Thanks to a fortuitous post from James Fee, I made a great leap forward with my portable GIS today, which is handy as my FOSS4G talk is number 10 in the list (2pm on the Tuesday, if you’re interested). I’m not going to give the game away as to exactly what’s on the stick (what would I talk about in September otherwise?) but I am at the stage of trying to streamline the configuration for all the programmes and putting a nice front-end on it.

This is an idea that seems to come up every so often- what GIS programmes can you run from a USB stick. Well it appears that the list has just got longer. I’m probably the last person to realise it’s possible to do this, but I was really pleased to see that both GRASS and PostgreSQL can now be run from a USB stick, along with QGIS, XAMPP (inc Mapserver, OpenLayers, Tilecache), and FWTools.

If you need almost-free contour data, for broad-scale maps showing the terrain of an area, and you live in the UK, then the Scottish Mountaineering Club have kindly provided data in Garmin IMG format on their website. To convert this into other GIS formats, then there is a programme called GPSMapEdit, which is shareware but quite useful. Paying for the software unlocks an option to convert to mapinfo, and from there the world of GIS is your proverbial oyster.

On this page I’m going to list the books and papers that I find most useful. **Archaeology Related Texts: ** Digital Archaeologyby Thomas L Evans and Patrick Daly Actually, this is a new book that I haven’t had chance to read yet, but Tom used to be the Head of Geomatics at Oxford Archaeology and did a lot to move the department forward so I’m sure it will be good (and I’ll be buying it myself for sure).