Spatially Adjusted

Blog

  • 25 Years of SRTM

    I noticed earlier last week that I just missed the 25th anniversary of the mission of the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission aboard STS-99. I’m not sure there has been a more important elevation data product that has been released to the public than SRTM.

    Given the uncertainty of funding for government programs in the new Trump administration, I’m not sure we’ll see another public 3D dataset in my time. Sure, there are private companies who collect much more detailed elevation data than SRTM, but none are as freely available as SRTM is (hopefully not was).

  • Spring Training 2025

    This week is one of the best in baseball—the start of Spring Training, with players practice already underway. Sadly, it’s been a long time since the Giants last made a World Series run, and the Dodgers are as annoying as ever. But hey, the team is healthy, and baseball is always fun to watch!

  • Resurrecting Planet Geospatial

    UPDATE:  We have the domain working, you now just need to go to geofeeds.me and you’ll get the same results as below.  The feed is at geofeeds.me/feed.  You don’t need to update anything as the old urls will continue to work.  Full speed ahead, make sure you reach out to Bill or myself if you want your blog, newsletter or other writing added.

    A couple days ago, Bill Dollins reached out to me and had a crazy idea:

    “Forget podcasting. We should resurrect planetgs”

    It took me all of 10 seconds to respond, “Hell yes”. You can read the technical way it was brought back on Bill’s blog:

    So, “Neptune” is born. The name is a nod to what Planet and Venus did/do, while the “N” planet hints at the Node underpinnings. Feel free to check it out. It’s about 50% me and about 50% Cursor. It’s not all the way baked, but good enough to release.

    A lot has changed since I put Planet Geospatial to bed. It’s been 10 years, longer than Planet Geospatial was alive since the python script culled all those Blogger sites and spit out a HTML page and an RSS feed. The world has changed a couple times over, blogs which were falling out of style have started to come back, newsletters are everywhere and Twitter is a cesspool of junk.

    Many of us had Planet Geospatial as our homepage (back when that was a thing) but feel free to grab the new temporary URL https://whale-app-k5eg5.ondigitalocean.app/view and the new feed https://whale-app-k5eg5.ondigitalocean.app/feed. We’re working at getting an easier domain set up because I let PlanetGS.com go many years ago and alas it has been taken.

    I hope this helps many of you start blogging again, we need all the good content to survive the next few years.

  • Cable Management

    One of the best parts of my iPhone 15 Pro is that it has a USB-C port on it. While I appreciate the lightning port, I have just grown so tired of having to manage so many different ports while traveling. Coupled with my iPad having USB-C and my Apple Watch having a USB-C charging cable, I went ahead and got myself an Anker 3 port USB-C charger (which has a USB-A for those times you need one) allowing me to plug in all my devices at night and just use ordinary USB-C cables.

    It is all nice and clean, no longer do I have all different cables for each device. My Kindle is USB-C, my GoPro is USB-C, my battery backup is USB-C and of course my MacBook Pro. I have reduced the cables I travel with because I don’t need one for each device. I do travel with a USB-A to USB-C cable for those times where the airplane doesn’t have USB-C or in an airport or rental car but that tucks away nicely in my travel bag.

    But then I just realized my AirPods Pro case is lightning.

    Now I could buy a USB-C case for said AirPods, but I want to wait until September and see if there is anything new. So trusty old lightning cable goes back in the bad for now.

    Update: I was asked how I charged my AirPods Pro last night, well you can use the Apple Watch charger. Works pretty well but its not a great solution long term.

  • Apple Maps Gets Topographical

    Apple Maps Gets Topographical

    GIS and Topo maps go hand in hand. From the classic Quad maps, to the National Geographic TOPO! product, to just basic Esri Topo map services, these topographic maps have been part of GIS since the beginning. Google Maps has had their “terrain” layer for a long time (though it seems to be fading out for some reason). Apple with the release of Watch OS 10 and the Ultra 2 added topographical maps to at least the watch ecosystem, but still required an iPhone to download the offline maps.

    But yesterday Apple finally closed that hole and added topographical maps (including the trails feature) to iOS.

    Now this is very user centric at this point. I expect to see these maps start appearing in apps that use MapKit but to what extent I’m not sure. I use onX Offroad quite a bit and suspect it will continue to use their own

  • ARC/INFO Manuals

    ARC/INFO Manuals

    If there is one regret in my life, it is that I didn’t steal the ARC/INFO manual binders from one of the jobs I used to use ARC/INFO. I’ve had an eBay search going for years in hope that someone will give them up. I suspect every binder set that still exists will never be given up. It’s like owning a Picasso, you’d never sell it and ask your relatives to bury you with it.

  • 19 Years and 2,362 Posts

    I mean we’ve been saying it since Elon had bought Twitter, but the deed is done.

    The social network formerly known as Twitter has officially adopted X.com for all its core systems. That means typing twitter.com in your browser will now redirect to Elon Musk’s favored domain

    I was talking to a good friend over email last month and he had this to say:

    The fun days of early twitter and before that blogging certainly made our industry more fun — thanks so much for your key role in that. Sadly those days seem to be gone and I don’t know where to find the modern equivalents.

    He is so right, I’m not sure how important my role was in the whole Twitter Geospatial world was, but that grouping we had back then was some of the best sharing of ideas and opinions I’ve ever been part of. I find myself rarely sharing anything spatial on Twitter anymore, mostly it is where I go to complain about the San Francisco Giants, Los Angeles Lakers or Arizona State Sun Devils. And most of that is just shouting into the abyss. This leaves no space for any outlet of my thought and feelings on spatial and the such.

