Robin's Blog

Archive for the ‘How To’ Category

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 […]

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 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 […]

How to: speed up viewing Samba network shares in OS X

This is a very brief post to explain how I managed to speed up the viewing (that is, listing of files/directories) in Samba shares accessed via OS X. So, a bit of background: I have a file server at home which has some shared folders on it, shared using the SMB protocol. This is the […]

How to: rescue lost code from a Jupyter/IPython notebook

Jupyter (formerly known as IPython) notebooks are great – but have you ever accidentally deleted a cell that contained a really important function that you want to keep? Well, this post might help you get it back. So, imagine you have a notebook with the following code: and then you accidentally delete the top cell, with […]