a poster press · Strava in, prints out

Posters pulled from the roads you ride.

patinate draws your Strava activity onto a city basemap, one low-alpha stroke per ride. Where you ride often the strokes stack and the color deepens, the way patina builds on metal.

Open the press Installcargo install patinate

A patinate poster of Grand Rapids in noir_heat: orange heat strokes over white roads on a black ground. — noir_heatsample data · Grand Rapids

the prints

Six themes, one city.

The bundled Grand Rapids sample through every theme the binary ships. Open any of them on the press to change the inks.

Grand Rapids sample rendered in noir_heat — noir_heat01
Black ground, white road hierarchy, hot orange heat.

Grand Rapids sample rendered in blueprint_heat — blueprint_heat02
Deep blueprint blue, pale roads, amber heat.

Grand Rapids sample rendered in warm_beige — warm_beige03
Cream paper, sepia roads, terracotta heat.

Grand Rapids sample rendered in cycle_heat — cycle_heat04
Paper palette, steel-blue heat.

Grand Rapids sample rendered in newsprint — newsprint05
Letterpress black on gray stock, red heat.

Grand Rapids sample rendered in verdigris — verdigris06
Bronze roads on a dark green ground, verdigris heat.

Each print is patinate render --theme <name> --heat-bloom 1.8 --heat-alpha 2.5 on fixtures/, rendered at build time with just web.

the plates

Four layers, in register.

A render is layered the way a print is: a ground, then each plate in its own ink. Every plate answers to a flag.

basemap

Streets and water

OpenStreetMap roads in six tiers, water and parks. Leave it off with --heat-only.

glow

The bloom

Two wide, faint passes of the heat ink under the sharp one. Scale it with --heat-bloom; 0 is a hard line.

heat

The rides

One stroke per activity, cut at the privacy zone before it is drawn. Scale its opacity with --heat-alpha.

text

The colophon

City, count and scale bar. --web leaves it off so a page can set its own.

operating sequence

Four commands, in this order.

A single Rust binary. Strava and OpenStreetMap own the upstream data, your disk holds the caches, and render works only from what is on disk.

once

auth

patinate auth

OAuth with Strava, scope activity:read_all. The token refreshes itself after that.

writes tokens into config.toml, mode 0600

once per city

fetch-osm

patinate fetch-osm --city "Your City, USA" --radius-m 25000

The OpenStreetMap basemap, from Overpass. Fetch again when you move or change the radius.

writes basemap.osm.json in the user cache dir

after rides

sync

patinate sync

An incremental pull of your activities. The only command you run often.

writes cache.db (SQLite) in the user data dir

whenever

render

patinate render --theme warm_beige --cycling --out heatmap.svg

Composes the poster from what is on disk. No network.

writes heatmap.svg, or whatever --out names

The docs: config, themes, every render flag →

after render

Three ways a render leaves the machine.

A print to hang

patinate render --theme noir_heat --anonymize --out poster.svg
rsvg-convert -w 3600 poster.svg -o poster.png

The full poster: six road tiers, glow, heat and the text plate. Rasterize it for a print shop.

A page ground

patinate render --theme cycle_heat --cycling --web \
  --transparent-bg --anonymize --out ground.svg

No text plate and no minor roads, over your own page color. cycle.dunn.dev is set on one.

An inline SVG

patinate render --theme cycle_heat --web --out inline.svg

Keeps the data-type, data-year and data-bike attributes for page filters. Pass --anonymize before it goes public.

privacy

What the zone hides, and what it doesn't.

Nothing inside obfuscation_radius_m of home reaches the SVG. The hidden zone is offset from home in a direction and distance only your [privacy] salt knows, up to offset_m (750 m by default), and each cut end is trimmed a little further along the track.

It does not hide everything. Tracks still converge toward home, and a determined analyst can narrow it to roughly 100 to 250 m. A larger radius adds only modest cover. Treat it as a tool you check, not a promise.

For anything public, also pass --anonymize: it drops the data-* attributes and the <desc> that carries the center coordinates. Everything on this site is the bundled sample: seeded random walks over the Grand Rapids road graph, no real rider.