    Hence I’m back to blogging, I feel like this has always been the best format for longer form thoughts and given I control the content vs some insane emerald mine heir this is better for my sanity. I am laughing at some of your still using RSS readers (heck I’m one) and having this post show up in your feed after many years. Thanks for never unsubscribing and stay tuned!

  • Book Review: Hands-On Azure Digital Twins: A practical guide to building distributed IoT solutions

    Finished reading: Hands-On Azure Digital Twins: A practical guide to building distributed IoT solutions by Alexander Meijers

    I’ve been working with Digital Twins for almost 10 years and as simple as the concept is, ontologies get in the way of implementations. The big deal is how can you implement, how does one actually create a digital twin and deploy it to your users.

    Let’s be honest though, the Azure Digital Twin service/product is complex and requires a ton of work. It isn’t an upload CAD drawing and connect some data sources. In this case Meijers does a great job of walking through how to get started. But it isn’t for beginners, you’ll need to have previous experience with Azure Cloud services, Microsoft Visual Studio and the ability to debug code. But if you’ve got even a general understand of this, the walk throughs are detailed enough to learn the idiosyncrasies of the Azure Digital Twin process.

    The book does take you through the process of understanding what an Azure Digital Twin model is, how to upload them, developing relationships between models and how to query them. After you have an understanding on this, Meijers dives into connecting the model to services, updating the Azure Digital Twin models and then connecting to Microsoft Azure Maps to view the model on maps. Finally he showcases how these Digital Twins can become smart buildings which is the hopeful outcome of doing all the work.

    The book has a lot of code examples and ability to download it all from a Github repository. Knowledge of JSON and JavaScript, Python and .NET or Java is probably required. BUT, even if you don’t know how to code, this book is a good introduction to Azure Digital Twins. While there are pages of code examples, Meijers does a good job of explaining the how and why you would use Azure Digital Twins. If you’re interesting in how you can use a hosted Digital Twin service that is managed by a cloud service, this is a great resource.

    I felt like I knew Azure Digital Twins before reading this book, but it taught me a lot about how and why Microsoft did what they did with the service. Many aspects that caused me to scratch my head became clearer to me and I felt like this book gave me additional background that I didn’t have before. This book requires an understanding of programming but after finishing it I felt like Meijers’ ability to describe the process outside of code makes the book well worth it to anyone who wants to understand the concept and architecture of Azure Digital Twins.

    Thoroughly enjoyed the book.

  • A GIS Degree

    My son decided to change majors from biodesign to GIS. I had a short moment when I almost told him not to bring all this on himself but then thought differently. I could use my years of experience to help him get the perfect degree in GIS and get a great job and still do what he wants.

    He’s one semester into the program so he really hasn’t taken too many classes. There has been the typical Esri, SPSS and Google Maps discussion, but nothing getting into the weeds. Plus he’s taking Geography courses as well so he’s got that going for him. Since he’s at Arizona State University, he’s going through the same program as I did, but it’s a bit different. When I was at ASU, Planning was in the Architectural College. Now it’s tied with Geography in a new School of Geographical Sciences & Urban Planning.

    I have to be honest, this is smart, I started my GIS career working for a planning department at a large city. The other thing I noticed is a ton of my professors are still teaching. I mean how awesome is that? I suddenly don’t feel so old anymore.

    I’ve stayed out of his classes for the past semester in hopes that he can form his own thoughts on GIS and its applicability. I probably will continue to help him focus on where to spend his electives (more Computer Science and less History of the German Empire 1894-1910). He’s such a smart kid, I know he’s going to do a great job and he was one who spent time in that Esri UC Kids Fair back when I used to go to the User Conference. Now he could be getting paid to use Esri software or whatever tool best accomplishes his goals.

    I plan to show him the Safe FME Minecraft Reader/Writer.

  • GIS and Monitors

    If there is one constant in my GIS career, it is my interest in the monitor I’m using. Since the days of being happy for a “flat screen” Trinitron monitor to now with curved flat screens, so much has changed. My first GIS Analyst position probably had the worst monitor in the history of monitors. I can’t recall the name but it had a refresh rate that was probably comparable what was seen in the 1960s. It didn’t have great color balance either, so I ended up printing out a color swatch pattern from ArcInfo and taped it on my wall so I could know what color was what.

    I stared for years at this monitor. No wonder I need reading glasses now!

    Eventually I moved up in the world where I no longer got hand-me-down hardware and I started to get my first new equipment. The company I worked for at the time shifted between Dell and HP for hardware, but generally it was dual 21″ Trinitron CRTs. For those who are too young to remember, they were the size of a small car and put off enough heat and radiation to probably shorten my life by 10 year. Yet, I could finally count on them being color corrected by hardware/software and not feel like I was color blind.

    It wasn’t sexy but it had a cool look to it. You could drop it flat to write on it like a table.

    Over 11 years ago, I was given a Wacom DTU-2231 to test. You can read more about it on that link but it was quite the monitor. I guess the biggest change between now and then is how little that technology took off. I guess if you asked me right after you read that post in 2010 what we’d be using in 2020, I would have said such technology would be everywhere. Yet we don’t see stylus based monitor much at all.

    These days my primary monitor is a LG UltraFine 24″ 4k. I pair it with another 24″ 4K monitor that I’ve had for years. Off to the other side is a generic Dell 24″ monitor my company provided. I find this setup works well for me, gone are the days where I had ArcCatalog and ArcMap open in two different monitors. Alas two of the monitors are devoted to Outlook and WebEx Teams, just a sign of my current work load.

    I’ve always felt that GIS people care more about monitors than most. A developer might be more interested in a Spotify plugin for their IDE, but a GIS Analyst care most about the biggest, brightest and crispest monitor they can get their hands on. I don’t always use FME Workbench these days, but when I do, it is full screen on the most beautiful monitor I can have. Seems perfect to me.