Much easier than you think
Turns out speaking coherently into a voice-to-text engine is hard!
Sharing for posterity
Bits and pieces cobbled together setting up a Raspberry Pi home server
Quick before we all get bored of it.
Ever wondered what the south-by-east-est part of your country is?
I bet (stupidly?) that coal will be cheaper than batteries in 2028
How to set up a production workflow on Prefect
TLDR: It’s great, but developing countries need more
Only one more push before the Med
Gore-Tex as a metaphor for monads
Long live Mapbox tiles
aka, Oatly is probably fine
Graphing the world's water basins with Neo4j
Turns out a billion insert statements isn't the best way.
If you ain't first yer last!
A recap of some of my more memorable excursions and hikes in the mountains.
After lots of messing around and figuring out, we're one step from moving to Oxford!
Guidance, steps, articles, books, videos etc to help be a better ally.
Adverbs, adverbs, every where, nor any use for them. (aka Rowling's editor needed regular expressions)
The software side was disappointingly easy; the hardware unsurprisingly messy. They sound better than any smart speaker, and don't spy on me!
It's time to incorporate real-world outcomes in your loss function.
Our hard work mapping the global power grid finally got published!
Michael Kloos wrote about our time in California and got it published in the MCSA annual journal. Republished here with his kind permission.
Winter is coming, and with it, short days. I decided to make a bright, pleasing sunrise wake-up light to help us get up in the morning.
Random updates as an excuse to publish a new post here. Some stuff from work, a pretty map, and outdoor trips I need to write about!
I added two new sections to this site, one for photos and the other for books. And some couscous for good measure. Have a look!
Data is a key enabler in boosting (among other things) increased access to modern energy sources. We took a (slightly) more human-centric approach to residential data and mapping in Tanzania.
Creating a smart, tree-aware algorithm for optimising electrical networks led to an interesting exploration of recursion and variable scoping.
In my work in electricity access and related issues, an issue that often comes up, and often frustrates me, is the lack of good open source tools. So building on some previous efforts, I've started...
A lot of the work I do relates to finding the cost-optimal of bringing electricity to more people and businesses. Implicit in this is the assumption that we know where the people are who already ha...
A basic web map featuring cool places and things discovered in the last few months in Barcelona.
I love working with Python, but as soon as you want to put something online, JavaScript's ability to process in the browser is a clear winner. In this post I'm going to go through making a web map ...
Building on the algorithms I developed for mini-grids, I decided to move up a level of abstraction and look at the country- rather than village-level. What follows is the outline of a model that us...
I've climbed about seven mountains above 4,000 metres. After my latest trip to Kyrgyzstan, where I took a very careful approach to acclimatization, I decided to have a look at my previous trips to ...
Together with a colleague at the World Bank, I ran a small project aimed at supporting the Mogadishu tech community. We worked with Awil Osman at iRise Hub to put together MogadishuWatt, focused on...
A friend needed a map of the US displayed with points at specific locations with attached information, and overviews for certain states with summaries. And for this to be done (and updated) as easi...
We've mapped over 4 million buildings in Tanzania. This post explores the possibilities of this data for off-grid planning using a simple Flask web app.
My book club is quite good about recording what we read each month, and noting what score each of us give each book. Let's see if it would be possible to do away with book club meetings altogether ...
Based on work in Tanzania with the government, several private developers and other stakeholders, two colleagues and I put together a report on the benefits of open data in off-grid access.
A month-ish with great friends in some of the most beautiful mountains in the world, with one goal: Bugaboo Spire.
Ironically, a large part of my work at KTH's Division of Energy Systems Analysis was modelling complex hydrological systems. I set out to create a model that would conduct massive scale hydrologica...
We knew this already, but our three weeks in Mexico drove the message home on an almost daily basis. This is the story of three South African amigos fumbling their way up a few volcanoes and some j...
This model is used to determine the best way to achieve universal electrification, by suggesting for each location in a country whether to extend the electrical grid, use a mini-grid system, or rat...
At the end of June I joined my brothers for a jaunt in the Richtersveld Transfrontier Park. It’s a harsh and barren landscape.
This year I was lucky enough to join two UIAA youth meets. Youth rock climbing in Catalonia, organised by the FEEC, and the Kazbek mountaineering expedition, organised by the Mountaineering & Climb...
Some time, several years ago when I still very excited about Java, and read a lot of books on evolution, I had the fun idea to combine the two. I created a simple program to model one of the more i...
My high school IT class (so, 2010) culminated in a programming project – we were free to create whatever we wanted (in Java), so long as we demonstrated what we'd learned in the class.