This article is in the paper copy of the FT today, which is nice :) Quite chuffed that my little data analysis project has ended up in a national newspaper. And I think it's an important topic too. #uk #health #pharmacy #data #datanalysis

Did you know that the number of pharmacies in England open after 9pm has decreased by 95% in just three years? I did some data analysis on this, inspired by needing an out of hours pharmacy over Christmas, and it has been featured in the Financial Times today: as.ft.com/r/4333cab1-6...

2025 GDAL User Survey is now active for the entire month of December! Visit gdal.org/survey/ & tell the project how you use it, where you get help, what it should do in the future, & how/if it should use LLMs going forward. (optionally) give us your email, we'll even enter you to win a GDAL t-shirt!

We have now uploaded all the recorded sessions from #FOSS4GUK 2025 in Leeds. 📹🦉 We would now invite everyone else to our youtube channel if you would like to catch up on the 35 recorded session. www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCKv...

Very proud of my former student (now colleague!), Gabi, who just gave her first conference presentation at #foss4guk in Leeds. #geospatial #gis #osgeo #postgis

The new 'gdal raster neighbours' function is pretty cool - it does convolution across a raster, with configurable kernels and other options. Not yet released, but available in dev builds. See gdal.org/en/latest/pr... for details.

Looking forward to #foss4guk this week in Leeds. I'll be attending with a colleague, running a workshop on producing live vector tiles from PostGIS and my colleague will be giving a talk. Now just to hope that the trains work better than last year: I got stuck in Bristol TM because the lift broke!

Debated about buying some heavy water today...for my #emfcamp talk/demo but a) it's very expensive and b) it'd probably get me put on a list. I'm consoling myself by buying high wattage halogen lamps instead.

@pwramsey.bsky.social and I are hosting PostGIS Day again this year! The call for papers and registration is open now. Join us! www.snowflake.com/postgis-day-...

Does anyone know any good books about the UK telephone network? Ideally I'd be interested in a history of the network, exchange development, memories of working on the network, big events (eg. phONEday etc) - but I can't seem to find anything like this

Orbio Earth just open-sourced their full methane detection pipeline—models, tools, synthetic-plume engine & validation notebooks—for Sentinel-2, Landsat 8/9, and EMIT. #Methane #ClimateTech #OpenSource - orbio-earth.github.io/Project-Euca...

So, TIL that a MultiPolygon is invalid if any of its polygon parts touch at more than a single point. Eg. a MultiPolygon where two 'polygon parts' share an edge is invalid. I can see why this is the case - those two polygon parts should be merged, but it's a bit annoying. #gis

I won't be able to make this as my wife is in the US at the time and so I'm needed at home - but I've had a great time at PyCon UK in the past, and I'm already looking forward to watching the videos of some of these talks.

Pleased to announce that I'll be giving a workshop at #foss4guk entitled 'Live Vector Tiles from PostGIS with pg_tileserv: A Hands-on Workshop' - I'll take you through the full process of using pg_tileserv to serve vector tiles to web maps (using MapLibre, Leaflet etc) and QGIS. Come along!

The Placing Technology blog (placing.technology) is utterly fascinating - someone blogging parts of their PhD research about the history of GIS and geospatial technologies in general.

The bubble mixture recipe for big bubbles on this blog is awesome - easy to make and works far better than others I've tried in the past! juliawise.net/misc-parenti... Thanks @juliawise.bsky.social

Just reviewed the list of talks/workshops for #foss4g2025 in Auckland - there are loads of really cool submissions. Such a shame I won't be able to be there, but I'll look forward to the videos. You can review them too at 2025.foss4g.org/attend/call-... Very simple to review, just 4 options!

We are finally ready to announce that EMF 2026 will happen on July 16-19, 2026, at Eastnor Castle Deer Park, Herefordshire. Expect more updates soon as we start spinning up the organisation again.

Surprised to find out today that my talk on UK railway signalling at #emfcamp from a few years ago has now had over 3,500 views! It's at www.youtube.com/watch?v=cryU... if you'd like to watch it.

🚨 Alert. Alert. The closing date for presentation submissions for #FOSS4GUK is rapidly approaching. Submit your talks here: uk.osgeo.org/foss4guk2025... It can be opinions, about projects, new ideas, breaking down technical concepts. Whatever topic you want, just involve open geospatial!

Found a cool feature of ogr2ogr: you can use SQL like 'SELECT * EXCEPT (col1, col2) FROM table' with the -sql parameter to exclude a few fields from the conversion process. Handy when you've got lots of fields and don't want to list them all out in the SELECT. See gdal.org/en/stable/us... #gis #gdal

Thinking of proposing a workshop at FOSS4G UK 2025 on on-the-fly tile generation for webmaps. Could cover MVT generation using PostGIS and pg_tileserv, raster tile generation using Titiler etc, or both? Any preferences? Or particular things I should cover? #foss4g #foss4guk #osgeo #gis

Just bought my ticket for @uk.osgeo.org's FOSS4G UK conference in October. Excited to attend on behalf of Rebalance Earth, and with some colleagues. Now just to write my workshop proposal... #gis #foss4g

New-ish post on my blog: it's another links post - that's all I seem to be able to get round to writing at the moment. Anyway blog.rtwilson.com/more-links-j... has links on a range of topics including #python #geospatial #gis #stac #postgres and #3dprinting. Enjoy!

This new functionality for seasonal grouping in xarray is nice: xarray.dev/blog/season-... - In one of the talks I gave about xarray years ago (at @ajgwords.bsky.social's Rasters Revealed, I think) I was asked a question about the season grouping being N Hemisphere focused - now I have a solution!

