Blog

A blog on my teaching, open source GIS, travel and life

Becoming a Dad

This blog post isn’t about GIS, mapping, conferences or travel, so feel free to skip it if you want. However, if you’re interested in my experiences of becoming a Dad, read…

GISRUK 2025 in Bristol

Last week I was fortunate to be able to attend GISRUK 2025, in Bristol, UK. I am a regular at the GISRUK conference series and it is always fascinating to see the latest…

The Open Science Retreat, Batenberg, Switzerland: collaboation, connection and snow!

For four days in April I was lucky enough to be able to attend the Open Science Retreat, in Batenberg, Switzerland. The Open Science Retreat (OSR) is a chance for anyone…

Travel to Interlaken for the Open Science Retreat

I had been invited to attend the Open Science Retreat (OSR), in Batenberg, Interlaken, Switzerland and this is my journey. I have posted another post about the event itself.…

tmap version 4 released!

tmap version 4 has now been released, and is now available on CRAN. It has a whole range of new features, which we will explore in this blog post.

FOSS4G 2024 - Belém, Brazil

I was very lucky to be able to attend FOSS4G 2024, in Belém, Brazil on 2nd - 8th December 2024. Belém is a fantastic city, and due to host COP30 in November 2025, with lots…

FOSS4G:UK South West 2024 - Bristol

It was great to attend FOSS4G:UK South West 2024 in Bristol on 12th Nov, at OSGeo:UK’s now regular Bristol Venue, The Engine Shed. The event was a sell out and we had 62…

New Website - Quarto

I’ve been thinking for a bit of time that I need to redo my website as some of the pages had evolved a bit, and were getting a bit too long. What you see now is what I have…

OCG Open Standards Code Sprint, Geovation, London, UK

In July I spent three days at Geovation in London attending the OGC Open Standards Code Sprint. OGC, the Open Geospatial Consortium manage and approve standards for…

ArcMap: 1999 to 2024

We finally have an end date for ArcMap! This has been something that has been a long time coming, but I would say is certainly due now. ArcMap final date of support for…

ICC, Cape Town, South Africa – 3D Models and UN Acronym Soup

A couple of weeks ago I spent a fantastic week in Cape Town, South Africa, attending the 2023 International Cartographic Conference. The ICC (not to be confused with the…

ESRI UK & GeoBusiness: GeoAI & Digital Twins

Along with many other people from the geospatial community, I was up in London earlier this week for ESRI UK Annual Conference, GeoBusiness and Spatial Data Science…

FOSS4G: Travelling by Train to Florence, Italy (from Weymouth, UK)

I recently attended my first international FOSS4G conference in Florence (Firenze), Italy, in August 2022. For those who don’t know, FOSS4G is Free and Open Source for (4)…

FOSS4G:UK Local 2022

On PostGIS day last week, Thurs 17th Nov, we ran FOSS4G:UK Local 2022. We were trying out a new model, with the conference distributed over 9 different physical venues (and…

ESRI UK & GeoBusiness: Digital Twins or just Digial Offspring?

Last week I attended the first ESRI UK Annual Conference (17th May) and the first GEO Business conference (18th & 19th May) for three years (although GEO Business had a…

Spatial R – Time to move from sp to sf

It was about three years ago (2019) when I last wrote about the sp and sf libraries in R. The R Spatial world has moved on since then, with sp heading close to retirement…

Matrix: What’s it all about?

I’ve recently come across a new piece of software that could revolutionise communication – and yes, you have probably heard that before, in many articles on the Internet!…

To video, or not to video

“That is the question.”

GISRUK 2021: Online II

We had a great GISRUK conference this year. We were online again (as we were in 2020), because of Covid-19, with Scott Orford at Cardiff University hosting, we had a really…

Census 2021: Who gets a letter and who gets a paper form?

The Conversation

This is an extended article, which was originally posted on The Conversation on 18/03/2021.

GISRUK2020: A brave new world

Online conferences are everywhere now – and everything now has online as a prefix. The GISRUK 2020 conference was no exception, and originally scheduled for 21th – 24th…