Upgrading the Cartridge on a Sony PS-HX500
At the start of lockdown, I picked up a Sony PS-HX500 turntable at a decent price. I thought it would be a fun lockdown project to record some of my LPs to digital formats and
research
Microsoft Flight Simulator (MSFS) 2020: Points of Interest Map
Microsoft Flight Sim (MSFS) 2020 is now out on Xbox Series S|X, allowing more and more people to explore the world by plane. Bringing together a vast amount of aerial imagery, the game can make
Ecurie Ecosse @ Merchiston Mews
During one of my many ‘Wednesday Wanders‘, I found another lovely Mews in Edinburgh. A Mews is a row of stables and carriage houses, but this one’s horsepower was upped somewhat… [link]
Map of Common Gaelic Placenames
After posting on twitter about starting to better understand Scottish maps since learning some Gaelic, I was pointed to all sorts of interesting articles, projects, books and events on the subject. One was this Ordanance
Merging Intersecting Lines in R
I came across a problem without a clear solution. I had lots (and lots) of line segments, which represented river stretches across GB. All I wanted to do was join together touching segments into a
Playing CHESS with Effective Rainfall (GB)
It’s useful to know how much water enters a system, particularly as part of the runoff model. I’ve always thought of the budget of precipiation (Prec) & potential evapotranspiration (PET) as effective rainfall (Raineff), but
LowPoly Fish: UK Freshwater Species
I’ve recently been working on amalgamating as much freshwater fish data as possible, and ended up with a dataset with 350,000+ individual fish records. An amazing dataset, and just a subset – in this case,
Animating Time: QGIS & FFmpeg
I was recently asked if I could animate this summer’s records from the Bloomin’ Algae App, to help show the spatial patterns as well as the impact of a recent media interest in the subject
RMarkdown Fun!
I recently went to an interesting EdinbR talk on RMarkdown and the workflow available via R Studio and its products. I’d not used any markdown before but had seen its use in documentation, and this
The Seas of the Beaufort Scale
During some recent work with weather data, I was looking at information on the Beaufort Scale and stumbled upon a set of evocative images of the various seas at different points in the scale. There
The Longest Countries Made of Elements
My pub quiz team have started setting a quiz each week to keep us in good form, with one person selecting questions for the others each week. For my last turn (full quiz here, if
UK Wind Data – TIFFs (free)
It’s very hard to get decent observed wind data for the UK (and most countries, I imagine), so I was intrigued when I found a 1km resolution database of wind data freely available online. You
RetroPie on a Raspberry Pi 3 = Retro Games!
After the recent release of the Mini NES, I came across an article on building a better system for the same price, with a Raspberry Pi 3 running RetroPie OS. I quite fancied a little
4 Maps of the US Electoral College
There have been a lot of articles showing up in and around the US election result either calling for the abolition of the electoral college based on its unfair representation of the populous, or the
Blimp-based aerial archaeology, circa 2006
Many years ago now, I was part of a group looking at archaeological GIS and experimenting with the use of a small blimp and remote camera for the purposes of scientific research. These days you
Name That Lake!
Two things coincided this week. The imminent launch of our new UK Lakes Portal illuminated how few lakes we have recorded names for, whilst a visiting work experience student was needing something to do… It
Seabird Density Visualisation, British Isles
I wanted to do a pretty simple GIS task with some nice visualisation, and in the course of my work had stumbled upon the ‘Magic’ site the government has set up. It’s not the flashiest
RRS Discovery – Underwater Science!
This is roughly halfway between personal research and work, as I won a ballot to get a tour of the RRS Discovery – a NERC research ship that was visiting London for a few days.