Robin's Blog

Archive for the ‘Academic’ Category

A load of links…

For months now I’ve been collecting a load of links saying that I’ll get round to blogging them "soon". Well, I’m currently babysitting for a friend’s daughter (who is sleeping peacefully upstairs), so I’ve finally found time to write them up. So, here are a load of links – a lot of them are geospatial- […]

Accessing Planetary Computer STAC files in DuckDB

I’ve been informed that this method is no longer working, and I haven’t had time to try and update it to work again. I’m leaving this here for historical value, and in case anyone can adapt the method to make it work. Microsoft Planetary Computer is a wonderful archive of geospatial datasets (primarily raster images […]

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 […]