Topic
open source
- Muse, a tool for journaling prompts
So far this year I've gone headlong into what's possible with AI development, specifically using Cursor. I've been using it to write code, write blogs, and even write this post. The potential for "personal software" i…
- gpt-researcher
GPT Researcher is an autonomous agent designed for comprehensive online research on a variety of tasks. The agent can produce detailed, factual and unbiased research reports, with customization options for focusing on…
- Ancient Myths and Open Source
Sam Arbesman finds similarities between the oral storytelling of myth. With generation retellings and small, effective adaptations over time, ancient tales were made more Lindy: Over time though, each ever-retold stor…
- Waypoint — a Raspberry Pi GPS Tracker
- OpenStreetMap is Having a Moment
My friend Joe Morrison wrote an excellent piece on the current state of corporate investment in OpenStreetMap: The four companies in the inner circle — Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft — have a combined market c…
- Weekend Reading: Software Builders, Scarcity, and Open Source Communities
👨‍💻 We Need More Software Builders, Not Just Users On the announcement of Airtable's latest round and $2.5b valuation (!), founder Howie Liu puts out a great piece on the latest round of changes in pursuit of their…
- Mermaid Diagrams
Mermaid is a neat project to add a custom syntax layer in Markdown to support rendering diagrams like flowcharts and sequences. Roam just recently added support for Mermaid in Roam graphs, which renders your diagram l…
- Digital Gardeners
The "digital garden" concept is gaining in popularity. I've seen a dozen of them recently, with groups like the Roam community taking to publishing their own open notebooks. Maggie Appleton (an awesome, prolific membe…
- Weekend Reading: Beastie Boys, Links, and Screencasting
🎥 Beastie Boys Story We watched this a couple nights ago. It's hard to tell how objectively good it was, but I loved the heck out of it as a decades-long fan. 🔗 Linkrot I'll have to try out this tool that Tom built…
- Weekend Reading: Tagging with Turf, Mars Panorama, and Kinds of Easy
🗺 turf-tagger Bryan put together this neat little utility for merging point data with containing polygon attributes with spatial join queries. It uses Turf.js to do the geoprocess in the browser. 🚀 Mars Curiosity Hi…
- Why Hasn’t Open Source Software Disrupted Esri?
This is a great post from my friend Joe Morrison assessing the state of the open source software movement in GIS against the biggest corporate competitive friction point, Esri. Even as QGIS and comparable open source…
- Weekend Reading: Blot, Hand-Drawn Visualizations, and Megafire Detection
📝 Blot.im Blot is a super-minimal open source blogging system based on plain text files in a folder. It supports markdown, Word docs, images, and HTML — just drag the files into the folder and it generates web pages.…
- mapwith.ai
In a conversation yesterday I learned about this project called RapiD, led by Facebook to use computer vision technology to detect features for mapping in OpenStreetMap. They’re working on a fork of the iD editor that…
- bookish.tech
This is a handy tool for searching book metadata, built by Tom MacWright. It’s a “universal converter” for book IDs in various services, like Goodreads, OpenLibrary, and WorldCat. It’s open source and also has an API.…
- Search the Archives
Since I've been posting here so frequently, it's gotten challenging to scroll through the archive to find links to things I wrote about before. Last night I worked on implementing a simple site search page that search…
- Weekend Reading: tracejson, Euclid, and Designing at Scale
🛰 tracejson An extension to the GeoJSON format for storing GPS track data, including timestamps. GPX has been long in the tooth for a long time, but it works and is supported by everything. This approach could have s…
- Weekend Reading: Terrain Mesh, Designing on a Deadline, and Bookshelves
🏔 MARTINI: Real-Time RTIN Terrain Mesh Some cool work from Vladimir Agafonkin on a library for RTIN mesh generation, with an interactive notebook to experiment with it on Observable: An RTIN mesh consists of only rig…
- MapSCII
I love that people out in the open source world still build things like this. It's an xterm-compatible renderer for accessing interactive map from a terminal console. I even tried it from a console on an EC2 instance…
- Open Source Game Clones
I don’t play games at all anymore these days, but I ran across this repository of open source clones of classic PC games. Some notable ones from the list that we used to play: 0 AD — Age of Empires C-Evo — Civilizatio…
- Assisted Tasks for OpenStreetMap
The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team has been working on an experimental version of the Tasking Manager tool that incorporates deep learning-assisted mapping projects. The OSM community has long been (and still largely…
- Discovering QGIS
This week we've had Kurt Menke in the office (of Bird's Eye View GIS) providing a guided training workshop for QGIS, the canonical open source GIS suite. #qgis workshop selfie @spatialnetworks ... a great group hard a…
- Contours in OpenDroneMap
One of my favorite open source projects ongoing right now is OpenDroneMap. I haven't gotten to use it much recently, but followed development over the last couple years. Outside of some loose testing a while ago, I ha…