USGS, which operates the Landsat satellites, just announced that Landsat 7 was officially decommissioned today. Landsat 8 and 9 continue operations. www.usgs.gov/news/nationa...

Quite chuffed that my paper on Py6S - a Python interface I developed to the 6S Atmospheric Radiative Transfer model has now got to 200 citations. Not bad for a "software paper that will never get cited" as some people told me at the time! #python #science #remotesensing

Registration for #FOSS4G:UK 2025 is open! Early bird tickets are £80, until the end of July, which is the same date when the call for presentations closes. NB conference t-shirts and tickets for the social evening optional. uk.osgeo.org/foss4guk2025... www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/foss4guk-2...

Just released another #3dprinting model - a lacemaking pin pusher. These are devices used by lacemakers to push little pins into their lace pillow (to hold the lace) without hurting their fingers. Available at makerworld.com/en/models/14... and probably coming to #emfcamp for a workshop!

Ever needed to simplify street networks? I did. And it is a pain. So we wrote an algorithm that does that for us. And can do for you, as it is available as a Python package called `neatnet`. Here's a short blog about it - martinfleischmann.net/simplificati... and package - uscuni.org/neatnet

New blog post: Learning resources for GIS in Python with cloud-native geospatial, PostGIS and more: blog.rtwilson.com/learning-res... I recently sent a list of learning resources to a MSc student I'm working with, and (with her permission) am sharing. #python #gis #remotesensing #geospatial

Quite chuffed, I've got to 200 downloads of 3D models I've created and published on MakerWorld: makerworld.com/en/@robintw Check them out - there are some models of bits of my body (from CT scans), railway signalling things, craft stuff, jokes and more! #3dprinting

Anyone know if there are WorldClim mirrors around with COG (geotiff) or Zarr cloud ready support. The main repo is glacial. #rstats #rspatial

We're looking for another speaker at PyData Southampton for our meetup on 15th April. If you can get to Southampton, UK (just 1hr15 by train from London!) you'll be sure of a warm welcome. Anything Python, data science, machine learning, AI etc welcome. @pydatasoton.bsky.social #python #pydata

Recently came across the FILTER keyword in the Postgres SQL dialect. Looks really handy. Allows things like SELECT COUNT(*) as total_count, COUNT(*) FILTER (WHERE a > 5) as a_gt_5 See stokerpostgresql.blogspot.com/2025/02/how-... and www.crunchydata.com/blog/using-p... for details #sql #postgres

Obstore v0.6 brings simple, painless integration with Microsoft Planetary Computer! - *Automatic token refresh*. No need to manually fetch SAS tokens and never think about token expiration times again. - STAC API integration developmentseed.org/obstore/late...

Love it when I do a quick search for a QGIS plugin and find exactly what I want - today I wanted an easy way for a non-GIS specialist to find a UK postcode in QGIS. The ZoomToPostcode plugin (plugins.qgis.org/plugins/Zoom...) does exactly what I want! #gis #qgis

Love this post! A GeoParquet backend for stac-fastapi sounds really useful for something I am working on (github.com/stac-utils/s...), and it's great to see some work on authentication for STAC - a problem I got part-way through trying to solve at a previous client (github.com/developments...)

New blog post: A load more links, at blog.rtwilson.com/a-load-more-... Basically just a load more links that I've collected over the past weeks/months, mostly with a geospatial/data/Python theme but not entirely. #gis #gischat #python

Reposting for the work-hours GIS crowd - I've had some really interesting responses already, and am going to write up all the responses in a blog post later this week.

If I wanted to persuade someone who only knows ArcGIS/ESRI products that they should look at QGIS/open-source tools, what particular features should I point to? Aside from being free and open-source - what wow features do they have? What can you do easily that you can't in Arc? #gis #gischat #foss4g

Huge win! Government announces plans to open up the Land Registry. If delivered, will finally reveal more about who owns land in England and Wales. Read my blog post for more details & how you can write to the Minister to make sure this now happens: whoownsengland.org/2025/03/06/h... 🧵1/

The raster labelling feature in the latest release of QGIS looks really cool. I've had to do a poor-man's version of this before by converting to a vector grid. Also gonna use it for updating some of the images I use for teaching. qgis.org/project/visu... #gis #qgis #raster

I give public science groups, usually to small/medium-sized groups locally-ish (tho I also do online talks). Went through my list of places I've given talks recently, and of the 17 different groups I've spoken at over the last 5 years or so, 40% have now closed. That's a real shame.

Thank you once again to @robintw.bsky.social for a fascinating talk on Monitoring the Environment from Space! It was a packed house and from all the glowing feedback we’ve received it was clearly a very popular topic. We hope to have Robin back to give another talk in the future!

Reminder for this evening. We're really looking forward to this talk!

Our next FOSS4G:UK will be an in-person event in Leeds on 1st & 2nd October 2025. More details soon at uk.osgeo.org. Start thinking about your submission for the Call for Talks - we want to hear what you have been up to with Free & Open Source 4 Geospatial! #GISchat

Just one week to go until we'll be hearing from @robintw.bsky.social about Monitoring the Environment from Space. Doors open at 7pm on Tuesday 18th Feb. We hope to see you there! For more information, visit our website from the link in our profile.

Following the example set by Umbra, the hyperspectral satellite imaging company Wyvern is now making available a subset of its data for free. This is the first time OSINT users will be able to work with hyperspectral data, & could lead to many interesting use cases. wyvern.space/open-data/

Python 1.0.0, released 31 years ago today: groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.... --> Tired of decyphering the Perl code you wrote last week? --> Frustrated with Bourne shell syntax? --> Spent too much time staring at core dumps lately? Maybe you should try Python!