User talk:Ekorren/Hash Inquiry Tool

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The last time I used the internet with a mobile phone was the day I bought my very first one, 6 years ago, when I accidentally hit the "internet" button. Now your tool made me dig up the user manual and try it again. And it works! Hooray! Now I'm prepared for the Christmas Holidays far from my computer. Thank you very much for this tool, it's just what I needed. And it even shows the globalhash!

The only thing I did not get to work was the google map (no image, only the things in the left and top part of the page), but that may be my own ineptitude. I'll try again. If it doesn't work, I will have to make printouts of every place I go to and draw a coordinate grid into them ;-)

Me neither. That's why "Find an online map service that works on my phone" is still a ToDo, and why I made the google map link optional, as there's no use in carrying useless links.
For my surroundings I have 1:50.000 topographic paper maps which carry an UTM grid. Using a set square/triangle it's possible to position quite accurately down to half a millimetre on the map if you have UTM coordinates available. Do you have maps with any kind of defined grid? I guess the largest difficulty to add an UTM mode would be to find the conversion algorithm for WGS84 -> UTM...
My only maps are google printouts and the standard road maps (Falk...).
If you have exactly pinpointed your base location on the map, the distance resolved by east and north can be used to find the approximate area on a standard road map. I could add a digit to the output, but it wouldn't really help. There's only a few hundred metres of accuracy reachable this way, may even be kilometres, regardless of scale. Falk has done some really crazy stuff with some of their city maps. Another reason is that first going 30 km east and then 30 km north does not take you to the same spot as first going 30 km north and then 30 km east. Maybe you could borrow 1:50.000 or 1:25.000 topographic maps from the library? Oh, and btw: Some of them have also a degree grid printed at the margins, but these are usually not the same degree lines we use here. In Germany, they often refer to the Potsdam Datum which is based on a slightly different approximation to Earth's real shape which fit's better for Central Europe but has some offset to the WGS84 approximation we use. --Ekorren 10:09, 25 November 2008 (UTC)
I couldn't sleep because I kept thinking about the map link problem:
  • 1) What do we need? Not the complete google maps database, the important thing is the area around the hashpoint.
  • 2) What do we have? Every graticule page and every meetup page includes a 300x400 pixel map, the meetup page ones are centered on the hashpoint which is indicated by the marker.
  • 3) It should be possible to get a script/program to look up the data of a small map similar to the meetup page ones (300x400 is a good size, my mobile phone's display is 240x320) and present it as jpg or png or anything an old mobile phone can read.
  • 4) Your tool could link to, instead of google maps, that script, sending the coordinates as parameters (http/blabla/maptool?lat=49.1234&lon=9.5678)
  • 5) Next step (because I want perfection): Not only one map link but three of them for each hashpoint.
That should be all ;-) - Danatar 02:07, 25 November 2008 (UTC)
I fear it doesn't work out that way (but would like to learn differently - any map magicians out there?). There is no jpeg or other standard format picture behind those maps which could easily be extracted. Also, it would probably violate the copyright and terms of use to do so.--Ekorren 10:09, 25 November 2008 (UTC)
Static maps from Google are implemented over a wrapper page now, so the request above should be resolved. --Ekorren 17:09, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

A request: While playing around, I saved today's page in my mobile phone's memory and the file showed up as "Geohash". Could you make your tool display a page title (I hope it's the page title that gets displayed) including the date? Else it will get confusing after a few days. - Danatar 21:38, 24 November 2008 (UTC)

Done ;) --Ekorren 22:26, 24 November 2008 (UTC)

Awesome tool!

I can no longer claim not to have a GPS. Now I can start from any location, and drill down to a local map, through my smart phone. Excellent! My only question would be if you could add a metric/English option, but even that's no big deal. -- Jevanyn 17:18, 3 February 2009 (UTC)

Actually I had implemented that already months ago, but just never added the option to the starter page. Well, it's there now. --Ekorren 11:53, 5 August 2009 (UTC)

I've played with the tool for a while now and I, too, have to say that it is really great. I really don't like sites that keep busting my browser (bahn.de is a great example) and I am an absolute fan of stuff that even works on a 486 that runs at 50 MHz. This tool is great! Thanks for the effort of creating it! --Zb 19:16, 27 December 2009 (UTC)

HTTP Header Bug?

I noticed that recently (in the last few days?) this page refuses to display on the (picky) browser on my BlackBerry 8130. Looking more closely, it appears this HTTP header line:

Content-Type: text/html charset=utf-8

should have a semi-colon in it like this:

Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8

If you could fix this, I'd greatly appreciate it! Thanks, --Wenslayer 15:57, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

Should be fixed, thanks for noticing. The error can't have occured before sunday afternoon (UTC), since that was the time when I switched the whole thing from iso-8859-1 to utf-8. I did that to allow for displaying graticule names and linking to the graticule pages on the wiki. There's a lot of non-ASCII-symbols in graticules names around me... --Ekorren 23:35, 27 July 2009 (UTC)
Cool, I just verified the fix works, thank you very much! Tschüß! --Wenslayer 23:50, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

Acronym

Am I the only person who compulsively abbreviates things?

