Note to self… AF Assist on the D700

Friday, 27 December, 2013

Note to self - AF-assist only works when in single servo mode and with single point focus on the centre spot. It don’t work otherwise and you can’t focus in a dark location!!!!

Relive those compouter games!!

Friday, 27 December, 2013

For those raised in the 70s and 80s there is a nostalgia for some cracking and quaint old games - forget Elite (although it is cool!). Pacman and Frogger are the name of the game!!!! BBC News carried a nice article on the Internet Archive’s emulation of some classic consoles and the games they run all within a web browser. Easy way to fritter away a few hours :)

Packt boot deals

Friday, 27 December, 2013

Try them out…. (I reviewed the Python one earlier this year

Earthrise

Tuesday, 24 December, 2013

See Earthrise as Apollo 8 saw it in 1968 - for the first time. Fabulous Earth Observatory and great NASA video.

Digital Globe Best Image

Monday, 9 December, 2013

Cast your votes! Some corkers here…..

Why are maps still so powerful?

Sunday, 17 November, 2013

Nicely blogged by the OS - and listen directly at the BBC here

Night skies….

Thursday, 7 November, 2013

Night skies by Mark Gee…. stunning.

Make it wide screen, pump up the volume, get lost in the universe….

Big data…. (some) big problems

Thursday, 7 November, 2013

Nioce post from Donald Clark on when big data goes wrong. A timely reminder about how messages become distorted, pushed to serve the purposes of their authors…… and up front is a classic map issue which all GIS students should be more than familiar with!

Hexaheaven

Tuesday, 29 October, 2013

Everyone’s at it!!

SPOT VEGETATION Data

Friday, 18 October, 2013

Nice pickup by GoGeo on free SPOT VEGETATION data with the impending end of the product. Comparable with AVHRR and worth a punt if you need wide coverage

iPhone 5s Head-to-head

Wednesday, 16 October, 2013

What a stunning review…… there can be only one…..

European Space Agency Earth Images

Wednesday, 16 October, 2013

Some cracking ESA images over at DPReview - take a look!

Homemade drones…..

Tuesday, 15 October, 2013

Nice video over at the BBC on a drone enthusiast and some great aerial videos.

WATCH IT!

OS Postcode Viewer

Thursday, 10 October, 2013

Nice link over at the OS blog on a postcode viewer developed in Processing. Worth a glance!

Journal of Maps Most Read

Thursday, 10 October, 2013

Just wanted to flag the Journal of Maps Most Read Articles - its a good way to see what has been trending and maybe take a peak at some of the articles. Our top article (at over 2000 downloads) is The Spanish population during the twentieth century and beyond which was our “Best Map” of 2012. This is currently a “free view” as it was released under our “Editor’s Choice”.

FREE EPRINT: Bibliographic webmap: the Physical Landscape of Britain and Northern Ireland

Wednesday, 2 October, 2013

This one passed me by in the depths of my inbox…..for the first 50 people interested, my paper Bibliographic webmap: the Physical Landscape of Britain and Northern Ireland has 50 FREE E-PRINTS. Please click on the link and download your copy.

Live London Buses

Wednesday, 2 October, 2013

The Live London Bus Tracker is just too cool to pass up - pick your route and be mesmerised by the buses passes to-and-fro. Want to get on an old Routemaster? Look up route 15 (amongst others) - OK, they’re not all Routemasters but its fantastic to be able to see where the buses actually are!! There are train and tube trackers around, but this for me is a winner!

Back after the hiatus…..

Wednesday, 2 October, 2013

Long summer and very busy start to the term…..but back with some posts!

Train Time: changing times

Wednesday, 28 August, 2013

Love this side-by-side-by-side of the London-to-Brighton line shot by the BBC….. its a great social take on the trip and the article provides some interesting comments on the changes. Well worth a view

Mapping Workshop - Loughborough 3 Sept 2013

Thursday, 15 August, 2013

If you haven’t clocked it already, I am involved in organising a workshop on the mapping of glacial landforms this September. Titled GMapping, it is concerned with:

“….the “GMapping Workshop” will present and discuss results from glacial gemorphological mapping by different interpreters for statistically representative synthetic drumlins within a real landscape. This can then inform both the differences/similarities in mapping and quantify the impacts upon the calculation of derived metrics. The key outcomes of this workshop will be the initial development of a set of objective criteria for geomorphological mapping.”

This is a highly topical area at the moment as manual, interpretive, mapping of visually complex landscapes is used extensively throughout the geosciences. And whilst it is preferable to have objective, repeatable, automated techniques, these approaches are still some way off sufficient levels of accuracy. So manual mapping remains the tried and tested approach….. yet comparability of results remains unquantified. Part of the problem is that with a real landscape we cannot a priori know what actually exists meaning it is hard to test the efficacy of individual maps.

One solution to this problem I was involved in with a my colleague John Hillier over in Loughborough….. here we used a real landscape but removed drumlins from it and then inserted our own back in to the landscape. We now have a real landscape with known landforms which means we can test how well individuals are able to identify them and, more importantly, variations in this identification and impacts upon the subsequent calculation of landform metrics.

So the workshop fast approaches and we now have a large set of mapped data (and shortly a preliminary report!) from which discussion can follow - perhaps the most important outcomes of this workshop are twofold:

1. gain a better understanding of mapping error and its impact upon landform metrics
2. development of a protocol for manual mapping to maximise accuracy