Make Data Useful

A couple years ago you may have read this great post from boredpanda talking about a research paper that took deep learning algorithms and applied them to art.  This opened up the possibility of, say, taking a photo and having it re-imagined as being a painting from an old master.

It’s actually pretty easy to do this now using a site called deepdreamgenerator.com.  I’ve done quite a few…

Making Stellar/Star Data #Maps In #QGIS #astronomy

I have a latent interest in stargazing but haven’t done much about it for a long time until the past weekend when I had a bit of time and wondered if I could create a star map using QGIS. I found a couple tutorials and stackexchange questions that referenced David Nash’s HYG Database from www.Astronexus.com. Some of the tutorials showed equations for computing latitude and longitude from the star…

Trick serving a hillshade image from GeoServer when it skews and adds value=0

I had the perfect hillshade raster ready to throw on top of my web map, I had previewed it in QGIS and the colour stretching and values looked fine.

I then loaded it into GeoServer and it looked great in the OpenLayers Layer Preview window as well.

However, once I added it as a WMS layer in a Leaflet map, I got really confused.  Even though I had my NODATA=255 parameters seemingly working well…

Day 1 - Building a 3D Game using Geo Data (Hobby project) - #geospatial #gis #indiedb #viz

We are a team of three guys (so far) with a design idea for a simple yet challenging racing/strategy game based on real-world geospatial data coupled with a 3D gaming engine. Tonight we started building it together in Unity after downloading a bunch of public geospatial datasets. Here’s a summary of what we’ve done and some basic screenshots. The goal is to make progress every couple days to show…

PDF Map Hack - Remove Embedded Image with #PDFtk command line & text editor

Need to remove an embedded image from a PDF file?  You can easily chop out parts of it as needed with the PDFtk command line tool and a little bit of text editing.  Here’s how… (more…)

Brief howto to generate terrain and add flowing water from DEM in Unity

Just a quick video follow up based on a reader asking how I did what I did in my previous post with Unity (http://unity3d.com) game engine.

Using Surface Wave asset and built-in Unity Terrain generator, plus a script for taking DEMs and creating Terrains easily.  I’m really new at this by the way, but have a brilliant teacher showing me this stuff in my spare time :)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.c…

High speed water flow simulation on a DEM using #Unity3d game engine #gis #data #geospatial

I’m helping some friends who are working on a project to visualise a whole whack of GIS data in Unity (Unity3D.com) game engine.  It looks like we’ll end up working on a GIS -> Unity workflow for generating terrains from DEMs and texture maps from orthophotos.  To top it off they’ve already got a landcover classification app running that takes landcover raster classes and creates 3D objects…

As data volumes grow, so does your need to understand how to partition your data.  Until you understand this distributed storage concept, you will be unable to choose the best approach for the job.  This post gives an introductory explanation of partitioning and you will see why it is integral to the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) increasingly used in modern big data architectures….

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I dug up one of my oldest blog posts from about 7 years ago.  In the post, I show how I had connected my Garmin eTrex GPS receiver to an Arduino board and used it to control a camera in a desktop application.

After pumping the data into the Arduino, I parsed the raw GPS data coming from the eTrex and streamed it out to a Pythonapp on the desktop, via a serial port.  I was using the output to…

Home #Energy Monitor Series - Internet of Things - posts showing install, use, data analysis in a home #iot #bigdata

Recently I started an Internet of Things series on my experiences installing, using and analysing data from a smart electrical meter.  This included a BC Hydro smart meter, Eagle monitoring gateway from rainforest automation, and a cloud-based analytics service from Bidgely.

I’ve collated all the posts on the topic for you below.  More will be added as I write them.  Enjoy!

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#IoT Day 4: @Bidgely Cloud Energy Monitor Dashboard - my first week of using a monitor, details about using system

After a week of collecting smart meter readings, I’m now ready to show results in a cloud-based energy monitor system – Bidgely – complete with graphs showing readings, cost and machine learning results breaking down my usage by appliance.

This is part 4 of a series of posts about the Internet of Things applied to Home Energy Monitoring.  I have a Smart Meter from BC Hydro, an Eagle energy…

Review of 3 Recent Internet of Thing (#IoT) Announcements - three different faces, my thoughts @amazon @facebook @ibm

Working in the big data and analytics space, I’m always interested in parts of the Internet of Things (IoT) that will produce more data, require more backend systems, and help users/customers get on with their day better.

The past week has shown a few interesting announcements relating to Internet of Things topics.  Here are just a few that jumped out to me, either because they inspired me or…

#Amazon Dash Button - Concept and Article re: #IoT use - applying to my fridge would rock my world

I like this concept: “Just press and never run out”.   It’s the Amazon Dash Button: http://amazon.com/… – intended to be stuck onto appliances, basically retrofitting ones that don’t have them built in (in the future).  Pressing a button orders refills of products, just like Amazon one click ordering online.

Also read this Fortune.com articleabout how this fits into their overview vision for…

#IoT Day 3: Viewing data on the #Eagle #Energy Monitor - looking at the basic #dashboard screens. #analytics #data

The Eagle energy monitor from Rainforest Automation is a very handy device.  It reads the wireless signal from my electricity meter and makes it available through a web interface – both a graphical environment and a RESTful API.  In this post we look at the standard graphical screens and the data download option. Next time we’ll look at the RESTful API for programmers to use.

This is part 3 of…

Plug-In #Solar: Moveable Solar Power For Renters & Do-It-Yourselfers tried in your rental? Hang from window? #energy

via Green Building Elements | From brick and mortar shops to city planning, we cover sustainable trends in construction, renovation, and more..

This definitely sounds promising, anyone have experience running a similar setup?

A small company, SpinRay Energy, has announced the production of a new UL listed, grid-tied solar power system that couldn’t be easier to install. Plug-in solar power…