Robin's Blog

Archive for the ‘Programming’ 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 […]

How to install the Python triangle package on an Apple Silicon Mac

I was recently trying to set up RasterVision on my Apple Silicon Mac (specifically a M1 MacBook Pro, but I’m pretty sure this applies to any Apple Silicon Mac). It all went fine until it came time to install the triangle package, when I got an error. The error output is fairly long, but the […]

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 […]

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 […]