Robin's Blog

Author Archive

The Feynman approach to small monetary compensation

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 […]

Join the GeoTAM hackathon to work out business turnovers!

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 […]

How to convert hex-encoded WKB geometries in PostGIS

A quick post today to talk about a couple of PostGIS functions I learnt recently. I had a CSV file that contained well-known binary (WKB) representations of geometries, stored as hexadecimal strings. I imported the CSV into a PostGIS database, and wanted to convert these to be proper PostGIS geometries. I initially went for the […]

I won two British Cartographic Society awards!

It’s been a while since I posted here – I kind of lost momentum over the summer (which is a busy time with a school-aged child) and never really picked it up again. Anyway, I wanted to write a quick post to tell people that I won two awards at the British Cartographic Society awards […]

Who reads my blog? Send me an email or comment if you do!

I’m interested to find out who is reading my blog. Following the lead of Jamie Tanna who was in turn copying Terence Eden (both of whose blogs I read), I’d like to ask people who read this to drop me an email or leave a comment on this post if you read this blog and […]

A load of links…

For months now I’ve been collecting a load of links saying that I’ll get round to blogging them "soon". Well, I’m currently babysitting for a friend’s daughter (who is sleeping peacefully upstairs), so I’ve finally found time to write them up. So, here are a load of links – a lot of them are geospatial- […]

Accessing Planetary Computer STAC files in DuckDB

Microsoft Planetary Computer is a wonderful archive of geospatial datasets (primarily raster images of various types), provided with a STAC catalog to enable them to be easily searched through an API. That’s fine for normal usage where you want to find a selection of images and access the images themselves, but less useful when you […]

Introducing offline_folium

Another new-ish package that I’ve never got around to writing about on my blog is offline_folium. It has a somewhat niche use-case, but it seems like a few people have found it useful. In brief, it allows you to use the folium package for creating interactive maps from Python, but without an internet connection. Folium […]