" (blog) hosted at openstreetmap.org, not in any way an official statement from the OpenStreetMap Foundation.
And I agree with the author that the design of Bing Map Builder looks problematic. The biggest problem being that it's segregating its contributors from the general OSM population in the name of "privacy."
Use an app that permanently downloads maps -- I like Mapy.cz and Organic Maps. And bring a waterproof phone case, an external battery, and a charging cable.
And also bring a waterproof paper map because it's lighter, easier to read, more resilient, and more fun.
OsmAnd is the pocket knife of cartography. It's by far the most flexible map I've use, although it's not as user-friendly as others. You can really choose what gets rendered and how.
My assumption is that these kiosks log all wifi and bluetooth traffic from nearby persons and vehicles, and USB device IDs of anything plugged in for charging. And of course the new ones will be logging 5G signals as well. Maybe there's not yet a centralized effort to coordinate these logs with the camera feeds to map people's physical appearance to their electronic footprints, but I can't imagine it isn't somewhere on the roadmap.
And Switzerland features the most drop-dead-gorgeous hiking maps of any land I've visited. It feels like each mountain was hand-drawn and shaded by someone who knows and loves it, and you can often ID them from the ground based on the pictures. But the artistic details are still subtle enough not to interfere with the roads, trails, POIs, and text.
To me (native English a la USA) apples are in a sort of uncanny valley between things that could in fact be measured by the physical handful, like peanuts, and things that couldn't -- buildings being way off the charts, obviously.
Same. A single apple, as found in the grocery store, is about one handful. Once you start talking about things much bigger than what an average human hand can hold then "a handful" does work as a synonym for "a few things" - probably less than ten.
> aggressively push out traditional veggie burgers on restaurant menus
I've found a similar trend in the supermarket frozen aisles. I used to be able to reliably find "veggie crumbles" at most largeish stores, perfect for pizza, chili, or mapo tofu. My favorite brand was Quorn (not quite vegan, includes egg whites) but there were often several decent options. Now it's rare to find anything other than Beyond or Impossible, packaged to look and feel like ground meat, very fussy. They taste okay, but I prefer both the crumbles' flavors and form factors. I've gone back to using TVP. (I'm not vegetarian -- I'll happily brown my TVP in bacon grease.)
Lovely. I spent many an hour in DEBUG.EXE as a child.
Finding extra space for adding code, like the welcome message, was always fun -- although it would be better form to have the code zero out the "borrowed" bytes after the message is written, just in case. Sometimes it was necessary to rewrite the assembly to squeeze in a few more bytes, eg, zeroing a register using an XOR instead of a MOV command with a 0000 parameter.
One could save these patches as text files that were designed to be piped directly into DEBUG.EXE, and these could be distributed -- by floppy, BBS, or printout -- to other users of the same DOS version. This was also a common way to format and distribute assembly language source code, since anyone could use their local copy of DEBUG.EXE to assemble it.
Yes, I was disappointed that the "bus" routing option appears to be for driving a bus.
The Valhalla pedestrian routing engine does include ferry routes, though it completely ignores ferry schedules. (Ferry use can be discouraged in the routing options... the interface for fine-tuning options for the different routing profiles is quite impressive. )
And I agree with the author that the design of Bing Map Builder looks problematic. The biggest problem being that it's segregating its contributors from the general OSM population in the name of "privacy."