Soupbo | Web development, spatial programming, amateur radio, etc.

18. February 2013

Aerial photography from a fishing pole

I recently picked up a 20′ long fishing pole to experiment with ham radio antennas, and today I thought it’d be fun to duck tape my mini 808 keychain camera to it and see what kind of shots I get. I tried some kite aerial photography a while ago, but that depends on it being windy of [...]

22. August 2012

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Manitoba Land Cover Map

Here’s a map I whipped up using some Natural Resources Canada data I found on data.gc.ca.
Converting these old file types was not fun, but there turned out to be a fairly simple way of doing this.

17. August 2012

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Mapping using open data – Hexbinning, and data.gc.ca

I’ve been on a bit of a mapping kick recently — mainly due to a few interesting mapping related projects we’ve had at Tactica. Using some free sources of data, I put together two maps: a hexagon grid showing large forest fires in Canada, and a map showing different permafrost zones in Canada. Sort of opposite ends of the spectrum, now that I think about it!

3. August 2012

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Statistical Data Resources

UNdata Explorer - a collection of statistical data from around the world Tools for browsing the UNdata Statistics Canada, Summary Tables – summaries of statistical data from Canada Sahel Food Crisis – a site for visualizing and sharing data on the crisis in the Sahel region of Africa

1. August 2012

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Biodiversity Resources and Data

Some of my notes when researching sources of data on biodiversity. The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) http://www.gbif.org/ The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) was established by governments in 2001 to encourage free and open access to biodiversity data, via the Internet. Through a global network of countries and organizations, GBIF promotes and facilitates the [...]

19. July 2012

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Misc. web mapping resources

Tile Drawer Tile Drawer is a tool which helps you set up your own OpenStreetMap server on Amazon EC2, and serve up custom map tilesets. They also provide a few ready-made map styles Hexagonal Binning All about hexagonal binning (hexbins) Hexagonal binning demo on GitHub by the author Uses the D3 javascript library, and as [...]

21. January 2012

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Got my Amateur Radio Licence

After putting it off for years, I’ve finally gotten my amateur radio license! Say hello to VE4WMT! With enough studying, it’s pretty straightforward to get. In Canada, as in the US, it is no longer a requirement to pass a Morse code exam, so this simplifies things for sure. One thing that really helped me [...]

9. December 2011

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Save Time by Providing Training Videos

I train a lot of people on how to use WordPress, Drupal, and other content management systems, and I’ve found that my methods have changed a lot over these few years. I used to write out full documentation on all of the steps needed, and provide the client with a nice document… a document that [...]

16. October 2011

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Aerial Photography with a Kite

It was such a windy day here in Winnipeg, MB that we decided it was a perfect time to test out my keychain spy camera! We used some tuck tape to attach it to the bottom fin where the string is tied… but I should have put it nearer to the bottom because the the [...]

1. April 2011

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An Intro to Tropo – Presentation

Here’s the slides for the presentation I did about the Tropo platform for the Winnipeg Ruby user group. Not a huge amount of information in the slides themselves, but I did point out some decent examples you can check out: Tropo documentation Example using the Web API Sinatra examples, using the Web API – great [...]

26. March 2011

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The BeBop Room – my first flash game

On January 28th and 29th, a bunch of independent game developers got together to work on a game. The idea was that each person would make a mini-game, and the player would be able to move from game to game as if they were each a ‘room’. The result was So Many Rooms, a collection [...]

5. December 2010

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Viva Pinata – can’t save the game – fixed

So I bought this fun little game called Viva Pinata, but after playing it for about an hour I realized I was unable to save the game! It says something about pressing the home key to load your gamer profile, but the home key does nothing. Pretty annoying considering all the lame tutorial stuff you [...]

23. November 2010

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Drupal Webforms – States and Provinces

Here is the data you can use when setting up a select box in a Drupal webform for selecting American states, and Canadian provinces.

13. November 2010

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Fable 3 vs Fable 2

I’m a couple hours into Fable 3, and I have to say I’m pretty disappointed. Where Fable 2 was very customizable, and open-ended, I’m finding Fable 3 is far too simple. In this post, I’ll be talking about some of the things I really dislike about this game… but first, some of the things that Fable III got right…

31. October 2010

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Motorola F3 – eInk Phone

The Motorola F3 is a very basic phone with an eInk display, and sells for about $30 unlocked. Read my post to find out more about its (lack of) features.

30. August 2010

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Misc Geospatial Links

Here are some miscellaneous geospatial related links that I have in my bookmark list. As I add more, I will eventually split them into categories.