Earlier this year my ad revenue increased nearly tenfold. This obviously led me to conclude that it’s probably time to stop relying on ad revenue, and try moving to a model based on reader support. If you’d like to understand how I came to that contradictory conclusion, read on; otherwise the tl;dr is that you can now support The Map Room via monthly payments at both Ko-fi and Patreon. When monthly payments reach a certain level (see below), I will discontinue ads on this site. In March my ad revenue basically quadrupled, and in April it nearly doubled again ..read more

BBC News: “Russia is causing disruption to satellite navigation systems affecting thousands of civilian flights, experts say. […] The persistent disruption led Finland’s flag carrier Finnair to suspend daily flights to Estonia’s second largest city, Tartu, for a month, after two of its aircraft had to return to Helsinki due to GPS interference. ¶ Tartu Airport relies solely on GPS, unlike most larger airports which have alternative navigation systems that allow aircraft to land even if the signal is lost ..read more

North Yorkshire council announced that apostrophes would be removed from street signs to avoid running into problems with geographical systems; as the Grauniad reports, this move has “provoked the wrath of residents and linguists alike.” Okay, several things. One, the standard being cited, BS 7666, from what I can gather (I can’t actually find BS 7666 online, just several guides to it), doesn’t ban apostrophes and other punctuation marks, it just deprecates them as a best practice. Two, removing apostrophes breaks Irish names—no O’Reilly Street, for example—and as such in an English context is ..read more

Some Pokémon Go players are apparently adding fake beaches to OpenStreetMap in order to improve their chances of catching a new pokémon. The pokémon in question was added to the game last month and only spawns in beach areas. Pokémon Go uses OpenStreetMap as its base map. It’s not hard to see how players can cheat by adding natural=beach nodes where no actual beaches exist, and indeed beaches started turning up in odd places in the game—and in the real-world map as well, because the game uses real-world map data, and that’s what gamers have been messing with. Receipts at the OSM community foru ..read more

Custom route creation and topographic maps are rumored to be coming to Apple Maps in the next iOS release, iOS 18. Google Maps has had custom routes since approximately forever; on Apple Maps we’ve had to choose between Apple’s generated routes without being able to edit them. Google Maps announced updates focusing on EVs (EV charger search, nearby chargers in the in-car map, suggested charging stops, forecast energy consumption) and sustainability (lower-carbon travel options rolling out in 15 cities, estimated flight emissions). Also, Street View came to Kazakhstan last month. Meanwhile, Ben ..read more

It used a vector display and cassette tapes for data storage. It was too early for GPS; instead it invented a process called “augmented dead reckoning” that snapped the car’s position back to the known road grid whenever you made a turn. It was the Etak Navigator, and it launched back in 1985. James Killick explores its history in the ninth installment of his series, “12 Map Happenings that Rocked our World,” with some surprises in how it influenced later GPS-based navigation systems (among other things, Etak eventually ended up in the hands of Tele Atlas). See also this 2015 article in Fast C ..read more

There’s no shortage of books about phantom islands—islands on the map that later turn out never to have existed—but now the Map Men have done a video about them, using as a narrative hook the case of Sandy Island, and how it managed to stay on maps into the Google Maps era ..read more

“In the age of Google Earth, watches that triangulate and cars with built-in GPS, there’s something about a globe—a spherical representation of the world in miniature—that somehow endures.” The Associated Press has a fairly light feature on the relevance and popularity of globes today; the bespoke globes of Bellerby and Co. (whence) are prominently featured, of course (Replogle not so much, oddly), but they’re intermixed with some historical trivia. Not in-depth in the slightest, but something a few newspapers would have found interesting enough to run ..read more

Randall Munroe, “Every Eclipse Path Map,” xkcd, 17 Apr 2024. Looks like we’re not quite done with eclipse maps, especially the whimsical sort, and it’s not at all invalid for xckd to have (what is probably going to be) the last word on the subject (at least for a while), with this fictional map showing the fictional path of a fictional eclipse over a fictional landscape, with rueful descriptions of fictional places where trying to see the fictional eclipse will come to a bad end for the fictional observers. (And you thought it was bad you got clouds ..read more

This Mastodon post makes a bad map of this week’s eclipse into the funniest map of this week’s eclipse ..read more