Field Notes — how to read anywhere on Earth
Guides to the visual clues that decide a geography round: bollards, road paint, utility poles, licence plates, scripts and shadows. Free to read, free to play.
- How to Guess Any Country From One Street View Frame — A repeatable five-step method for identifying any location on Earth from one frozen frame — driving side, biome, sun, script, infrastructure.
- Driving Side: The First Cut You Should Always Make — Around 76 countries drive on the left. Reading which side you are on is the cheapest cut in the game — and five ways to do it without a moving car.
- Bollards Are the Cheat Code: Read Roadside Posts by Country — The small white posts at the edge of the road are set by national standards bodies and almost never redesigned. Here is how to read shape, cap and reflector.
- License Plate Colours as a World Map — You cannot read the characters, but you do not need to. Plate shape, colour and banding identify a country from fifty metres away.
- Road Lines Decoded: Why the Paint Changes at Every Border — Centre line colour, edge line colour and dash geometry are set by national law, not by habit. Read the paint properly and you have most of the way to the country.
- What the Google Car Gives Away: The Camera Meta — The vehicle carrying the camera leaves fingerprints in every frame — blur colour, roof racks, antennas, escort cars. Learn to read them, and when not to.
- Identify a Country by Its Script in Three Seconds — You do not need to read the sign — you need to classify the writing system. Each script collapses the map differently, and several are single-country tells.
- Utility Poles: The Ugly Clue That Wins Rounds — Power distribution was built nationally, standardised nationally, and never modernised. Pole tops are a regional fingerprint hiding in plain sight.
- Follow the Sun: Read Shadows to Find Your Hemisphere — Shadow direction and satellite dish angle split the planet in half in under five seconds — no vehicles, no signs and no road furniture required.
- Street View Image Quality as a Country Clue — Resolution, colour rendering and compression artefacts are country-level clues, because Google did not photograph the world with the same equipment.
- Guardrails, Fences and Chevrons: The Boring Clues — Crash barriers, chevron boards and field fencing are nationally standardised and almost never noticed. They belong in your first pass, not your last.
- The Follow-Car and Other Weird Street View Tells — Some coverage carries oddities so specific they identify a country instantly — escort vehicles, unusual capture methods, strange blurs and one-off quirks.
- How to Guess Any Indian State from Street View — India is 28 states and 8 union territories and the scoring radius is tight. Here is the order to read a frame in — plate code, script, milestone, landscape, roofline — and what to do when they disagree.
- Indian Number Plate Codes by State — and What the Colours Mean — Every Indian registration plate opens with a two-letter state code and a district number. Here is the full table, the colour system, and why a plate on a truck is worth almost nothing.
- Reading Indian Scripts: Which State Uses Which Alphabet — You do not need to read the words. Ten scripts, told apart by shape alone, and each one maps to a small handful of Indian states. Includes the confusion pairs and why the Hindi belt defeats this method.
- Indian Milestone Colours: What the Painted Stone at the Roadside Means — The band on an Indian kilometre stone is colour-coded by road class — yellow for national, green for state, black for district, orange for village. Here is how to turn that into a location.
- Indian Landscapes by Region: Soil, Crop and Tree as Location Clues — Plates drive and buses drive, but soil does not. Black cotton soil, red laterite, Thar scrub, coconut palm, tea and paddy — how to place an Indian round from the ground and the vegetation alone.
- Indian Roofs, Buses and Autorickshaws: Regional Tells on the Street — Roof pitch tracks rainfall, state transport buses are painted by state, autorickshaw livery is regional, and Punjab puts aeroplanes on its water tanks. The built environment as a location clue.