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Explore UK place names on a map – my new web app

As an Easter present for you all, I’ve got a new web app you can play with. It lets you search for UK place names – things like ‘ends with burgh’ or ‘starts with great’ or ‘contains sea’ – and then plot them on an interactive map. Once you’ve done that, you can even share […]

My geospatial PDF talk at FOSS4G 2021

This is only about 3 years late – but I gave a talk at FOSS4G 2021 on geospatial PDFs. The full title was: From static PDFs to interactive, geospatial PDFs, or, ‘I never knew PDFs could do that!’ The video is below: In the talk I cover what a geospatial PDF is, how to export […]

How to speed up appending to PostGIS tables with ogr2ogr

Summary: If appending to a PostGIS table with GDAL/OGR is taking a long time, try setting the PG_USE_COPY config option to YES (eg. adding –config PG_USE_COPY YES to your command line). This should speed it up, but beware that if there are concurrent writes to your table at the same time as OGR is accessing […]

How to create a Windows USB boot stick using Ventoy

I ran into a situation recently where I needed to create a Windows 10 bootable USB stick. I could easily download a Windows 10 ISO file, but I knew that it needed some ‘special magic’ to write it to a USB stick that would boot properly. I tried various solutions (including windiskwriter) but none of […]

How to easily reload a QGIS layer

Summary: The QGIS Reloader plugin will give you a new QGIS command to reload a layer, very useful when you’re updating a layer in another program and want to refresh QGIS’s view of it. I use QGIS for almost all of my interactive GIS needs. Often I’ll be writing some code in Python that creates […]

How to get segment-geospatial working on Microsoft Planetary Computer

Just a quick one today to document the solution to a problem I ran into earlier today. I was using Microsoft Planetary Computer to access some Landsat satellite data, and I wanted to run it through the Segment Anything model from Meta, to segment out agricultural fields from the image. I tried to do this […]