I work with a lot of geospatial data, and I depend on a system installation of GDAL. GDAL lets me open geo-referenced TIF images, and it’s a dependency for a lot of python packages like Shapely and GeoPandas. If all I needed to do was use GDAL in python, I could try to install it through Anadona by running

conda install -c https://conda.anaconda.org/ioos geopandas=0.2.1

(note: this package was not compatible with python 3.6 when I tried it, so you might need to create a virtual environment with 3.5), but I also like to use some of GDAL’s command like tools like gdalinfo and gdal_pansharpen.py. So I had to suffer through a system-wide install for mac, which is a challenge.

President Obama has said a lot of words. That is a fact. I wanted to use those words and make a Robot to talk in his voice… on Twitter. So I built a Markov text generator using some of his speeches available at American Rhetoric.

IMDB has an awesome auto-complete search box. Type some words in it, and it immediately shows you a list of movies that match your search. I wanted to see which movies I could find on IMDB without actually loading each page, so I decided to scrape information right out of the search box.

I presented my final project at Metis last thursday. I talked about using ML to increase the chance that a famous newscaster would retweet me. This post is a work in progress.

Many people made predictions about this year’s primary, and many of these predictions turned out to be wrong. I don’t need to retread all of this information here, but suffice to say many people underestimated Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.

This post will show you how to create a feature in OSX where you right click on a file, and it opens a Terminal in the containing folder. After some searching, I found out that you can do this with Automator. I found instructions here but they were out of date and some of the relevant pieces of Automator have changed. So I wrote an updated version.

I’ve spent a few weeks using Pandas and I’m starting to appreciate just how powerful it is. I recently used it with geographic data for the first time, and that’s the topic of this post.

My goal is to locate people on the AT, so the first thing I need is a good map of the AT.  Fortunately, the Appalachian Trail Conservancy (ATC) maintains GIS data describing the path of the AT and makes it available on its website.  I was hoping to get started by downloading the GIS data, and then converting it to a format that I can use more easily.  However, I found out that that wasn’t going to be straight forward.