Robin's Blog

Archive for the ‘How To’ Category

Accessing Planetary Computer STAC files in DuckDB

Microsoft Planetary Computer is a wonderful archive of geospatial datasets (primarily raster images of various types), provided with a STAC catalog to enable them to be easily searched through an API. That’s fine for normal usage where you want to find a selection of images and access the images themselves, but less useful when you […]

How to subscribe to releases on Github

For a while I’d wished there was an easy way to get notified when my favourite open-source packages release a new version. I’d often see something on social media, but that tended to only be for the larger packages – and I wanted to keep up with the smaller ones too. When I actually bothered […]

Some matplotlib tips – a reblog

I was looking through my past blog posts recently, and thought a few of them were worth ‘reblogging’ so that more people could see them (now that my blog posts are getting more readers). So, here are a few posts on matplotlib tips. Matplotlib titles have configurable locations – and you can have more than […]

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. […]

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 […]

Some easy recipes

This is a bit different to what I usually post on this blog (which is usually technical content about GIS, remote sensing, Python and data analysis – see a few example posts), and this is part of April Cools – a group of bloggers writing posts that are unusual for them, but still good content. […]

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 […]