Some data analysis I’ve done has been featured in the Financial Times today – see this article (the link may not work any more unless you have a FT subscription – sorry). The brief story is that I had terrible back pain over Christmas, and spoke to an out-of-hours GP on the phone who prescribed […]
I don’t seem to have time or energy for long posts these days, but here’s another quick post which might save you some time and frustration. Recently, I’ve been trying to import OpenStreetMap data into a PostGIS database to use with pgRouting. I wanted to import data for the whole of England – which has […]
A Discord server I use has a channel called #til, standing for Today I Learned. It’s a place to post interesting or surprising things you recently learned. I took my posts to that channel from the last couple of years, tidied them up and have listed them below. Hopefully you’ll find something interesting there: TIL […]
I really haven’t got much time or energy at the moment (I spent most of the Christmas break with an extremely painful back, which was exhausting and frustrating), but I wanted to post a very brief list of books I read this year. I read a total of 44 books this year, which includes re-reads […]
I’ve got into a bit of a habit of writing occasional posts with links to interesting things I’ve found (probably because it’s a relatively easy blog post to write). This is another of those posts – this time, written in June 2025. So, let’s get on with some links: Why COUNT(*) can be slow in […]
I recently gave a careers talk to students at Solent University, and through that I got to know a MSc student there who had previous GIS experience and was now doing a Data Analytics and AI MSc course. Her GIS experience was mostly in the ESRI stack (ArcGIS and related tools) and she was keen […]
I did a post a while back which was just a lot of links to things I found interesting, mostly in the geospatial/data/programming sphere. Since then I’ve collected a lot more links – so here are some of them. The theme, such as there is, seems to be ‘this would have really helped me about […]
As always, this post is very delayed – apologies. In fact, I was encouraged to write this by a friend who I see at PyData Southampton (Hi, if you’re reading this!). I mentioned my talk in passing to her, and she asked if I’d blogged about it yet. I admitted that I hadn’t, and promised […]
I just shared this approach with some friends, and thought I’d blog it here too. When I get a relatively small amount of monetary compensation for something, I take the ‘Feynman Approach’ to it and buy something fun with the money, giving me a sense of satisfaction from the compensation (which, presumably, was to compensate […]
Summary: I’m involved in organising a hackathon, and I’d love you to take part. The open-source GeoTAM hackathon focuses on estimating turnover for individual business locations in the UK, from a variety of open datasets. Please checkout the hackathon page and sign up. There are prizes of up to £2,000! (Click image for a larger […]