KnowWhere

After I published my map of defence spending a friend suggested that it would be interesting to see how things had changed since the end of the Cold War in 1990/91. I knew that the data I had covered a longer time period so I asked Claude if we could update the map and it checked the data and confirmed that there was reasonable data coverage back to the mid 70’s so I decided to backdate (or is it update?) the map to run from 1975 to 2024. What’s new The extended map now runs from 1975 to 2024,…

With Keir Starmer recently losing a Defence Secretary and then leaving a budgetary timebomb for his successor as PM, Andy Burnham, I thought it might be interesting to see how we rank on defence spending and who are the world’s largest exporters and importers of arms. I started out by trying to find some data on arm sales and Claude sent me to SIPRI where you can download very granular data on almost every transaction but after playing with the data I decided to take a simpler approach and map…

Thanks to Mario Ame Everything was working fine. I had just finished building the Grow Your Own allotments map, deployed it to the live server, and was feeling pretty pleased with myself. A few days later a friend messaged me that the map had stopped working. No regions, just a blank basemap. Checked the console and got this: “Server returned no content-length header or content-length exceeding request. Check that your storage backend supports HTTP Byte Serving.” Not the most helpful error…

The current outbreak of Ebola has inevitably encouraged lots of maps of the outbreak, just search for “Maps of the Ebola outbreak in Africa” and you will find something like this. Some of these are pretty good, some don’t communicate very well and a few are awful. My attention was drawn to a static map obviously generated by AI which was so so bad that it was laughable and you had to wonder why anyone share this without picking up the numerous obvious geographic errors, I wwonderedhat Claude…

I am struggling to come up with an idea for what to map next. A bit of a brain freeze. Have you got an idea? Leave a suggestion in the comments.

Having knocked up a simple fuel finder based on a csv download from the government site at the beginning of the week I thought “How difficult could it be to make something more functional and elegant and connect to the government fuel finder API?” Answer – the “more functional and elegant” not too difficult – […]

This morning there was a lot of amused banter amongst my geo-pals about the UK Government’s Fuel Finder API based on an article in The Times (possible paywall) on the problems with the data. You can download the data or access the api from the gov.uk site. I downloaded the data for this morning (31st […]

I was looking for a simpler project to build after my last couple which had proved more complicated than I had anticipated. I came up with the idea of mapping airports and finding some data on their environmental impact – good idea, but not so easy. Finding a dataset of airports was relatively easy, the […]