Birmingham has a vibrant community of geek/enthusiast groups, of which I’m proud to be a part. That said, it’s sometimes hard to find or even know about all of them, without the right. So collected here are the groups I know of:

Birmingham LUG
Linux User Group that meets at the University of Birmingham, on the third Thursday of [...]

Does an electric car gets better or worse mileage than a conventional petrol or diesel car? To a large extent, it depends on what we choose to include or exclude in the calculation. We can measure the whole chain, accounting for every step in the process of extraction, refinement, transportation and use – a well [...]

There are quite a few forums on the net for electric bikes, scooters, motorcycles and cars. Mostly they cover early adopter issues, tinkering, advocacy and DIY conversions. Here are the ones I’ve been drawn to:

Endless Sphere, A lively forum with an emphasis on electric bikes
V is for Voltage Another lively forum with many posts on [...]

These two messages appeared on the Spatialite mailing list today:
From: stefanobartol87453@gmail.com
Subject:Where can I find an online anti-virus that doesn’t install on your PC?
I’ve got 5 PCs that I’m trying to use to train disadvantaged young people. The problem is they are riddled with viruses and a firewall blocks me from updating them. The people in [...]

Petrol is fantastic stuff. It’s driven modern society, to the point of defining it: dirty, but very effective. Petrol has been so popular because of it’s convenience – as a liquid it’s easy to handle; and the fantastic amount of energy it holds – about 10 kilowatt hours in each litre. That’s an amazing amount [...]

LocalView Intranet is a web mapping product developed and sold by ESRI UK, predominantly to local councils. The current version (as of August 2009) is 2.1 SP2, supported on ArcGIS Server 9.2 SP5. The following are some straight forward tips for improving it’s performance:

The ArcMap document (mxd)  defining each map service is critical to every [...]

Apologies if your email to me has bounced these last few days. My domain was due for renewal, and neither I nor my calendar went bing. Everything should be back now, if you’ve sent me something and I haven’t reacted or replied please resend it.

To help you build and distribute your Python packges, Python provides distutils. This library knows how to bring together your modules, where to put scripts and how to compile C extensions. The process is driven by a setup.py file, written by the package author or maintainer. Depending on what argument is passed, setup.py can install [...]

If you’ve enjoyed PyCon UK the last 2 years, the bad news is that it won’t be happening this year. The good news is that  EuroPython 2009 is coming to sunny Birmingham instead, for 3 days from Tues 30th June to Thurs 2nd July and registration is now open. The even better news is that [...]

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are by their nature data driven. The data comes in a wide variety of raster and vector formats. Rasters hold raw, continuous data recorded striaght from the real world. An example is Satellite/aerial imagery, this is a commonly held in an open format with broad support, such as GeoTIFF [...]