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marklit

2,535 karma

Big Data, AI, GIS & Networking Consultant.

Author and Technical Analyst of https://tech.marksblogg.com/

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Comments138
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thecastlemap.com 1d ago

Map of the world's great castles and fortresses

marklit
306pts189
tech.marksblogg.com 4d ago

Flight Planning with Little Navmap

marklit
1pts0
tech.marksblogg.com 6d ago

Flight Planning with Little Navmap

marklit
12pts5
source.coop 7d ago

World Base Map (Natural Earth 6.0)

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4pts1
wretched.computer 7d ago

Reverse Engineering Crazy Taxi, Part 3

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3pts0
www.youtube.com 10d ago

Morosx MX88 Manet [video]

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2pts0
github.com 10d ago

Littlenavmap

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2pts0
yle.fi 14d ago

Electric aircraft makes historic flight from Sweden to Finland

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6pts0
www.shadedrelief.com 15d ago

Blue Earth Bathymetry 2.0

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4pts1
github.com 16d ago

Pyramids – GIS Utility Package

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3pts0
source.coop 21d ago

Planet crisis response imagery related to the earthquakes in Venezuela

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2pts0
tech.marksblogg.com 22d ago

Vantor's Open Satellite Feed

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1pts0
news.err.ee 22d ago

Estonian camera headed for deep-space mission in 2028

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1pts0
github.com 28d ago

Multi-temporal Sentinel-2 super-resolution by optimization

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5pts1
www.youtube.com 29d ago

Cirrus SF50 G3 Vision Jet [video]

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3pts0
www.greybeam.ai 1mo ago

DuckDB Internals Part 1

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480pts153
news.err.ee 1mo ago

Bank of Estonia recommends keeping cash reserve at home

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3pts1
tech.marksblogg.com 1mo ago

Optimal Seating on the Airbus A380

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2pts0
github.com 1mo ago

An open-source aircraft identification library in Python

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1pts0
twitter.com 1mo ago

3D Japan

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2pts0
tech.marksblogg.com 1mo ago

Open Source Aviation Maps

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4pts0
tech.marksblogg.com 1mo ago

Open Source Aviation Maps

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3pts0
www.youtube.com 1mo ago

Wi-Fi 8 in the Lab [video]

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2pts0
www.youtube.com 1mo ago

An LLM Flies X-Plane [video]

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1pts0
tech.marksblogg.com 1mo ago

1.75B Airport Weather Observations

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2pts0
www.spectralreflectance.space 1mo ago

The EO community probably does not need your weekend package

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5pts0
newsletter.terrawatchspace.com 1mo ago

Three Years On: Analysing Advent's Maxar Acquisition

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2pts0
www.youtube.com 2mo ago

Tearing apart an x-ray machine I got from the government

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3pts0
www.youtube.com 2mo ago

FaceTime Without the Internet [video]

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3pts0
worldbuilder.substack.com 2mo ago

Unbundling Google Maps

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3pts0
3.4M Solar Panels 3 months ago

I love that idea. I don't have time for anything elaborate today but I dropped two visualisations at the bottom of the post.

I can't get the vector basemap to render in QGIS properly with any other projection. I love using EPSG:3301 for Europe, etc.. but loads of strange things happen. Even 4326 is an issue.

Glad you enjoyed it.

There should be enough SQL in the blog to re-purpose extracting out the Wildberries locations and seeing where they land on top of. I've never heard of this firm before you mentioned it.

From Google:

Citibank operates over 2,300 ATMs within more than 600 U.S. branches, with a total network of over 65,000 fee-free ATMs

So the 57,163 Citibank locations are probably a combination of their branches and ATMs.

Update: I reviewed Alltheplaces a while back, they scrape company websites for store locations. They reported 68,227 locations for Wildberries. ATP is one of the sources Overture use but they seem to use 1.55M of the records from their 19M-record dataset. https://tech.marksblogg.com/alltheplaces.html

I'm having a hard time tracking down the OSM-specific actions around this but Australia moved 1.8M back in 2017 due to continental shifting https://www.ga.gov.au/news/news-archive/australia-officially...

The Airport in Tartu, Estonia had a navigation upgrade last year in order to help mitigate navigation jamming that's taking place in the region. https://www.eans.ee/en/uudised/tanasest-saab-tartu-lennuvalj...

Defcon had a great talk on all the different navigational systems pilots can use and a note at the end that these shouldn't be decommissioned at the rate they're experiencing atm https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSVdfOn737o

From what I've seen in news reports, China has built a lot of tower blocks that are 10s of floors, rather than the 4-5-floor buildings I saw when I worked in and travelled around India.

India has ~4x the population of the US so the ratio of buildings isn't much of a surprise.

That 5 TB of data will probably be 3-400 GB in Parquet. Try and denormalise the data into a few datasets or just one dataset if you can.

DuckDB querying the data should be able to return results in milliseconds if the smaller columns are being used a better if the row-group stats can be used to answer queries.

You can host those Parquet files on a local disk or S3. A local disk might be cheaper if this is exposed to the outside world as well as giving you a price ceiling on hosting.

