Robin's Blog

Welcome to anyone coming here from April Cools! I usually blog about things like cool geospatial tools, books I’ve read, Python packages I’ve created and more. But today, time for something different… I quite like making decorated birthday cakes (I’ll show some of my favourites at the end of this post), but they generally take […]

A friend was using GDAL’s ogr2ogr command to import some data to PostGIS recently, and as part of the import they were doing a reprojection of the data. They got the following error: PROJ: Cannot open https://cdn.proj.org/uk_os_OSTN15_NTv2_OSGBtoETRS.tif: schannel: the certificate or certificate chain is based on an untrusted root They’ve had various SSL errors on […]

Some data analysis I’ve done has been featured in the Financial Times today – see this article (the link may not work any more unless you have a FT subscription – sorry). The brief story is that I had terrible back pain over Christmas, and spoke to an out-of-hours GP on the phone who prescribed […]

I don’t seem to have time or energy for long posts these days, but here’s another quick post which might save you some time and frustration. Recently, I’ve been trying to import OpenStreetMap data into a PostGIS database to use with pgRouting. I wanted to import data for the whole of England – which has […]

A Discord server I use has a channel called #til, standing for Today I Learned. It’s a place to post interesting or surprising things you recently learned. I took my posts to that channel from the last couple of years, tidied them up and have listed them below. Hopefully you’ll find something interesting there: TIL […]

I really haven’t got much time or energy at the moment (I spent most of the Christmas break with an extremely painful back, which was exhausting and frustrating), but I wanted to post a very brief list of books I read this year. I read a total of 44 books this year, which includes re-reads […]

I’ve got into a bit of a habit of writing occasional posts with links to interesting things I’ve found (probably because it’s a relatively easy blog post to write). This is another of those posts – this time, written in June 2025. So, let’s get on with some links: Why COUNT(*) can be slow in […]

I recently gave a careers talk to students at Solent University, and through that I got to know a MSc student there who had previous GIS experience and was now doing a Data Analytics and AI MSc course. Her GIS experience was mostly in the ESRI stack (ArcGIS and related tools) and she was keen […]

I did a post a while back which was just a lot of links to things I found interesting, mostly in the geospatial/data/programming sphere. Since then I’ve collected a lot more links – so here are some of them. The theme, such as there is, seems to be ‘this would have really helped me about […]

As always, this post is very delayed – apologies. In fact, I was encouraged to write this by a friend who I see at PyData Southampton (Hi, if you’re reading this!). I mentioned my talk in passing to her, and she asked if I’d blogged about it yet. I admitted that I hadn’t, and promised […]

I just shared this approach with some friends, and thought I’d blog it here too. When I get a relatively small amount of monetary compensation for something, I take the ‘Feynman Approach’ to it and buy something fun with the money, giving me a sense of satisfaction from the compensation (which, presumably, was to compensate […]

Summary: I’m involved in organising a hackathon, and I’d love you to take part. The open-source GeoTAM hackathon focuses on estimating turnover for individual business locations in the UK, from a variety of open datasets. Please checkout the hackathon page and sign up. There are prizes of up to £2,000! (Click image for a larger […]

A quick post today to talk about a couple of PostGIS functions I learnt recently. I had a CSV file that contained well-known binary (WKB) representations of geometries, stored as hexadecimal strings. I imported the CSV into a PostGIS database, and wanted to convert these to be proper PostGIS geometries. I initially went for the […]

It’s been a while since I posted here – I kind of lost momentum over the summer (which is a busy time with a school-aged child) and never really picked it up again. Anyway, I wanted to write a quick post to tell people that I won two awards at the British Cartographic Society awards […]

Summary: I’ve created a demo web app where you can search an aerial photo of Southampton, UK using text queries such as "roundabout", "tennis court" or "ship". It uses vector embeddings to do this – which I explain in this blog post. In this post I’m going to try and explain a bit more about […]

I’m interested to find out who is reading my blog. Following the lead of Jamie Tanna who was in turn copying Terence Eden (both of whose blogs I read), I’d like to ask people who read this to drop me an email or leave a comment on this post if you read this blog and […]

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- […]

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 […]

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 realised recently that I’d never actually blogged about my pyAURN package – so it’s about time that I did. When doing some freelance work on air quality a while back, I wanted an easy way to access UK air quality from the Automatic Urban and Rural Network (AURN). Unfortunately, there isn’t a nice API […]