An update on the story of the family living in the location displayed as the default when an IP address is geolocated and an actual location can’t be found. A very interesting story on the consequences of use and misuse of location data.

3D Robotics (3DR) had raised nearly $100 million and wanted to build the perfect consumer drone. That effort nearly destroyed the company. Sidenote: My office has repeatedly looked at 3DR drones for our own use and nearly purchased twice before finding that they were pulling the plug on each of them so support would be hard to come by. They had some very compelling offerings, but like other companies were getting killed in the market by DJI. As my coworker says “price is king” and DJI was pricing to win.

I’m putting together an ever-evolving collection of GIS blogs and news sources here. It will change over time and I’m cross referencing it to regional and topic-based subsets. This is just a start, but it’s growing. If you have your own GIS blog, let me know and I’ll add it.

Also for the course, I merged a couple of listings of datasets and added some others to help make a major listing of datasets that can be used for GIS. It’s still missing tons, but feel free to make a pull request or send me an email to suggest others. It’s an always changing work-in progress. It also includes many non-spatial data sources (from the original list it came from), but I left them there because they could still be valuable in a spatial context.

If you’re into water, programming, and spatial data, this blog has posts from many authors that can provide new information, skills, and techniques.

Want to get started learning Python? Here’s a tutorial from a UC Davis Engineering professor that gives you a quick introduction to the language, specifically for engineering. While it’s not specifically GIS focused, it gives you an introduction to where you could then learn about GIS packages from there.

Want to get started with making maps in R? My coworker Ryan Peek wrote a great article on how to make static maps in R. Full of example code to recreate an ArcGIS workflow in R.