Installing Google Earth on Ubuntu 13.10 64-bit
Google earth cannot be installed on Ubuntu 64-bit systems anymore. It requires the ia32-libs which is unfortunately deprecated in Ubuntu 13.10. Luckily I found a solution by mc4man on the Ubuntu...
View ArticleA new great version of QGIS
Are you one of those people eagerly waiting for all those new features in QGIS that have been mentioned in the last couple of months on various forums and blogs? Well, the waiting is (almost) over....
View ArticleRescale your raster data layer
Sometimes you want to rescale a raster layer, e.g., to reduce the number of categories, or to create a common scale for different raster layers. Very basic of course, so you can expect to find an...
View ArticleReverb makes it easy to find and download satellite data
If you need MODIS satellite data, you should check Nasa’s Reverb web portal. It is a, and I quote, “next generation metadata and service discovery tool”. But, as it turns out, is is already available...
View ArticleA quick list for one-click access to a list of often used xsetwacom settings
I just bought a small Wacom drawing tablet to use as alternative mouse and for my photo editing. According to the manual this tablets, like most on the market, are only compatible with Windows or OS X....
View ArticleGRASS 7.0 beta1 is out
After a long wait, GRASS 7.0 beta is out! See here a summary of what is new in this release. Take your time, is is a long list :-). In fact, GRASS 7.0 has been available for some time now … Continue...
View ArticleAdd multiple raster or vector map layers to current map display in GRASS GIS
If your mapset contains many raster or vector layers GRASS offers a very handy feature to quickly select the layers you want to add to your current map display. In the layer manager, click Ctrl+Shift+L...
View ArticleZIM desktop wiki 0.57 is out
I just got the latest update from ZIM desktop wiki, with some noticeable changes / improvements. From the release notes: Highlights of this release are a rework of the side panes, allowing plugins to...
View ArticleIntegrating Maxent, R and GRASS GIS
The maximum-entropy (Maxent) methods is one of the most widely used approaches for species habitat modelling. It has its own dedicated software, the Maxent software (written in java and therefore...
View ArticleDisabling Ubuntu’s overlay-scrollbars for GRASS (or other applications)
Ubuntu has this new overlay-scrollbars for some time now. They look good I think, but unfortunately, they do not play nicely with GRASS GIS. So what if you want to keep them for most programs, but...
View ArticleA faster way to calculate MESS in R – or – a tribute to Stack overflow
Jean-Pierre Rossi introduced a function to calculate the “Multivariate Environmental Similarity Surfaces” in R. Since then, the function has become part of the dismo package, which is a package...
View ArticleLibreOffice global menubar still not working properly in Ubuntu 12.10
I upgraded to Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal about two weeks ago. As usual, there are a number of new or improved features and changes, the arguably most controversial being the Dash’s Amazon...
View ArticleOpening MODIS tiles in QGIS
NASA offers a very convenient web-based tool to select and download the tiles you need; Reverb / ECHO. The tiles are in HDF format and use the Sinusoidal grid tiling system (proj4 definition:...
View ArticleReading GRASS GIS vector attribute tables into R
Linking GRASS GIS and R will give you a very powerful set of geo-spatial analytical tools. The spgrass6 offers a very convenient interface between GRASS GIS and R. You can read more about this package...
View ArticleConverting an ArcMap layer file into an SLD document
Most open source GIS programs can open all most common, and quite a few obscure data format (thanks to the gdal library). What they can’t open is the ArcMap layer files (.lyr). A layer file defines...
View ArticleNew GRASS GIS Web Site
The GRASS GIS web team has created a whole new website. The goal was to create a simplified structure, general update and nicer experience. And they certainly succeeded, it looks great! And navigating...
View ArticleMultivariate Environmental Similarity Surfaces (MESS) index in GRASS GIS
The Multivariate Environmental Similarity Surfaces (MESS) is an index that represents how similar a point in space is to a reference set of points, with respect to a set of predictor variables (Elith...
View ArticleExtracting lines ending with specific character using sed or grep
A quick note (to myself mostly) about how to extract lines from a text file that end with a specific set of characters. In Linux, you can very easily do this using ‘grep’ or ‘sed’. But, first a little...
View ArticleSpatialite 4.0 is out
The release of Spatialite 4.0 was just announced on the Spatialite user group. You can download it from the Spatialite website. And while you are on the website, check out the page about switching to...
View ArticleStratified random sampling in GRASS GIS
There are various options to create a vector or raster layers with random sample points, including v.random, r.random and r.random.cells. The first two generate random points within the defined region....
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