今回の写真は二年前の大雪の時の写真です。

Kyoto recently had a fairly big snow, but I didn't get out for photos, so I thought I'd post some additional photos from a pair of big-snow days that Kyoto had two years ago. First there was "Kyoto’s Biggest Snow in 58 Years" and its followup, about the big snow that started on New Year's day (2015). Then, two days later, there was an even bigger snow that garnered "Kyoto At Night During a Heavy Snow" posted in three parts (parts one, two, and three).

Rob Cole used to be one of the more prolific engineers creating plugins for Adobe Lightroom, until two years ago when he seemed to have fallen off the face of the Internet. His web site vanished, taking with it his valuable trove of solutions for photographers, and at the same time, his active participation in online forums stopped.

For the past two years no one in this facet of his life knew what had happened, but I've finally learned today that Rob passed away unexpectedly in January 2015.

This situation brings to mind "On the Permanence of One’s Online (and [...]

I had a long and interesting bicycle ride down to Osaka last weekend that I've been wanting to write about, and I thought I might finally get around to it yesterday, but I went on a ride instead. Today, I'll just share some pictures from yesterday's shorter (76km/48mi) ride (view at Strava).

First I visited a bump of a hill covered in bamboo and bamboo farming, with quaint roads running here and there through it.

I didn't know what to expect when I got to the bamboo-grove hill ("mountain" is too much for this), but the road I happen to [...]

So 2016 is over, making it my first full year of cycling, having been bitten by the cycling bug in the spring of 2015. Like last year's summary of my 2015 cycling, this post looks back on my 2016 cycling with my geeky-data eyes.

I titled the post with the word "Reflections" so that I can sprinkle these kinds of photos throughout:

So, in 2016 my cycling year was eight months long, and during those eight months, I rode to some extent or another on 102 days, totaling 8,459km (5,256mi). On average that's about 83km (52mi) each time, twice a [...]

Everyone is familiar with Google Maps, but for various reasons (cost, quality, expressability), many mapping applications use map data from OpenStreetMap ("OSM") instead. It's free to use and anyone can add/edit/update it pretty much in real time... it's like Wikipedia, but for maps.

I have particular interest in it because lots of cycling-stuff uses OpenStreetMap data...

I use the maps on my phone when riding, via the Galileo Offline Maps app (name changed Feb 2019 to Guru Maps), and sometimes with the Maps.me app.

I plan my cycling routes with OpenStreetMap data, via GraphHopper. The Strava route builder also uses [...]