- A Growing Geo Community: Takeaways from FOSS4G NA 2019
I had a great time last week out in San Diego for this year's FOSS4G-NA. This post I wrote for the company blog runs down general conference takeaways, plus a wavetops overview with best-of sessions I attended. It was…
- FOSS4G North America 2019
Next week Joe and I will be out in San Diego for FOSS4G-NA 2019. This'll be my first one since I think 2012. There's always an excellent turnout and strong base of good folks to catch up with. This year they've put to…
- Sponsoring QGIS
We recently began a corporate sponsorship for the QGIS project, the canonical open source desktop GIS. I got back into doing some casual cartography work using QGIS back in December after a years-long hiatus of using…
- Weekend Reading: Calculator, SaaS Metrics, and System Shock
💻 Open Sourcing Windows Calculator Seems silly, but this kind of thing is great for the open source movement. There’s still an enormous amount of tech out there built at big companies that creates little competitive…
- Desktop GIS — The Evergreen Topic
A good post from my colleague Bill Dollins about the state of the desktop GIS: I pretty much watch Esri from a distance these days but, even from my perch, I can’t see any workflow that doesn’t involve desktop softwar…
- Weekend Reading: Fulcrum in Santa Barbara, Point Clouds, Building Footprints
👨🏽‍🚒 Santa Barbara County Evac with Fulcrum Community Our friends over at the Santa Barbara County Sheriff have been using a deployment of Fulcrum Community over the last month to log and track evacuations for floo…
- Weekend Reading: Shanghai, Basecamp, and DocuSaurus
🇨🇳 195-Gigapixel Photo of Shanghai Shot from the Oriental Pearl Tower, the picture shows enormous levels of detail composited from 8,700 source photos. Imagine this capability available commercially from microsatell…
- Fulcrum Desktop
A frequent desire for Fulcrum customers is to maintain locally a version of the data they collect with our platform, in their database system of choice. With our export tool, it’s simple to pull out extracts in format…
- Kindle Highlights
I started making this tool a long time back to extract highlighted excerpts from Kindle books. This predated the cool support for this that Goodreads has now, but I still would like to spend some time getting back to…
- OpenDroneMap
Since I got the Mavic last year, I haven’t had many opportunities to do mapping with it. I’ve put together a few experimental flights to play with DroneDeploy and our Fulcrum extension, but outside of that I’ve mostly…
- Jupyter, Mathematica, and the Future of the Research Paper
Paul Romer has an interesting take on this piece from the Atlantic: Jupyter rewards transparency; Mathematica rationalizes secrecy. Jupyter encourages individual integrity; Mathematica lets individuals hide behind cor…
- mapquery
A neat tool for generating graphics from map data for visualizations.
- JekyllConf
JekyllConf is coming up in May, a conference to talk about the latest with Jekyll, the static site generator that lets you publish websites without heavy needs for hosting and databases. This isn't a typical conferenc…
- Awesome AWS
A collection of excellent resources, documents, and tools for Amazon Web Services.
- speedtest-cli
If you're a nerd about checking your download and upload bandwidth when things seem to be getting slow, you've certainly used Speedtest.net to find out your raw internet speed. If you're an even bigger nerd, you'll lo…
- AlaSQL
A neat find for doing SQL queries in the browser. Open source and easy compatibility with tons of data formats.
- fulcrum-node
Jason Sanford's node.js library for working with the Fulcrum API.
- Bringing Geographic Data Into the Open with OpenStreetMap
This is an essay I wrote that was published in the OpenForum Academy's "Thoughts on Open Innovation" book in early summer 2013. Shane Coughlan invited me to contribute on open innovation in geographic data, so I wrote…
- Terra
Inspired by a couple of others, I released a micro project of mine called Terra, to provide a fast way to run several geospatial tools on your computer. Because I work with a variety of GIS datasets, I end up writing…
- Creating New Contributors to OpenStreetMap
I wrote a blog post last week about the first few months of usage of Pushpin, the mobile app we built for editing OpenStreetMap data. As I mentioned in the post, I'm fascinated and excited by how many brand new OpenSt…
- Symbola
If you've ever done much involving symbol sets in mapping (especially web mapping), you know about the nightmare of managing 700 separate PNG files, with different, duplicate versions for slightly different size varia…
- WhereCampTB
My talk from Ignite Spatial at WhereCampTB, talking about the OSM Tampa Bay meetup group. Check out the slides in better detail here. It was a fun event a couple weeks ago — great participation from folks in all…
- OSM in Commercial Products
OpenStreetMap has become an undeniably powerful open data resource for industry to start taking advantage of. I gave this talk at State of the Map 2011 in Denver to show some of the things our company is doing leverag…
- WhereCampDC
We just returned from a fantastic weekend up in DC - first at the Ignite Spatial event on Friday night, then the WhereCampDC unconference on Saturday. Being the first event of it’s kind that I’ve attended (with the “b…