Our hardware store had someone outside handing out small slices of “pizza pi.” Why a hardware store? Who knows? But it was fun.

Liking Claude Cowork so far.

"Field of Dreams" hits a little harder after your father has passed away.

Sovereignty and Open Source Open source geospatial tools are good. I have been making some form of that argument for most of my career, especially on this blog. The mature projects are equal to or better than their proprietary alternatives. The communities that build and maintain them represent…

The Siren Song of Global Identifiers Recently, a proposal submitted to the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) set off a thoughtful discussion within the open geospatial community. At issue is the idea of a global identifier system for real‑world geographic entities, which is something that would…

509 BCE - Roman Republic established 46 BCE - Julius Caesar named Dictator for Life 27 BCE - Roman Empire begins with Senate declaring Octavian as Augustus 476 CE - Fall of Western Roman Empire The Western Roman Senate convened through all of this. People matter more than institutions.

We’ve added a daily briefing feature to GeoFeeds. geofeeds.me/briefings

When the leopards are busy eating their own faces, let them continue.

When Geospatial Is Consumed at AI-Scale In February 2026, Gary Gale published a brief post describing a problem that, on its face, looked mundane. A volunteer‑maintained mapping project called Vaguely Rude Places had experienced an abrupt surge in traffic. Daily requests jumped from the low…

The most important geospatial app you will see today: www.whereisitfiveoclock.beer

Doing a little work with Mergin Maps. blog.geomusings.com/2026/02/17/x...

I haven't needed a single additional feature released since MS Word 6.0.

Github and AWS seem to be in an intense competition to see who can create the most inscrutable permissions management experience.

I tell you what, Ring figured out exactly how to weaponize white people’s empathy in service to a corporately controlled surveillance state. Tell them it will find your dog.

It’s fun to see this again, @james.fee.fm

Mudpocalypse about to hit the DMV.

Ten years ago, I wrote about the geospatial landscape as I saw it then. Ten years later, I decided to take another look.

Minneapolis residents aren’t just pushing back against Trump’s crackdown—they’re undercutting MAGA’s core philosophy, Adam Serwer argues.

"Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?" - Joseph Nye Welch

The people who spent years defending and even lionizing Kyle Rittenhouse and Ashli Babbitt now want us to believe that an unarmed mother in her car and a disarmed nurse were domestic terrorists who deserved to be murdered by law enforcement.

We've added 12 more feeds over the last couple days. Check out the updated aggregation at geofeeds.me/view

Scale doesn’t break systems, it reveals the one you actually built. At small scale, humans are the glue. At large scale, assumptions become outages. If your system only works because someone “knows how it works”…. that’s not design. That’s babysitting. spatiallyadjusted.com/lessons-from...

AI Still Requires You to Understand Your Business I have said repeatedly throughout my career that the effective use and adoption of technology requires a deep understanding of your own business processes and workflows. This is true regardless of the nature of the technology: proprietary or…

GeoFeeds: Now with MCP It's been about a year since we rolled out GeoFeeds, a spatial new aggregator along the lines of the old Planet Geospatial. During that time, it's been humming along, and we've added about 90 blog feeds to it. It provides a single, rolling, aggregated feed of posts from…

One of the giants upon whose shoulders we stand. Rest in peace, Dr. West. thezebra.org/2026/01/18/d...

“In Bid to Dissolve NATO, Trump Raises Prices for American Consumers” - Fixed it for you, @nytimes.com

Weird memory surfaced today. I was a Navy contractor for many years. There was a guy on base with a name very similar to mine, so we were adjacent in the address list. We'd get each other's email/voicemail constantly. Never met him once, but probably talked to him on the phone about two dozen times.

Spatial Analysis with Claude Code I've been doing more (a lot more) with Claude Code lately. With its subagents and skills features, it's become more customizable and powerful. I can really dial it into doing things the way I want them done, which accelerates my development and quickly gets me to…

Notepad++ is my sole use case for Wine on my Mac.

I was one of the founding members of the HIFLD working group and I am mostly ambivalent about the shuttering of HIFLD Open. It was a convenient portal for data that is available elsewhere.

“Open” can mean a lot of things. Here, we discuss its variations and their implications. cercanasystems.com/2025/11/vari...

Terrain, water, and infrastructure shape human behavior. Human behavior reshapes risk, access, and demand. That feedback loop is where many automations quietly break. AI can help guide rules by interpreting spatial nuance. We unpack this in our latest post. cercanasystems.com/2026/01/oper...

Today’s earworm open.spotify.com/track/6z9ehf...

Seemed like a good day to donate.

dog.wagged = true;

The star has come down. 2025 is in the books.

Claude Code doesn't seem to be a better programmer than me. It seems to make the same kind of mistakes I would. It simply finds them faster after the fact.

Hacked up a quick desktop geoparquet viewer with Claude Code. Currently browsing data from the HIFLD archive on Source Collective.

I used Claude Code to build an app to help me with social media. I had it build a version with Electron and another with MAUI. Makes me wonder how many SaaS subscriptions I can sunset by building helper apps for myself this way.

The past year has been difficult for many reasons, but today, I watched my granddaughters experience Christmas with joy and safety. So many choices and challenges were vindicated today.

I just want to say for the record that when the history books are written centuries from now, I believe the election of Donald Trump in a free and fair election in 2024 will go down as one of the most senseless and self-destructive own goals in human history

I have not watched “Elf” yet. What is wrong with me?

Cercana Systems LLC - Reducing the Costs of Fragmented Spatial Data in 2026 by Cercana https://cercanasystems.com/2025/12/reducing-the-costs-of-fragmented-spatial-data-in-2026/

Early bird tickets for #SOTMUS2026 are now available! Save some 🫰 and snag your spot at State of the Map US in Madison, Wisconsin, from June 11 to 13! See ya there! 🐦 openstreetmap.app.neoncrm.com/np/clients/o... #OpenStreetMap #geospatial #opendata #Madison

Can we be done with modals, now?

Attended an event in NYC by Jesse Itzler. It was part business talk, part pep rally and exactly what I needed after this year. No new words were spoken. No new pearls of wisdom entered my head, but the reframe was needed. Sometimes, you need to hear what you already know.

Data Preservation: Let the Pain Guide You As I’ve recounted before, what became HIFLD started as the M: drive on a Windows server in a musty government building in Norfolk, VA. Early exercises made it obvious that the data on our M: drive didn’t match the data on other M: drives. They also made it…