Source
r/super_memo•
rogne

Memorizing all the streetnames of your local city/town would be very useful. Are there any experienced coders here who could perhaps create a tool to make a google maps based image occlusions on any area you choose?

Question

I have no idea how hard this would be to make, but I was thinking something like, writing an area into the tool, or somehow select it yourself. and it'd generate images from google maps where the different streets are in different colors and each have a number attached to it, and it'd ask "what street is on this number" or it'd give you the name of a street and ask which number it belongs to.

I hope it doesn't come across as me wanting someone else to do the hard work for me, but im hoping many people think this sounds useful and one of those people have the skills and time to develop something like this.

cheers

Posted Jul 16, 2019, 5:05 PM UTC

46
alessivs🐧•

As a poor man's option try https://www.bing.com/maps (the web app, not the API)

  1. Load the aerial view and remove labels via map options (labels are usu. street names in this view)
  2. Create pushpins for streets. You can give them nicknames: proper street names, numbers, or a mnemonic.
  3. Screenshot (you can easily hide UI elements that give out too many hints)

Not as flexible, but far quicker than coding against GMaps API and e.g. adding custom routes laid out on top of street names (which tend to get overlaid at different places at different zoom levels), or say, setting up your own tiles for OpenStreetMap.

Depending on your needs you can also encode memories with other mnemonics. See here for inspiration.

Addendum. On a personal note, as a pedestrian and non-smartphone-holder I'm only a bit frustrated at the negativity and cliche-assumptions drawn in the other sub this was posted to. I remember walking through this area, where every block looks the same (like an urban version of the road-runner v/s coyote chase scenes) and for miscellaneous decision-making reasons I realized it was immensely helpful knowing:

  • How many streets deep I was from the main street that had the subway station entrances
  • What direction and approx. distance was the alternative subway entrance for the same station
  • Spots where minor streets started and ended
  • Short (ideally shortest) path to places of interest

in a circumstance that made reliance on "previous visits/experiences" (and associated memories) hardly possible.

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larryjor•

This is a very cool idea. Currently, I am memorizing all of the counties and their seats in the US. This, of course, is simple in Supermemo: make a map template with an image and a text component. I can find images of U.S. states with their blank counties and fill in the targeted county. I use a lot of mnemonics. I do like the idea of memorizing streets!

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CappieXL•

Would you be so kind to share the image youre using for this? Im in the proces of trying out supermemo but the learning curve is pretty steep

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larryjor•

Here's an example from Virginia: first, the blank image (only outlined counties), and then the filled image (one county filled in). Let me know if that is what you wanted.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_Virginia_counties_and_cities.svg

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_Virginia_highlighting_Buckingham_County.svg

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alessivs🐧•

You can make your own maps of this type with MapChart

For example, to color individual VA counties:

  1. Visit https://mapchart.net/usa-counties.html
  2. Scroll down to the map settings and choose Isolate State = VA
  3. Work from there
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