Items in Action

This is an ongoing list of items in actions, aka list of TODO items. So often, some good directions that deserve serious investigations and explorations have to be put off. This blog is trying to make a record of these resources. Open Geospatial Data White House Transparency and Open Government Open data: an international comparison of strategies Harvard CGA China Data Links USGS Data Quality Assurance Best Practice and Examples [Read More]

AWS S3 CLI

AWS s3 (Simple Storage Service) is one of the simplest Amazon Web Service. It works just like a network drive. Amazon has granted many public institutions free S3 buckets. Smithsonian Institute (SI) is one of them. With its open access initiative, SI also shared a large amount of data on s3. Smithsonian Open Access on github AWS registry for Smithsonian The data largely contain metadata at SI, 3D models, and pictures. [Read More]

Read New on new Reader

Acquired a new ebook reader Rakuten Kobo Elipsa. The device has a good size at 10 inch. It also supports Dropbox for loading books and OverDrive for borrowing from public libraries. A few useful settings: DoubleCommander: A open-source alternative to TotalCommander. A more powerful and more convenient file explorer. Briss: A open source PDF cropper. It is running on Java. Windows removes Java by default, but many programs, like ArcGIS Pro, installed their own Java Running Environment (JRE). [Read More]

PostgreSQL/PostGIS without instllation

Using EnterpriseDB installer to install PostgreSQL and using Stackbuilder to install PostGIS is very easy. However, running PostgreSQL/PostGIS as a service, which is the default result of such installations, has some overhead because it is running in the background no matter it is actually used or not. Note that PostgreSQL has a small footprint when in “idle”. Nevertheless, it could be useful to run PostgreSQL/PostGIS as needed using binaries. [Read More]

Regularly Report Computer IP with DHCP

As many are working from home during/after the pandemic, it is super convenient and even necessary to remotely connected to office computers or home computers. However, wirelessly connected devices or ISP-connected devices may have their IP updated from time to time. This blog describes a short Python program that can automatically and periodically report a computer’s IP address. The information is saved into a text file, which can be saved in Dropbox or other cloud drives. [Read More]

Vector Tiles for Leaflet

Install GDAL Tools The GDAL tools are installed from https://www.gisinternals.com/. Install the core with Python applications, which contain some useful raster tools like gdal2tile.py. Alternatively, it can be installed using OSGeo4W. However, OSGeo4W can interfere with PostgreSQL/PostGIS on GDAL for the setting. Therefore, it is not recommended to use OSGeo4W for GDAL. As QGIS is part of OSGeo, it comes with GDAL pre-installed. So, it is also good to use the GDAL within QGIS. [Read More]

Hello R Markdown

R Markdown This is an R Markdown document. Markdown is a simple formatting syntax for authoring HTML, PDF, and MS Word documents. For more details on using R Markdown see http://rmarkdown.rstudio.com. You can embed an R code chunk like this: summary(cars) ## speed dist ## Min. : 4.0 Min. : 2.00 ## 1st Qu.:12.0 1st Qu.: 26.00 ## Median :15.0 Median : 36.00 ## Mean :15.4 Mean : 42.98 ## 3rd Qu. [Read More]

Big Image Sample

Using Multiple Images

The image banners at the top of the page are refered to as “bigimg” in this theme. They are optional, and one more more can be specified. If more than one is specified, the images rotate every 10 seconds. In the front matter, bigimgs are specified using an array of hashes.

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