Robin's Blog

Archive for the ‘GIS’ Category

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 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 […]

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 […]