Spaced Out :: 08 2015

An interesting summary piece over at Amateur Photographer…. and particularly noting that

“The number of CAA-approved commercial operators now stands as 862, compared to 549 in April and a reported 359 in October 2014.”

Of course from this headline figure its hard to gauge the volume increase of flights (and their distance/duration), although I guess that could be the subject of an FoI request, however the increase in operators does show the burgeoning of a new market. At some point in the next few years we’ll see this mature as survey requirements are operationalised and the size of operators increase with companies merging.

Perhaps of more interest will be the consumer market…. this is where there will be a significant increase in flights and probably the highest safety risk as well. This is what will drive both innovation and legislation. Its worth noting (from the article)

“According to Forbes business magazine, the world’s largest consumer drone maker, DJI, is now worth $10 billion.” Now thats food for thought…

Esri have just published a free online and PDF book called The ArcGIS Book. In Esri style, it is beautifully produced and presented with an eye for layout, typography and map design. Esri have always been strong supporters of publication and education, although Id probably say its more aligned to edutising - part education, part advertising. If you live inside the Esri garden they are very good accompanying products - this one, subtitled “10 big ideas about applying geography to your world” is largely an educational user guide to ArcGIS Online. It does this very well covering an intro, catography, story maps, data, spatial analysis, 3D, apps, mobile, real-time and back to web GIS. There are explanations, interviews, online videos and practical lessons to support all this. If you are an Esri convert its an excellent guide sitting between a textbook and an online course (and Esri have form here as well), designed to support those either in education or those wanting to be self-taught.

Of course it won’t give you anything outside the Esri world and that’s where you’ll miss out on wider spatial and non-spatial developments. But as a resource, use it as its very good.

and marketing!!

I was asked to fill in a customer satisfaction survey today using a fairly normal 1-10 symmetrical likert scale. Except that below the scale values 1-6 were noted as “negative”, 7-8 as “neutral” and 9-10 as “positive”. This psychological bias means that if you are satisfied you should be scoring 9-10…. this will naturally inflate any averaged values which can then be validly used in any marketing.

Clearly even big companies like Aviva aren’t too worried about pushing the boundaries of acceptable.

My Nikon D700 has what are called “Custom Banks” - on face value these look like ways of saving your settings (for example if you have a preferred setup for a type of shooting) which you can then use later. Indeed you can use them this way, except the way they are set up is somewhat counter intuitive (as Ken Rockwell explains)…. whenever you change a setting it is automatically stored in the current bank, there is no save option. So by all means use bank “B” for a studio portrait range of settings *but dont change anything* otherwise they are automatically stored! Given you can’t lock your settings, you’ll probably end up needing to check them which kind of negates the point of using a custom bank in the first place!

Firefox has a very effective resume download facility which is useful with big downloads (particularly as Im on 2Mb broadband) - however it consistently failed me when downloading the Windows 10 install ISO last week. I tried downloading it 3 times and on each occasion it failed at around 3Gb which was very frustrating. When I reinitiated the download it started from the beginning….

After the 3rd fail I looked in to whether you can force Firefox to resume a download and indeed you can!! A partial download will have the filename followed by the .part suffix. Move this to a new location then start a new download - this will create a new .part file in your download folder. At this point pause the download, delete the new .part file and replace it with the old .part file, then resume the download in Firefox. It will correctly resume.

Big time saver!