Like before, this was another question that came up over the dinner-table when I was in Germany at xmas. I'd recently found out at a September Edinburgh GeoMob talk by Peter Creasey that Scotland had freely-available Lidar datasets. This sounded like a good opportunity to use them, particularly because I was wanting to play with datasets that provide height information.

Years ago I wrote short stories. For many of these I now look back and cringe. For this question, I suspect I shall look back at it similarly. However I think it's important to record this otherwise I'll have nothing to look back on, which is worse.

As is often the case when I am in Germany, the topic of (painful) train travel came up, and in particular: is it quicker to go North↔South or East↔West? Me being me, I wondered if I could answer this with data.

"Mike Moran showed us how he uses Python to take all the routes near King's Crossing in London and filter them down to subway stations only. Magic, if you ask me."

Indeed. However, it was also magic to me, when I looked at what I'd done a few weeks later and tried to understand it. 🤔 So ...

Back in the 90's I remember one particular winter in Edinburgh when I was starting University, next to Pollock Halls, and my god it snowed. It was like, proper Winter Wonderland stuff. Since then? Hmmphf. Similarly, I've been coming to Ronneburg in Germany since the early 2000's and remember some pretty fun times taking the sledge out. Recently? Not so much.

So, is it snowing less?

I couldn't quite get it ready for my EdinburghJS presentation but I now have water being properly handled in Linzer. It's a subtlety, but I found when exploring in my Garibaldi iteration that you got better regions if you treated water as part of the boundary.

Many thanks to EdinburghJS for hosting me at their Geo and JS June Meetup, particularly since I mentioned very little Javascript (zero 😊).

The slides are available, but here's all the links I mentioned:

It was great to get along to my second "Makers gonna make" event at Codebase on Saturday, despite the Red Weather Warning on Friday. Many thanks to Peter Trizuliak for organising.

It's a pretty laid-back environment with a nice mix of focus time, breaks for pizza and free coffee / food (thanks to sponsors, Shopify, Codebase and The Source Coffee roasters). You can present what you've done and/or head to pub later, but no pressure to do either. The next event is coming up in February; I unfortunately can't make this one, but maybe see you at another!

Over the holidays I was thinking about where I am with the Biscuits project. The Linzer version has gotten to the point where I have a lot of the core bits of technical knowledge required, and I "merely" need to understand the aesthetics, if I wanted to copy the original artist.

Whilst it is good to attempt to copy to learn, I am now a bit uneasy with it as a goal. This is partly because the habit of "Computing People" copying "Artistic people" is becoming a bit rude in the current race-to-the-bottom of AI Art. However, it's also because I have some other ideas I wanna explore. So, I'm gonna do that instead.

I did a talk on this project at the GeoMOB Edinburgh event on 1/10/2024. The slides are available, but I'll give a summary of the accompanying explanation content here.

The "Biscuits" project began back in September 2017. It was inspired by a work of art by Armelle Caron called Les Villes Rangees: