The Dutch government resigned on January 15, 2021 as a consequence of the so-called “childcare benefits scandal” or kinderopvangtoeslagaffaire. In the Netherlands, childcare is not free and some people are entitled for a subisdy for its costs. Around 2013, number of people were falsely accused of abusing this subsidy and were forced to pay back the money they had received, even though they did nothing wrong[1].

At a glance, this scandal does not look particularly unique or related to issues with fairness in AI, but this is certainly a misstep from the government as for some families this repayment resulted…

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.

I’ve been actively geocaching for around 14 years now. Most of my finds are in Hungary, where there is a local website for geocaching: geocaching.hu. This website does not have the same caches as the original site, geocaching.com, rather a different set (with some…

The following map was published today on the official Coronavirus site of the Hungarian government.

The map shows all municipalities in Hungary. As the note on the bottom explains, municipalities that had at least one (known) Coronavirus infection since March are shown in red, the ones with no infection yet are shown in green.

Putting aside the fact that the map has no information whatsoever regarding the “age distribution of infected people”, this is still a terrible map.

1. Using red and green as colors to show information is bad for accessibility: people with red-green color blindness cannot distinguish these colors.
2. …

As the second wave of the coronavirus arrives, I was part of a discussion where keeping a healthy distance from others came up as a topic. Someone said:

I am really glad not to live in Manhattan — it’s so densely populated that if everyone went outside they could not even stay six feet apart!

While this statement was obviously just a figure of speech, it really piqued my curiosity: Manhattan is really densely populated — what if people really don’t fit on the streets if they want to keep a decent distance? …

The first electric trams in Budapest started service in 1887 on the Grand Boulevard. This segment later became part of Line 6 and its sister Line 4, which follows the same route except for the last two stops. Combined, they are the busiest tram lines of Europe. For 10 years, they were served by the longest passenger trams of the world — only to be surpassed by another line in Budapest.

Replacement buses

Someone taking these trams in Budapest does not ponder these historic facts when traveling on the line. No, she thinks about something else: the feeling that there is yet…

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.

Rationale

gptt is primarily intended to be used as a command line tool, although its core functions can be used in any Python program. …

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.[1] …

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.

I often create paper maps for my hikes. Not only are they there even if the battery of my phone or GPS dies, but I can also put custom information on them. Such information is typically a point: a checkpoint for a hike, an interesting place to see, or a geocache.

Slicing a track at an arbitrary set of points

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