Referring to what? (Sorry, I ain't gettin' it...) --Zb 11:07, 13 February 2010 (UTC)
See also: Backronym --Ekorren 10:37, 16 February 2010 (UTC)

Consider an OpenStreetMap link?

OpenStreetMap is (in my area) often better than Google Maps. Could you consider an OSM link? Stevage 01:00, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

You're talking of the list mode? Sure, wouldn't be difficult, will probably be done soon. However, the list mode is probably only used by people with rather dumb mobile phones, and those would need static maps (at least my phone won't do anything non-static).
The map overview has OSM links since it was introduced. I would consider (optionally) replacing the maplets in the map overview by OSM if someone told me how to do that - am too lazy to search myself ;) --Ekorren 08:02, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

Anthill is not working

When I try to load anthill in Firefox, it just loads a blank page. It doesn't have any error messages or anything. In the "script" tab of firebug it said "Failed to load source for: http://tjum.anthill.de/geohash.html"

I checked on another computer in my house and it didn't work for it either, so I'm guessing it's an issue on the server and not my computer, (unless it's my router, which I doubt.)

Do you know what the problem is and when it will be fixed? Lhaze 01:52, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

The problem was an overfull filesystem which caused the webserver to fail. Just now, there's a little bit of free space, and it seems to work again. Can fail again any time, though. --Ekorren 07:28, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

tjum.anthill.de was acting strangely yesterday - it appears it believes the 05-13 DJIA was 0. Today seems to be worse, at least from here in NA. --Thomcat (talk) 10:06, 14 May 2013 (EDT)

I've seen the zero yesterday. However, a zero djia will not be used in any case, so it won't yield wrong coordinates (as it does with some other tools...) Today it works fine for me. --Ekorren (talk) 10:11, 14 May 2013 (EDT)
Another zero today. I check the text list primarily to see where the globalhash is for tomorrow - I swear one of these days I'm going to visit Nunavut. --Thomcat (talk) 09:47, 15 May 2013 (EDT)
Grrr. This should not be possible to happen at all - no zero value should ever be saved to the cache. Cleaned it out manually. Sorry for the incovenience. --Ekorren (talk) 13:00, 15 May 2013 (EDT)

The tool is currently not working. The site's main page loads fine (as far as I can tell), and the front page for the tool loads, but results do not. --Rex Wolf (talk) 09:55, 15 October 2013 (EDT)


Please could you consider addding this useful tool to [[Category:Implementations]] so it can be found more easily. Sourcerer (talk) 10:20, 11 August 2014 (EDT)Sourcerer

This is a wiki. Just do it. If someone objects, there's always "undo". --Ekorren (talk) 03:26, 12 August 2014 (EDT)
OK - I did it. --Sourcerer (talk) 18:56, 12 August 2014 (EDT)Sourcerer

google maps static api v1

Maps are not loading anymore because google turned off the v1 api which is used in this tool --Eupeodes (talk) 13:52, 15 January 2016 (EST)

Boo to Google. Seems they tend to switch off everything people like to use, and render their services unusable.
Can someone point me at some manual how to rewrite the service? (I might still decide to switch it off instead, after a look at the manual). --
Hi Ekorren, maybe the comments here can be useful? I really hope you'll decide to keep the service as I use it nearly on a daily basis :o) --Crox (talk) 17:08, 22 January 2016 (EST)
By the way, if you want to consider an OSM option instead of Google, you can check these links. --Crox (talk) 12:52, 23 January 2016 (EST)
As a quick fix, I switched to OSM for the map overview. Mapnik only currently, regardless of your actual choice. --Ekorren (talk) 14:19, 25 January 2016 (EST)
And it's broken again... Kellerkind (talk) 14:05, 20 September 2018 (UTC)
If you have a suggestion for a fix which does not involve any complicated code and does not require to install anything on the server, give me a hint. Otherwise... Well, I guess I'm out. Since I haven't done any geohashing for a few years now, motivation to invest significant effort is rather low ;) --Ekorren (talk) 14:13, 20 September 2018 (UTC)
Tads wrote something on Zigdon's talk page because of the same problem. I don't know anything about coding, but perhaps it will help. - Danatar (talk) 18:09, 26 January 2016 (EST)

Map previews are broken

It seems that map site (static.openstreetmap.de) that you're using for maps is broken - all it shows for me are black rectangles with marks in them, which is next to useless. I see that you haven't claimed your account yet, but still, this is a very valid issue. Also, thanks for this awesome tool, it's my main source for hashes! V1993 (talk) 13:34, 17 June 2021 (UTC)