If you have a Parquet file with billions of records and row-groups measuring into the thousands then hosting on something like Cloudflare where there is a per-request charge could get a bit expensive if this is a popular dataset. At a minimum, DuckDB will look at the stats for each row-group for any column involved with a query. It might be cheaper just to pay for 400 GB of storage with your hosting provider.

There is a project to convert OSM to Parquet every week and we had to look into some of those issues https://github.com/osmus/layercake/issues/22

I'm hoping to use most of this system for the next 10 years. At some point, I want to add some beefy GPUs to it when I get back into 3D again.

There are ~15 GB of SAR imagery at the bottom being rendered as is from GeoTIFF files. On my 2020 MBP rendering that amount of data in QGIS would lag without building mosaics and tiles.

The Parquet pattern I'm promoting makes working across a wide variety of datasets much easier. Not every dataset is huge but being in Parquet makes it much easier to analyse across a wide variety of tooling.

In the web world, you might only have a handful of datasets that your systems produce so you can pick the format and schemes ahead of time. In the GIS world, you are forever sourcing new datasets from strangers. There are 80+ vector GIS formats supported in GDAL. Getting more people to publish to Parquet first removes a lot of ETL tasks for everyone else down the line.

70% of daytime RGB sat imagery is covered by clouds. I'm not sure how easy it would be to spot if clouds were covering a city's lights at night.

I've only seen Maxar publish one night time image and that was of Dubai. I suspect smaller buildings in not so well lit areas could end up getting missed out.

SAR imagery would work well for seeing at night and through clouds but I'm not sure what the state of AI building footprint detection is with SAR atm.

Download responsibly 10 months ago

I haven't done any deep dives into their road data but there was ~80 GB of it, mostly from TomTom, in the August release. I think the big question would be how much overlap there is with HERE and how would the metadata compare.

TomTom did a few write ups on their contribution, this one is from 2023: https://www.tomtom.com/newsroom/behind-the-map/how-tomtom-ma...

If you have QGIS running, I did a walkthrough using the GeoParquet Downloader Plugin with the 2.75B Building dataset TUM released a few weeks ago. It can take any bounding box you have your workspace centred on and download the latest transport layers for Overture. No need for a custom URL as its one of the default data sources the plugin ships with. https://tech.marksblogg.com/building-footprints-gba.html

Download responsibly 10 months ago

Amazon, Esri, Grab, Hyundai, Meta, Microsoft, Precisely, Tripadvisor and TomTom, along with 10s of other businesses got together and offer OSM data in Parquet on S3 free of charge. You can query it surgically and run analytics on it needing only MBs of bandwidth on what is a multi-TB dataset at this point. https://tech.marksblogg.com/overture-dec-2024-update.html

If you're using ArcGIS Pro, use this plugin: https://tech.marksblogg.com/overture-maps-esri-arcgis-pro.ht...

Download responsibly 10 months ago

I suspect web apps that "query" the GPKG files. Parquet can be queried surgically, I'm not sure if there is a way to do the same with GPKG.

From discussions I've seen online, a lot can fail on satellites so there is a bias to do as little as possible on them. There does appear to be plenty of bandwidth to transmit back to ground stations.

The real win will be satellite-to-satellite transmissions where any data collected by the constellation is passed to the satellite that'll next fly over a ground station. This will lower the time from capture to analysis considerably. The fresher the data, the more valuable it is.

The JSON files in the S3 bucket can be downloaded in isolation from any other format and they're pretty small. I did some geo-enrichment of them in a previous blog post where I found the country and waters of Umbra's ship imagery. https://tech.marksblogg.com/yolo-umbra-sar-satellites-ship-d...

The above relies on network calls to OSM but with Capella, I found a way to get the smallest GeoFabrik partition for each image using a single GeoJSON file. The code could probably be modified to work on Umbra's feed with a bit of work. https://tech.marksblogg.com/capella-open-data-free-satellite...

Lastly, Umbra have ~24 locations they image frequently but there is an 'ad hoc' folder with a lot of subject names in English that give away the location and subject matter. This might be easier to look through for interesting imagery.

aws s3 --no-sign-request ls 's3://umbra-open-data-catalog/sar-data/tasks/ad hoc/' | grep -i 'tesla\|nvidia\|saudi'

DuckDB's file format is OLAP-based but supports CRUD operations. I've created DBs with it with 10s of millions of records and gotten amazing query speeds.

Efficient querying using indices over S3 for their format isn't something I've looked into just yet.

Green Idea | Estonia | REMOTE | Full-time | Windows + DirectX C++ Developer

I'm looking for a C++ developer to build Geospatial / GIS visualisation and editing tools for Windows. These will work in both 2D and 3D. These will act more like desktop applications like AutoCAD and 3D Studio Max rather than full-screen video game applications.

The project is likely to be iterative so if you thrive on agency and being a part of the brain-storming process, you should feel at home.

Knowledge of the following is expected:

* C++17

* Computer Vision + Graphics, photogrammetry

* CUDA

* DirectX

* DuckDB and SQLite3

* GDAL and GEOS

* Packaging Windows Applications for distribution

* Python

* QGIS & ArcGIS Pro

* WinUI 3 and Windows Ribbon

We're based in Estonia but flexible with time zones between here and California.

Contact me via https://www.linkedin.com/in/marklitwintschik/ to apply for the role.