Is IP geolocation this accurate and accessible to every website nowadays?
If this website can do this I assume every website I visit can do it too?
<script id="cflocation">
window.CFLocation = {"lat":####,"lng":####};window.CFDsm=null;
</script>
Mine's off by more than 100 miles (Comcast Business fiber), it's not magic.
And yet every site that uses IP geolocation for useful purposes thinks I'm in a completely different state that bounces around every few months, if I don't let the browser share my location.
At my last job, I built a little docker image that used the free maxmind DB and kept it up to date, and ran a node server which returned some JSON telling estimated lat/long, city name, country, etc.
It's put me on the wrong continent before now. That was fun.
Right city, completely wrong part. Maybe that's where my ISP has their connection?
In the second video, you can see that the shadow seems to align with a curved line during summer solstice: https://x.com/janBuild/status/1796473232658518133
One nature demarcates curves, humans and animals will adapt to them in their choice of path.
We've used this website for years for checking the sun in various potential homes and holiday rentals. It's a half decent approximation but it doesn't really have proper height data (I think it's using standard building classification from Open Street Map data?) so it's only a guide.
But it's pretty cool overall! And I'll keep it in mind as we're in the process of looking for a new home.
The premium map is really good for my neighborhood!
I wonder if it's image processing from Planet data or something. Shape from shadows (then back to shadows?)
Maybe working back from that could feedback how high the buildings might be.
(Google search results for this are full of spam from a mix of motor insurance companies and sunglass companies)
Driving with the sun at your back is never a good time to be on the road.
It shows it almost completely in daylight save for building shadows, which is really wrong even right now as most of the house is shaded by trees.
Then I see an upgrade button... and it wants me to pay. Yet I can't even validate the data passes a sniff test. Their free tier very much doesn't.
Try changing to "below canopy" in the Settings and you might see the missing shadows.
From the About: "The shadows displayed by default are estimates gathered through indirect means like crowd sourcing and low resolution data."
Not sure what low resolution data they are using for the trees (I can't imagine mine were crowdsourced given I'm the only house around). Probably not worth it for me but apparently the premium version has more accurate/current data.
So as expected, if the site has height information it can draw shadows but definitely not for "every building" etc that the title claims.
Currently it's an approximation of shadows based on unreliable open data which is nice but not that special.
Perhaps I should look into high resolution height data (that is, high enough that an individual building shows up at all) with licenses that allow use in OSM and at least tag the buildings that show having a mostly uniform height. For example in the Netherlands, AHN is amazing (hundreds of points per tree! It looks like a 3d wireframe render of the entire country, truly amazing) but the license is not permissive enough.
There's a dark and a troubled side of life;
There's a bright and a sunny side, too;
Tho' we meet with the darkness and strife,
The sunny side we also may view.
Keep on the sunny side, always on the sunny side,
Keep on the sunny side of life;
It will help us every day, it will brighten all the way,
If we keep on the sunny side of life.EDIT: Lots of features are not free though. Pricing dialog keeps popping up when you click around things.
Shade map just crashes my phone every time.
For instance this fancy neighborhood on the hill has expensive housing, but in January it's already getting pretty dark quite early:
https://shademap.app/@44.07882,-121.32535,13.88804z,17041517...
[1]: https://re.jrc.ec.europa.eu/pvg_tools/en/tools.html
Then I realized the "problem" was the Daylight Saving Time changes... existential sigh
(Where do I submit a pull request to address that obvious bug??)
So the jump in shadows due to DST change in March should not be on the same day in Paris than in New-York.
I used it all the time, in the summers of 2014/2015 to pick places to have lunch at, that were in the sun, when I had a corporate job in the center of Berlin.
It stopped working/being displayed at some time, don't remember which year after it was.
I guess not many people knew about it and the discontinuation of it can be booked under "general enshittification of Google products".
Using Lidar to map tree shadows - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36658001 - July 2023 (41 comments)
Shade Map Pro - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30532286 - March 2022 (12 comments)
Show HN: 3D map of shade around the world - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29827943 - Jan 2022 (71 comments)
Map of shadows at any place and time - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29681693 - Dec 2021 (4 comments)
Show HN: GPX replay map that shows terrain shadows during activities - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28854959 - Oct 2021 (14 comments)
Due to the initial location, an extra verse can now be added to this song. (About a little Café in Sneek that is somehow tenuously linked to pretty much everything)
Which is how it should be[1]; cool!
Because the elephant in the room with most global dataset compilations is that the accuracy varies greatly from place to place. Some countries or regions have detailed data, others have generic or unclassified blobs. Some data is older, some is newer.
An ideal tool reduces the need for detailed provenance checking upon every usage.
But, that's probably a really hard problem to tackle. If there's no data on tree height, it seems impossible to accurately portray shadow extrapolations for forests. Especially since the forests can have a high frequency of change.
Super cool project, I hope this continues to grow!
Very polished and generally well designed.
And behold, it’s missing the entire forest my street is in.
It does have the buildings although if i look out the window their shadows are a tiny bit too short for my location.
[1] https://shademap.app/@38.88916,-77.03523,14.41656z,171715125...
I imagine the solar industry to be a target market of yours and wish you lots of luck with growing it.
I really like the Annual Sunlight and hours in the sun layers. It's really nice to be able to instantly see the shading at different times of the year without having to awkwardly select a date.
I used to work outdoors somewhere where the "shade" providing roof and umbrellas were useless many hours of the day, due to the actual position of the sun.
This doesn't seem to be taking trees into account. My neighborhood is filled with douglas firs that are 200+ feet tall and cast a lot of shade.
Has shadow from a tree that fell over and was removed 6 months ago.