On a weekend in July 2022, a couple of friends and I decided to go for a hike in the Hochschwab mountains in Austria. When I posted the photos a couple of days later, another friend commented that she, too, had been there during the weekend. Did we just miss each other by a couple of minutes, or were we much farther apart? I looked our track logs to find out.

I’m not sure but I have an idea.

Have you ever wondered what words you can spell out using wooden cubes that have letters on each face? I have.

If you enjoy geocaching, you might want to go paperless and just bring a smartphone or GPS device with you on your treasure hunt. Alternatively, you might want to have a backup with you on paper if anything goes wrong with your device. I wrote a simple web service that helps you with the second case.

According to my analysis, it is likely that there is, but this seems not to be the case in other, more densely populated localities.

In this article I explore a method to visualize linear spatial data that changes over time: which segments of tram line 6 of Budapest were under construction at which points in time? This investigation is inspired by a video posted on Index.hu and a 140-year-old train schedule diagram.

About two years ago, I shared an article about a project where I query and process results from the Google Transit API in a way that provides a simple overview for public transport connections between two places. Since I ended up using it rather frequently, I decided to turn it into a proper Python package, called gptt, available on GitHub and PyPI.

Last year we organized an internal conference at my workplace and I volunteered to put together a booklet with the abstracts of the presentations. I wanted to add photos of the authors, but I did not want them to look all the same. I came up with the idea to have the photos on top of two rectangles of the same size but of two different colors, a bit offset from the photo – every photo should be paired with differently offset rectangles to add some unique design. Of course, I did not want to do this by hand, but that’s what I know Python for.

I have recently released my first Python package, gpxslicer, a simple tool to cut GPX track logs into smaller segments. It is now available on GitHub and PyPI. The motivation behind creating it was simple: I wanted to automate tasks that I had done by hand too many times.

If you want to use spatial data from OpenStreetMap, OpenStreetMap is more than just a free map: it is also a free database of global geographical data. If you are not familiar with it, check out its Wiki to learn more. one way to get it is via Overpass, Read more about the Overpass API and its various endpoints here. a read-only API of the OpenStreetMap database. While the API is extremely flexible, its unique language, Overpass QL is not very intuitive. This article takes a very simple query and dissects it into its smallest pieces. This will help you understand (and write) such queries.

It really was a great idea. As usual, I took a problem that I randomly ran into and wanted to find a solution to. I was not sure if I could implement the solution, but I knew I could describe it. It happened when I was working on a project where I got some data about municipalities in Hungary. I thought it would be handy to sort them alphabetically so that the user of the final product can easily find the place they are interested in. However, due to the unusual letters in the Hungarian alphabet, such as ő or gy, collation is not trivial. But I knew I could find a way to solve this!

I was going through the documents of my great-grandfather, Lajos Frenyó when I found a couple of folded papers in one of the notebooks. I had already known that he really liked hiking but I did not have any material proof of this hobby apart from the photo used as the cover image of this post. That is, up until that moment, because these papers contained a very detailed account documenting two trips in the Tatra mountains. This post contains these two reports with my comments.