Robin's Blog

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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 […]

Upcoming talks: Cafe Sci Oxford & PyData Southampton

I’m giving two talks in the next two weeks, and wanted to publicise them here in case anyone local-ish wants to come. Oxford Cafe Scientifique I’ve spoken at various Cafe Scientifique meet-ups before, and now it’s the turn of the Oxford one. I’ll be giving my talk about the whole range of satellite imaging – […]

Travel times, over time

A fun analysis I did a while back was using the Google Maps API to look at travel times between certain locations over time. I originally got interested in this because I found that travelling from my house to the university (yes, that’s how long ago this started…) seemed to either take a very short […]