Robin's Blog

Author Archive

How to decorate a simple but effective child’s birthday cake

Welcome to anyone coming here from April Cools! I usually blog about things like cool geospatial tools, books I’ve read, Python packages I’ve created and more. But today, time for something different… I quite like making decorated birthday cakes (I’ll show some of my favourites at the end of this post), but they generally take […]

How to bypass SSL for PROJ reprojection

A friend was using GDAL’s ogr2ogr command to import some data to PostGIS recently, and as part of the import they were doing a reprojection of the data. They got the following error: PROJ: Cannot open https://cdn.proj.org/uk_os_OSTN15_NTv2_OSGBtoETRS.tif: schannel: the certificate or certificate chain is based on an untrusted root They’ve had various SSL errors on […]

Today I Learned – in 2024 and 2025

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 […]

Favourite books I read in 2025

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 […]

More links – June 2025

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 […]

A load more links

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 […]

My talk at FOSS4G UK South West 2024

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 […]