Firstly, if you’ve seen this post before, apologies. It got lost in a previous re-organisation of the blog and I thought it was worth re-posting… You can get free contour data for the UK from the Scottish Mountaineering Club website. It’s based on public domain NASA data, cleaned up by the club and made freely available. It comes in garmin .img format, in several zip files, which roughly represent areas of the country.

Just when I thought I was either going to have to write a tip about configuring Grandstream VOIP phone extension modules (which I can do, if there’s enough interest…) along comes this article from Web Worker Daily full of useful tips for Microsoft Word. No news yet as to how many of them work in Open Office as well… Paste Your Formats. If you want to apply your formatting and styles for a given paragraph or document to a new paragraph or document, hit Ctrl+Shift+C to copy, select the text you want to apply the formatting to, then hit Ctrl+Shift+V.

I was quite excited to find that you can use openstreetmap data in your own GIS environment by loading it into PostgreSQL. To me, this makes it much more useful, as I can now begin to use it as an alternative to costly data from the Ordnance Survey. The procedure took some time (mainly due to trial and error), but the following worked for me in Ubuntu: Install osm2pgsql by downloading it from here using subversion

From the postgis maestro himself comes a handy tip for mass loading shapefiles of identical schemas into postgis: First, get the table schema into the database, by loading a small file, and then deleting the data. We delete the data so we can loop through all the files later without worrying about duplicating the data from the initial file: shp2pgsql -s 3005 -i -D lwssvict.shp lwss | psql mydatabase psql -c “delete from lwss” mydatabase

Welcome to the first Tip Day of 2008! Problem: You may occasionally find a microsoft word document that claims to have no spelling mistakes in it regardless of the fact that you know darn well that it has. You may check the language settings and find that it is set to the correct language and uses the correct dictionary, and you may reset the spell-check and ask it to recheck the document.

Man is not the only option for help about a command in linux. whatis — Display a summary of a command (rather than the entire manual) apropos — Display a list of commands that pertain to (are apropos to) a keyword whereis — Display information about the location of a command: the executable, the source code (if any), and the man pages. which — Display which version of a command will execute (for when there are two, or more, commands with the same name installed on the system).

PostgreSQL from 8.2 onwards can be run easily from the command line in windows, without setting up as a service. Go to your postgresql/bin folder and at a command line type: pg_ctl start -D location\of\your\data\folder (as specified in initdb) -l logfile This should output a notice telling you whether the server has started up correctly. It also saves output to a logfile in the bin folder. If the server starts without incident, open another command window at the same location and type: