I wanted to share one of my favourite places in London, so this beautiful map lies on Portobello Road on the farthest side of the flea market. I shot the pictures in December; the weather was not so great, which is rare, as London is always sunny.
MapsintheWild Flea market on Portobello Road
I’m still here.
There’s nothing like spending some time in hospital to get a visceral reminder that “well, things could be a whole lot worse”. There are plenty of people dealing with far more dire scenarios than a little surgical recovery with a discharge in a handful of days.
My stay was scheduled for 3-5 days, and I was discharged in 4, a testament to my good health going in and the skill of my surgeon in doing the least harm while still doing what needed to be done.
It was still a long and eye-opening four days.
Psychologically, the worst time was the 24 hours before they put me under. Fasting, and hard antibiotics, and bowel prep, and anticipation, and an early start. I shed some tears in the pre-op while waiting to roll into the OR, for sure.
The four days of recovery in hospital included all sorts of new indignities, from catheterization to shitting the bed, from adult diapers to the generalized humiliation of being unable to move, pinned down by gravity and pain. Good personal growth moments. This is staying alive, in all its messiness, a process of continuous compromise and self-adjustment.
Now I have two recoveries to work on.
The near term one is healing from the surgery. They put a breathing tube down my throat, catheterized me, cut six little port-holes into my abdomen to stuff laproscopic tools through, inflated my abdominal cavity so they could see what they were doing, cut out the majority of my rectum and the surrounding lymph nodes, stapled the sigmoid colon to whatever rectum was left, inflated my bowel to test that joint, and then closed me back up again. My middle is in rough shape. But it should all recover to more-or-less its previous strength, over several weeks.
The longer term one is how my GI system adjusts to missing several critical centimeters at the end. This is where permanent changes loom, the bits that worry me. How long I can go between trips to the bathroom and how much control I have over things when I need to, are recovery processes that will play out over several months.
So far, for someone in their first week of recovery, I think I am doing well.
I am trying not to worry too much about the whole cancer part of this journey, which is still in the grey area until we get pathology back on the parts they took out of me. That will determine whether I am due for several months of post-operative chemotherapy, or move directly to monitoring.
Talk to you again soon, inshalla.
We are extremely pleased to announce the 5 winning proposals for our 2024 QGIS.ORG grant programme:
Funding for the programme was sourced by you, our project donors and sponsors! Note: For more context surrounding our grant programme, please see: QGIS Grants #9: Call for Grant Proposals 2024.
The QGIS.ORG Grant Programme aims to support work from our community that would typically not be funded by client/contractor agreements. This means that we did not accept proposals for the development of new features. Instead proposals focus on infrastructure improvements and polishing of existing features.
Voting to select the successful projects was carried out by our QGIS Voting Members. Each voting member was allowed to select up to 6 proposals. The full list of votes are available here (on the first sheet). The following sheets contain the calculations used to determine the winner (for full transparency). The table below summarizes the voting tallies for the proposals:
A couple of extra notes about the voting process:
We received 39 votes from 21 community representatives, 17 user group representatives, and the OSGeo voting member.
On behalf of the QGIS.ORG project, I would like to thank everyone who submitted proposals for this call!
Barry Rowlingson spotted this tattoo. “Met a #maptat in the wild today – I’d get one of these but I’d feel I had to point my arm north all the time”
MapsintheWild Cardinal Arm
Estuvimos en Expoagro 2024 y la presentación de GeoExpress AgTech fue un éxito rotundo. Con una sólida reputación tanto a nivel nacional como internacional, nuestra empresa se especializa en la creación y aplicación de soluciones tecnológicas comerciales basadas en código abierto, que impulsan el crecimiento y la eficiencia de las organizaciones. Nuestro CEO, Ariel Anthieni, y nuestra COO, Julia Martinuzzi, encabezaron el equipo selecto que participó en este evento de renombre.
Nos complace enormemente haber participado en la feria agropecuaria más destacada de la región, que se llevó a cabo en San Nicolás, provincia de Buenos Aires, del 5 al 8 de marzo pasados. En nuestro stand, nuestro equipo estuvo disponible para proporcionar información detallada sobre cómo nuestras geosoluciones tecnológicas pueden optimizar los procesos y mejorar los resultados de su empresa. Además, tuvimos el honor de ofrecer una conferencia el miércoles 6 de marzo, a las 17 horas, en el Auditorio Agtech John Deere, donde profundizamos sobre nuestra solución y cómo puede beneficiar a las empresas.
Además de presentar GeoExpress AgTech, tuvimos el privilegio de interactuar con diversos actores de la política y del sector agropecuario. Entre ellos, pudimos hablar con Jorge Macri, Jefe de Gobierno de la Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires, a quien le contamos sobre nuestra empresa y nuestras ideas. Fue una oportunidad invaluable para compartir nuestra visión y nuestros proyectos con figuras destacadas de todos los ámbitos, fortaleciendo así nuestro compromiso con el desarrollo tecnológico y el progreso del sector.
¿De qué se trata AgTech? Imaginá poder optimizar la gestión de tus datos agrícolas de manera eficiente y personalizada, ahorrando tiempo y recursos finitos mientras impulsás el crecimiento de tu empresa. Con GeoExpress AgTech, esa visión se hace realidad. Nuestra solución integral está diseñada para abordar los desafíos únicos que enfrenta el sector agropecuario en la actualidad, pudiendo no solo gestionar los datos geoespaciales, sino integrar la información que se encuentra en diferentes sistemas, carpetas compartidas y pc personales en una sola plataforma.
Desde la agricultura de precisión hasta la gestión de la cadena de suministro, comprendemos las complejidades de la industria. Por eso hemos desarrollado un conjunto de herramientas avanzadas basadas en código abierto que permiten visualizar establecimientos, lotes y datos relacionados de manera intuitiva y en tiempo real. Ya no tendrás que lidiar con múltiples plataformas o sistemas desarticulados; GeoExpress AgTech centraliza toda tu información en una sola interfaz fácil de usar.
Pero no se trata solo de facilitar la visualización de datos. Nuestra solución también cuenta con potentes capacidades de geoprocesamiento avanzado y un recolector de datos online/offline, diseñado específicamente para adaptarse a tus necesidades cambiantes. Ya sea que estés trabajando en el campo o en la oficina, GeoExpress AgTech te brinda las herramientas que necesitas para tomar decisiones más informadas y estratégicas, impulsando así la productividad y la rentabilidad de tu negocio. GeoExpress AgTech no es solo una plataforma tecnológica; es un socio en la transformación digital del sector agropecuario. Si deseas conocer más sobre nuestra empresa y nuestras soluciones, te invitamos a visitar nuestro sitio web www.kan.com.ar o a enviarnos un correo electrónico a info@kan.com.ar, donde descubrirás un mundo de posibilidades tecnológicas para tu negocio.
Los invitamos a ver la entrevista que le hicieron a nuestro CEO en la Expo Agro
Ant Scott sent this pic from Antananarivo in Madagascar.
“Antananarivo Madagascar – can’t tell if the facing tiles correspond to admin boundaries but I like to think they do”
For those of you who are not on top of your Madagascan geography here is a screenshot of the regional borders.
MapsintheWild Antananarivo on a Column
Doug shared this “NJ Turnpike Bridge over Raritan River. Map plaque #MapsintheWild #whereIam“
MapsintheWild New Jersey Turnpike Memorial Bridge
Simon Polster said “Love this flowy transit chart from the Baden-Württemberg train network”
MapsintheWild Baden-Württemberg Train Network
Glen Pawelski sent us this pic. I know it is just a map in a frame but the layout, the styling and the font make it a thing of beauty IMHO.
MapsintheWild McCoy Hotel, Tucson
Doug G spotted this. “42N Brewing Asylum Porter Birds eye map of Buffalo State Hospital area.” Strong beer, nice map.
MapsintheWild 42N Brewing Asylum
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Matthew Edney shared this from his local store. What self respecting map geek is not going to want to taste that beer?
MapsintheWild Bunker Evergreen IPA
Kaakaapoo sent us this super massive floor map of Leeds “My favourite #MapsInTheWild for @mappery, the map of Leeds filling the main room of Leeds City Museum”. Almost makes me want to visit to Leeds!
MapsintheWild Giant Floor Map of Leeds
by Andrea Aime (noreply@blogger.com) at April 22, 2024 09:27 AM
Berndan deWeg shared this pic of a lamp in his home. “A Maps in the Wild in my living room.. geological map of part of Spain as lamp…”
MapsintheWild Spanish Geology Map Light
This is probably my last posting before I go in for surgery and start my new life as a “patient”.
I was talking with a friend, and we were laughing at how “patient” has the dual meaning of forebearance and under medical care. We didn’t pull out our phones and find out that it is also from the Latin, for “suffering”.
Anyways, suffering is definitely part of life in CancerLand, and surely a reason why we are culturally so frightened of it, even when prognosis is good. Some measure of suffering will be extracted, on the way through, and that’s if you are lucky.
A poster on the groups shared that she felt angry, when talking to civilians about their “troubles”. She said wanted to scream at them, “well at least you don’t have cancer!”
Someone responded, “the healthy man desires many things, the sick man desires only one thing”. Which seemed the most pithy perspective.
I shared that I felt a little guilty posting about my own mental state, dealing with a stage two diagnosis, in a forum frequented by many people in stages three and four. And people were fairly uniform in saying, there is something about hearing the words, “you have cancer”, that marks a sharp dividing line in ones life, no matter what the physical progression is.
Surgery will be my first sharp physical dividing line. Hopefully also my last, but as usual the grey area is in effect.
Talk to you again soon, on the other side, inshalla.
Today’s post is a QGIS Server update. It’s been a while (12 years 
) since I last posted about QGIS Server. It would be an understatement to say that things have evolved since then, not least due to the development of Docker which, Wikipedia tells me, was released 11 years ago.
There have been multiple Docker images for QGIS Server provided by QGIS Community members over the years. Recently, OPENGIS.ch’s Docker image has been adopted as official QGIS Server image https://github.com/qgis/qgis-docker which aims to be a starting point for users to develop their own customized applications.
The following steps have been tested on Ubuntu (both native and in WSL).
First, we need Docker. I installed Docker from the apt repository as described in the official docs.
Once Docker is set up, we can get the QGIS Server, e.g. for the LTR:
docker pull qgis/qgis-server:ltrNow we only need to start it:
docker run -v $(pwd)/qgis-server-data:/io/data --name qgis-server -d -p 8010:80 qgis/qgis-server:ltrNote how we are mapping the qgis-server-data directory in our current working directory to /io/data in the container. This is where we’ll put our QGIS project files.
We can already check out the OGC API landing page at http://localhost:8010/wfs3/
Let’s add a sample project from the Training demo data repo. (You may need to install unzip if you haven’t yet.)
mkdir qgis-server-data
cd qgis-server-data
wget https://github.com/qgis/QGIS-Training-Data/archive/release_3.22.zip
unzip release_3.22.zip
mkdir world
cp QGIS-Training-Data-release_3.22/exercise_data/qgis-server-tutorial-data/world.qgs world/
cp QGIS-Training-Data-release_3.22/exercise_data/qgis-server-tutorial-data/naturalearth.sqlite worldGiving us:
QGIS Server should now be serving this sample project. Let’s check with a WMS GetMap request:
Giving us:
If you instead get the error “<ServerException>Project file error. For OWS services: please provide a SERVICE and a MAP parameter pointing to a valid QGIS project file</ServerException>”, it probably means that the world.qgs file is not found in the qgis-server-data/world directory.
Of course, we can also add http://localhost:8010/ogc/world to the WMS and WFS server connections in our QGIS Desktop:
Raf spotted this premium chocolate map in Poboleda.
“Xocoleda 9 Onze is an awesome chocolate shop in Poboleda, a small village in the wine making region of Priorat in Catalunya.”
MapsintheWild It’s a Chocolate World
Erik spotted this in a thrift shop.
“Best thrift store find of the year: #MapsintheWild cookie cutter (or: clip irl function). I’ll accept the #mapswithoutnewzealand issue. Wouldn’t be more than a crumb anyway!”
MapsintheWild Cookie Cutter (literally)
Stan Carey shared this mirror map.
“Mirrors in the shape of the Aran Islands at Connemara Airport, alongside Tim Robinson’s map for lo-fi comparison (below)”
MapsintheWild Arab Islands in Reflection
GeoServer 2.24.3 release is now available with downloads (bin, war, windows), along with docs and extensions.
This is a maintenance release of GeoServer providing existing installations with minor updates and bug fixes. GeoServer 2.24.3 is made in conjunction with GeoTools 30.3, and GeoWebCache 1.24.3.
Thanks to Andrea Aime (GeoSolutions) for making this release.
New Feature:
Improvement:
Bug:
Task:
For the complete list see 2.24.3 release notes.
Community module development:
Community modules are shared as source code to encourage collaboration. If a topic being explored is of interest to you, please contact the module developer to offer assistance.
Additional information on GeoServer 2.24 series:
Release notes: ( 2.24.3 | 2.24.2 | 2.24.1 | 2.24.0 | 2.24-RC )
Cancer is a mind fuck.
I mean, it’s a body fuck too, obviously, but the early experience for me has been of weird gyrations of mental health and mood with each passing day.
The first thing I did was the first thing everyone does – look up all the different probabilities of five year survival, because that’s what is at the top of the Google search.
With a stage two diagnosis (hard to know if that’s actually what I have, though) Google says I have a 10% chance of dying over the next five years.
That feels like… a lot? A scary amount.
But wait, here’s a fact – my odds of dying just in the ordinary course of affairs over the next five years are about 4.5%.
Does that stop me from being 1000% more terrified, on a daily basis, since receiving my diagnosis? No it does not.
A good deal of that terror, I think, is that cancer promises a patient a long and painful interaction with a medical system that has only destructive rear-guard actions at hand to stop it. Cut things out; kill it with poison; zap it with radiation. These procedures all leave a body worse for wear, and if they don’t work… they bring you back and do some more of them.
My great grandfather died while rolling a ball on the lawn bowling green in his late 80s. Massive stroke, he died doing something he loved and was dead before he hit the ground. Floyd Ramsey hit the mortality jackpot.
Naturally, I would also like to hit that jackpot. Cancer says, “not so fast, you might have a different life experience ahead of you”.
It would be a little too pat to say that getting a diagnosis starts you off on the stages of grief, because that implies some orderly process to the mental evolution. I am not progressing linearly through the stages of grief, so much as visiting them randomly, over and over, in an emotional shuffle mode.
Some days are denial days. Some days are acceptance days. Some days are bargaining days.
I told my councillor last week that “I only feel OK to the extent that I am dissociative”, and that seems to still hold true. I am at my most together when I have fully distracted myself from the diagnosis. I’m not sure if this counts as “taking one day at a time”. Probably not.
Talk to you again soon, on the other side, inshalla.
Erik shared this great puzzle map.
“100 years of #RotaryInternational in the Netherlands celebrated with a biking marathon for charity through the country. Today”
MapsintheWild Floor Puzzle Map
Doug shared this “Map of Peaks Island keeping my hands warm and my beer cool.”
MapsintheWild Peaks Island Cooler
A common refrain on my Facebook cancer support groups is that the first months after diagnosis can be among the most stressful. You know the least about the actual extent of your condition, but you simultaneously know for sure that your life is going to change a great deal, starting now.
It is also the first time for grieving.
In the worst case it is grieving actual mortality, the very real threat of the end. But even in a relatively low impact diagnosis like my (current) one, there is grief. It is the grief of lost futures, lost plans, lost self-image.
I am a person who runs and climbs and rows and goes on long walks and travels and teaches and speaks publicly. At least, I was. If all goes according to plan, there will eventually be a new me, who does some or many of those things. Maybe not all of them anymore, there is no predictability or control.
Last Christmas I took my family to Rome over the holidays. “No time like the present!” I said, little knowing how apt that would be. I’m glad for everything I have done with my family. Climbing mountains, scaling cliffs, travelling afar, and even the predictable summer trips to the beach.
Some of these adventures were quite hard, and in the moment I wondered to myself “what the heck were you thinking?” In the end, I regretted none of it, and we all have lifelong memories we share.
Before she was killed by cancer, Amy Ettinger wrote:
I’ve always tried to say yes to the voice that tells me I should go out and do something now, even when that decision seems wildly impractical … Money always comes back, but if you miss out on an experience, the opportunity may never come back.
I am trying to pack as much climbing, and eating out, and walks to the cafe, and evening date nights into my life as I can, before the start of treatment. It’s too late for anything big, but these are little things that bring me joy that may become harder to do, after.
My surgery date is set now, and the procedure will mark an abrupt decline and then the start of a long slow climb back up to whatever “new normal” my body can fashion from my reconfigured plumbing. Some people have great results, some people have terrible ones.
As always, there’s no way to know, the grey area is omnipresent, which is perhaps why I sound so morose.
Talk to you again soon, inshalla.
The first quarter of my season has been challenging. I've had to deal with injuries and other niggles, and I'm just starting to feel better when I run. Moving forward on fitness while not being able to run very much has been an interesting problem to work on.
As I mentioned in Preason running I started my 8 week block of interval workouts with nagging knee pain. This pain continued for 6 weeks. I dealt with it by alternating outdoor runs with low-impact sessions on an elliptical or stair-stepper machine. I did one outdoor session of hill intervals and one indoor session of stair-stepper intervals every week. By the end of the block, I was doing 36 minutes of hard uphill running, and 4 hours of easier running or stepping in a week. It's not where I want to be. At least I didn't have to skimp on the hard intervals. I'm satisfied with doing as much hard running as my knee allowed, and enjoy feeling more fit.
At the end of last year, I was determined to get some physical therapy and rehabilitate my ankles and feet. I've been visiting a local clinic once a month and have been diligent about doing the recommended exercises. The therapist says that I have good range of motion in my ankles, though there is an imbalance; my right ankle has excellent mobility while the left is only better than average. My bigger problem, in the therapist's view, was that my toes and feet are weak. I needed to build muscle so that I can do toe stands easily and lift my arches. So, I've been going to the gym to build muscle three times a week. I do sets of back squats (5 x 5) for overall strength, and then do sets (3 x 10) of single-leg calf raises on a step with a kettlebell, single-leg squats with toe taps using a barbell and band around my thighs, and single-leg deadlifts with dumbbells. The Three Amigos, as I've been calling these single-leg exercises, have been working for me. My feet and lower legs are stronger and their imbalances are getting ironed out. I feel almost equally good with the deadlifts now, wobbling just one time out of ten, at most, on my left leg. The therapist has me progressing to single-leg jumping now, and I'm feeling better balance with the new exercises, too.
Consistent strength training, conservative running, and changing the way I sit at work seem to have let my knee recover. I'm standing, sitting on a stool, and reclining more when I work, using a conventional office chair less, and at maximum height when I do.
A radiology visit in December revealed that I'm developing a bone spur on my right heel. I wonder if this is yet another symptom of imbalance in my feet and legs, more stress on my right foot caused by favoring my weaker left? I'm getting some consultation on this and meanwhile am icing regularly. Two weeks ago I had to stop running for 3 days to treat aggravation of my right sciatic nerve. It was a good reminder to be more diligent about stretching and foam rolling. Otherwise, I'm doing pretty well. Heart palpitations are behind me. I'm eating and sleeping well, keeping sinus infections at bay, and enjoying longer days and generally nice spring weather.
I'm grateful to be able to continue training and am looking forward to a productive block of tempo running.
Harel Dan shared this pic with me. Can you guess where it is? Scroll down to find out.
Harel explained “The uniquely American passion for copying other placenames from every corner of the world, led to there being all these places within a few hundred miles of each other in the state of Maine. Someone was clever enough to make a tourist trap out of it.”
MapsintheWild Can you guess where this fingerpost is?
Another one from Erik’s US trip
I know that some will complain about the cardinal points not being a map but we have had them before and if you want to go ultra geek you could probably visualise a country outline in a weird projection in the coffee.
MapsintheWild Compass Coffee
Before I joined the population of fellow cancer travellers, I had the same simple linear understanding of the “process” that most people do.
You get diagnosed, you get treatment, it works or it doesn’t.
What I didn’t appreciate (and this will vary from cancer to cancer, but my experience is with colorectal) is how little certainty there is, and how wide the grey areas are.
Like, in my previous post, I said I was “diagnosed” with cancer. Which maybe made you think I have it. But that’s not how it works. I had a colonoscopy, and a large polyp was removed, and that polyp was cancerous, and a very small part of it could not be excised. So it’s still in me.
Do I have cancer? Maybe! I have a probability of having live cancer cells in me that is significantly higher than zero. But not as high as one.
How bad is what I have? This is also a game of probabilty. Modern technology can shave off the edges of the distribution, but it can’t quite nail it down.
A computed tomography (CT) scan didn’t show any other tumors in my body, so that means I probably don’t have “stage 4” (modulo the resolution of the scan), which is mostly incurable (though it can be manageable), where the cancer has managed to spread outside the colon.
An MRI didn’t show any swollen lymph nodes, which means I maybe do not have “stage 3”, which requires chemotherapy, because the cancer has partially escaped the colon. But MRI results are better at proving rather than disproving nodal involvement and people report having surgical results that run counter to the MRI all the time.
That leaves me (theoretically) at “stage 2”, looking at a surgical “cure” that involves removing the majority of my rectum and a bunch of lymph nodes. At that point (after the major life-altering surgery!) the excised bits are sent to a pathologist, and the probability tree narrows a little more. Either the pathologist finds cancer in the nodes (MRI was wrong), and I am “upstaged” to stage 3 and sent to chemotherapy, or she doesn’t and I remain a stage 2 and move to a program of monitoring.
In an exciting third possibility, the pathologist finds no cancer in the lymph nodes or the rectum, which means I will have had major life-altering surgery to remove… nothing dangerous. My surgeon says I should find this a happy result (no cancer!) which is probably because he’s seen so many unhappy results, but it’s a major surgery with life-long side effects and I would do almost anything to not have to have it.
Amazingly, despite our modern technology there’s just no way to know for sure if there are still live cancer cells in me short of taking the affected bits out and doing the pathology. Or waiting to see if something grows back, which is to flirt with a much worse prognosis.
Monitoring will be regular blood tests, annual scans and colonoscopies for several years, as the probability of recurrence slowly and asymptotically moves toward (but never quite arrives at) zero. And all those tests and procedures have their own error rates and blind spots.
There are no certainties. All the measuring and cutting and chemicals, and I will still have not driven the cancer entirely out, it will stubbornly remain as a probability, a non-zero ghost haunting me every year of the rest of my hopefully long life.
And of course worth mentioning, I am getting the snack-sized, easy-mode version of this experience! People in stage three or stage four face a probability tree with a lot more “and then you probably die in a few years” branches, and the same continuous reevaluation of that tree, with each new procedure and scan, each new discovery of progression or remission.
Talk to you again soon, inshalla.
We all love a map jigsaw, well at least Harry Woods and I do. Here’s Harry making a jigsaw map of London that was made from OpenStreetMap.
I guess you could make a jigsaw of your favourite location, could be one for my friends at SplashMaps.
MapsintheWild The Pieces of London
logo del proyectoEs con gran placer que informamos que el equipo ganador por Colombia de la edición 2023 del concurso Proyectos con Estudiantes y gvSIG Batoví fue seleccionado para el Programa de entrenamiento en el uso pedagógico de las TIC – Convocatoria 2024
Como resultado, el proyecto viaja a Corea del Sur.
Nos llena de orgullo saber que la iniciativa del Curso – Concurso Geoalfabetización mediante la utilización de Tecnologías de la Información Geográfica (que en el año 2023 tuvo por primera vez participantes fuera de Uruguay) permita que un proyecto desarrollado en Colombia (y que ameritó haber sido declarado ganador del concurso) dé a conocer la experiencia aún más internacionalmente.
el equipo colombiano ganador con los diplomas del concurso Proyectos de Geografía con estudiantes y gvSIG BatovíFelicitamos a la profesora Astrid Corredor por el logro obtenido. Estos resultados son los que nos convencen cada día de continuar con la iniciativa del curso-concurso para seguir difundiendo el uso de las Tecnologías Libres de Información Geográfica como herramientas de enseñanza y de generación de conocimiento.
vista del municipio de Choachí desde el páramo
Sorry, this entry is only available in French.