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- Hacker News
- Found myself recently down a rabbit hole watching a lot of climbing videos (free, trad, bouldering, etc).
I was looking at Google maps to locate some of the more obscure climbs outside the Yosemite valley proper. Little did I realise that Tommy Caldwell, Alex Honnold, Lynn Hill and others had done a project with Google to take a Street View camera up El Capitan (The Nose route but also parts of the Dawn Wall). Seriously the best in-person view to get an idea of what it's like pitch by pitch up the wall.
by dwd - I have also spent an incredible amount of time looking at slowly moving Street View footage, but it was through https://neal.fun/internet-roadtrip/ - a "game" where strangers collectively vote to move around Street View coverage at slightly faster than walking pace.
It was a great community, and good fun to see so much of North America that I would never visit. It's still going, but I don't visit as much (it used to be basically permanent second/third monitor content while I wrote my thesis). A cool opportunity for programming too: I made a bunch of mods for the game (https://greasyfork.org/en/users/1473129-jdranczewski) and a basic ambient viewer where you can just watch the Street View go by (https://jdranczewski.dev/irt/viewer.html).
by jdranczewski - I appreciate this hobby.
I've visited San Francsico a few times but haven't been since 2007.
At one point, back in about 2013 or 2014, I got a little bit obsessed with the Hetch Hetchy aqueduct. It started innocently enough (reading an article about the Pulgas Water Temple), and I ended up spending many evenings in bed using Google Earth and Google Maps street view to trace the route of the aqueduct and look at the things around it. Where the pipes run under cities it's easy to see their "mark" on the land (since no permanent structures are permitted to be built above them). Following them up into the mountains was fun, too.
A few years later I got into looking at abandoned rail lines in the Midwest and spent evenings "flying" the routes of old railroads. They're similar to the aqueduct insofar as you can see the "scar" they've left on the (and in the oddly-shaped parcels of land left after they were sold-off).
by EvanAnderson - Many years ago, I found an image via Goggle that I used as a desktop image: an old copper stamp mill in Calumet MI[1]. That image had a ghost image in it and I got a little obsessed.
After more research than I should have ever put into this question, I found a copy of the photo responsible for the ghost image[2].
Not being able to leave things at that... I had to try and find where the photo had been taken in Google Maps and street view. And I did[3]!
Wandering around maps and street view I found a number of houses in the original photo that are still there, like [4]. The intersection that is front and center on the photo [2] is the current intersection of Oak St & Spruce St. The duplex home at the bend in that intersection, where the woman is walking in front, is still there, though clearly it's seen better days.
Definitely spent too much time, even if virtually, in Calumet, MI.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fexternal-prev...
by sbuttgereit - If you've talked to ChatGPT enough this is instantly recognizable as AI writing. It's this kind of romantic hacker poetic ad copy thing. The short little punchy sentences. The sentence fragments. The repetition. This new age Instagram drama: flash talk for goddesses and sunsets.
I guess it works! But it's gross. lol.
- I lived in Tokyo for a year and my favorite hobby was taking the train somewhere about 10 miles from home then just wandering around, vaguely towards home. It's such a beautiful walkable city, and the safety means you don't need to worry about much at all. I usually walked at night and I would come across drunk people stumbling home, pets (and rodents!) roaming the streets, construction in the middle of the night, strange open late restaurants / bars, and all kinds of other things. Living in Japan has its downsides but that activity was a nice reminder of what a cool place it is. I continue going back every year just to explore new little places I've never gone. I recommend anyone who visits to find some time to just wander around. Pick a destination and walk there and see what you find.by hfosidkc77
- I had to click this title!
For some months now I do basically the same, but without the clicking in Streetview. There are some channels on Youtube where someone walks through neighborhoods in Tokyo, I found I really enjoy these. The streets are so clean and the houses so beautiful. Indeed, once in a while a Japanese sports car pops up around a corner, just standing there on somebody's driveway.
I also enjoy the walk-throughs of neighborhoods in New York (edit: now that I think about it, this started with following ari@home, a streamer who makes electronic music on the fly while walking and having an open mic). I tried Dallas once, I guess, but it was all way too big and bulky (but it was down town I guess, so that's to be expected of a lot of cities on this planet).
Does anybody have ideas for other nice spots on this beautiful planet!? I think I know Tokyo by now. ;)
by rambambram - In 2009, Google Street View had only been gathering images in Austin for about a year, I think. I pulled up right behind the Street View car at a red light, and I waved out the window, hoping that would get captured. I sent an email to my friends with a link to the location and said, "check this out in a couple of months!"
When I checked later that year, there was no image of me, so I thought the camera had not been active, and I forgot all about it.
Then, while looking through old emails a couple of weeks ago, I found that one and clicked the link. I clicked to see images from 2009, and sure enough, there was my little white Honda. And when I moved around the map, I found an image where my hand was out the window, waving! It was like I was waving to myself from the past. Pretty neat!
by dkurth