Robin's Blog

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Resources for learning Python for Remote Sensing – or switching from IDL

I’m supervising an MSc student for her thesis this summer, and the work she’s doing with me is going to involve a fair amount of programming, in the context of remote sensing & GIS processing. She’s got experience programming in IDL from a programming course during the taught part of her Masters, but has no […]

Software Sustainability in Remote Sensing

As part of my fellowship with the Software Sustainability Institute, I’ve written an article on Software Sustainability in Remote Sensing. This article was originally written a couple of years ago and it never quite got around to being published. However, I have recently updated it, and it’s now been posted on the SSI’s blog. I’ve […]

I’m an academic in a wheelchair – why is it so difficult?

I must say this is a bit of a departure from the normal content of my blog, but I think this is something important to post, as part of Blogging Against Disablism Day 2016. (For those who are coming here from BADD16, this blog usually talks about my academic work, Python programming, computing tips and […]

How to: speed up viewing Samba network shares in OS X

This is a very brief post to explain how I managed to speed up the viewing (that is, listing of files/directories) in Samba shares accessed via OS X. So, a bit of background: I have a file server at home which has some shared folders on it, shared using the SMB protocol. This is the […]

How to: rescue lost code from a Jupyter/IPython notebook

Jupyter (formerly known as IPython) notebooks are great – but have you ever accidentally deleted a cell that contained a really important function that you want to keep? Well, this post might help you get it back. So, imagine you have a notebook with the following code: and then you accidentally delete the top cell, with […]

Previously Unpublicised Code: RPiNDVI

Another instalment in my Previously Unpublicised Code series…this time RPiNDVI, my code for displaying live NDVI images from the Raspberry Pi NoIR camera. It isn’t perfect, and it isn’t finished – but it does the job as a proof-of-concept. If you point the camera out of your window you should see high NDVI values (white) […]

My thesis writing timeline – analysed using Dropbox and Python

I wrote my PhD thesis in LaTeX, and stored all of the files in my Dropbox folder. Dropbox stores previous versions of your files – for up to 30 days if you are on their free plan. Towards the end of my PhD, I realised that I could write a fairly simple Python script that […]

How to: Get Sublime Text style editing in the IPython/Jupyter notebook

So, I really like the Jupyter notebook (formerly known as the IPython notebook), but I often find myself missing the ‘fancy’ features that ‘proper’ editors have. I particularly miss the amazing multiple cursor functionality of editors like Sublime Text and Atom. I’ve known for a while that you can edit a cell in your default […]