Robin's Blog

Archive for the ‘GIS’ Category

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 […]

I was interviewed on a podcast!

Recently I was interviewed on the Geomob podcast. You can listen on the Geomob site or using the embedded player below: In the episode I talk about the British Placename Mapper and its inspiration, how I built it, and what might come next. I also cover some of my other geospatial projects including the Free […]

New Projects page on my website

Just a quick post here to say that I’ve added a new Projects page to my freelance website. I realised I didn’t have anywhere online that I could point people to that had links to all of the ‘non-work’ (maybe that should be ‘non-paid’) projects I’ve made. These projects include my Free GIS Data site, […]

Simple segmentation of geospatial images

I had a need to do some segmentation of some satellite imagery the other day, for a client. Years ago I was quite experienced at doing segmentation and classification using eCognition but that was using the university’s license, and I don’t have a license myself (and they’re very expensive). So, I wanted a free solution. […]

What’s the largest building in Southampton? Find out with 5 lines of code

Recently I became suddenly curious about the sizes of buildings in Southampton, UK, where I live. I don’t know what triggered this sudden curiosity, but I wanted to know what the largest buildings in Southampton are. In this context, I’m using “largest” to mean largest in terms of land area covered – ie. the area […]

British Placename Mapper – follow-up and links to cool maps

A couple of weeks ago, I released the British Placename Mapper, which is a website that allows you to search place names in Great Britain and show them on a map. You can do searches like finding all the places starting with ‘great’, or ending with ‘burgh’ or containing ‘sea’. I tweeted and tooted about […]

Simple self-hosted OpenStreetMap routing using Valhalla and Docker

I came up with an interesting plan for an artistic map recently (more on that when I’ve finished working on it), and to create it I needed to be able to calculate a large number of driving routes around Southampton, my home city. Specifically, I needed to be able to get lines showing the driving […]