Weeknotes: 5th October 2026

Habitat maps My plan was to do a semi-global run this week, but to get there I ended up with a stack of small steps towards that which instead took up the time. OSM downloads to Overpass Up to now I've been accessing OpenStreetMap (OSM) data by doing region specific downloads from Geofabrik. Obviously I could just scale this up and download ALL TEH REGIONS!, but instead I turned to another option. Colleague Anil Madhavapeddy has been setting up a local OSM mirror with Overpass server so we can query the Overpass API to our hearts content without hitting limits on the public version and/or annoying people. The main interesting thing here for me was I'd not considered that the country specific downloads actually miss out overlapping/enclosing polygons that are not entirely within the download area. For my use case, where I'm trying to find very local things (forests, parks, etc.) this won't make a huge difference, particularly as I've mostly been focussed on island nations (UK,…