Author Archives: John Reiser

Stamen Map Tiles now a paid service

Understandably, the awesome map tiles produced by Stamen Design over 10 years ago have been moved to Stadia and are now a paid service. I have extensively used the Toner Labels service as annotation to aerial photography and as a … Continue reading

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Broken libraries? Docker to the rescue!

I’m working on some spatial data, loading shapefiles into PostgreSQL on an older server of mine. Revisiting my previous blog post, I wanted to review more recent NJ Land Use/Land Cover data with the 2002 LULC data I imported to … Continue reading

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Revisiting OpenStreetMap Land Use Data

Back in August of 2009, I converted the latest available Land Use/Land Cover data for New Jersey into .OSM format and uploaded it as “NJDataUploads” to OpenStreetMap. You can read my write up of the initial uploading effort here. While … Continue reading

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What a year.

I neglected to blog in 2020. I think I can speak for everyone when I say last year was “a wild ride” at best and a “disease and insurrection hellscape” at worst. Last year, with the shift to remote, I … Continue reading

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Pi-based LED Sign

I took some time this Thanksgiving break to work with Raspberry Pi and a flexible LED display. I love the Pi, as it is a familiar environment, but with opportunities to work with different hardware. Working with some instructions online, … Continue reading

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Meandering Meetings and Open Data

I love meetings. When the right people are in the room, with a clear agenda and desire to work together towards a common goal, magic can happen. Ideas are put out there and refined as a group, and an action … Continue reading

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Presentations at MAC URISA 2018

I’m currently down at the MAC URISA 2018 conference in Atlantic City. This year, I conducted a full-day workshop on Spatial SQL. I also presented on using Docker to explore open source GIS offerings. If you’re still around at the … Continue reading

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What I’m Reading – July 2018

Here are a few articles I’ve read over the last month that you might find interesting. “I keep it because I have not heard a voice I like better,” he once said, “and because I have identified with it.” He … Continue reading

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Leveraging the Power of Spatial Databases

I’m out at the ESRI DevSummit this year, and tonight I presented the following talk on using SQL to perform spatial analysis tasks. The presentation slides are included here. I tried to squeeze in several examples, including mapping 2,199 farms … Continue reading

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Optimize Your Indexes and Selections

I have been working on a project that is driven by a series of functions written in PL/pgsql. The functions look at New Jersey’s land use data over several different time periods and selects out certain areas if they have the … Continue reading

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