A place to store random thoughts, snippets of GeoTools code and other bits and pieces of stuff I write sometimes. If you enjoyed the post or it helped you out, please consider buying me a coffee
How I created a spare monitor I’m big on reuse, repair and recycling which is one of the reasons I volunteer at Glasgow Repair Cafe – I blame being exposed to “Stig of the Dump” at an impressionable age. As a result I struggle to throw out broken things let alone things that still work. However, space limitations mean that I do occasionally have to tidy out some stuff. I discovered that I have way…
It appears that I haven’t posted anything here for a year! There are some mitigating circumstances though. TL;DR; I didn’t die and I have a new job. The Build Up Coincidently, about a year ago I started to struggle with my mental health. Initially I didn’t worry too much as the onset of winter and the clocks going back always adversely affects my mood, and living in Scotland makes this worse as it…
I recently needed to implement a way of showing the uncertainty of a marker in a web map (the final application isn’t ready yet) and while I found a bunch of tutorials and stackoverflow answers that covered parts of this I couldn’t find a single page on how to do it. So I’m going to write it up here so that next time I need to do this a search will find this. TL;DR; You can see a simple demo here…
I came across a brilliant thread on Mastodon by Sarah Dal discussing how she worked out what the most remote post box in the UK was. But there was one remark that bothered me, she said that to convert her lat, lon points to OSGB (EPSG:4326 to EPSG:27700 for the nerds) she had to go to the Ordnance Survey site to find some software to do this. Since she already had the points in QGIS this seemed…
Adding a Spell Check to QGIS (Or what to do on a rainy bank holiday in Glasgow) This Monday was a local bank holiday in Glasgow (or at least the university) as a remnant of when the whole town took a train to Blackpool in the same two weeks so that the ship builders and steel works could stop in a coordinated fashion. As is required in the UK the weather was awful so I stayed in and being bored…
Is GeoJSON a good spatial data format? A few days ago on Mastodon Eli Pousson asked: Can anyone suggest examples of files that can contain location info but aren’t often considered spatial data file formats? He suggested EXIF, Iván Sánchez Ortega followed up with spreadsheets, and being devilish I said GeoJSON. This led to more discussion, with people asking why I thought that, so I instead of…
Review of FOSS4G 2023 Introduction FOSS4G 2023 was held in Prizren, Kosovo and there were 800+ attendees from 120+ countries. This was a great attendance despite Kosovo not being the easiest place to get to, especially if you were me. I had booked flights to and from Belgrade, Serbia because they were a relatively good times for me (I am missing being only 1 hour from a London airport). It looked…
Drawing a line on a GeoTools Map As anyone following the dismal news out of the UK recently will know we had some sort of royal extravaganza down south in England this weekend, so with nothing better to do (and an extra day off) I decided to do some playing with GeoTools. This was mostly motivated by the work I had already done in answering this gis.stackexchange.com question about how to draw a…
I use open source tools nearly all the time and I’m always on the look out for new and useful tools to help make my life easier, so in this post I’m going to list some of the ones I’ve found recently. MailHog MailHog is an email testing took for developers. That doesn’t sound like much but when you are trying to configure a program to send you email notifications then it can be a life saver…
Moving If you’ve been following me on twitter you may have noticed that I’ve gone a bit quiet there, and possibly other places that you expected to see me like stackexchange and the GeoServer lists. There are two reasons for this, first I’ve abandoned my twitter account, partly because of Elon Musk and co but mostly because there is now a critical mass of people I know and people I find…