Ken spotted this on US TV – I think it would make a great caption contest. Go for it!

Reinder spotted this magnificent illuminated globe at the railway station in Leiden. I think it’s a perfect choice for our Xmas day post.

Happy Christmas to all who celebrate it and Seasons Greetings to the rest of you.

A few days ago, my pal Ken Field posted about a new project he is planning for 2026:

“Ten years ago I had an idea to write about a map a day for a year. I’ve had another idea… Introducing the #365DayMapChallenge where Ian Muehlenhaus and I will make a map a day, using only natural language prompts and AI, for a whole year. More here: https://mapdesign.icaci.org/2025/12/the-365-day-map-challenge/“

I had a look at the ICA Commission on Map Design site and thought I would have a play with their WebMapperGPT tools. The idea is to describe the map that you want to build and then the AI tool will generate the code for you. Turned out it is both compulsive and a lot harder than I would have expected!

Jeremy spotted this in the Lemon Tree pub in London. He said “It was really interesting to interpret. Around 1850 we reckoned. The Crystal Palace is still in Hyde Park, no Tower Bridge, the terminus main railway stations are in.”

You might think “that’s really neat” then Ken chipped in to identify the maps as “Balloon View of London as seen from Hampstead by Henry Banks, 1851” – you could visit the original in the London Museum. For the Londoners trying to work out where Santa might be heading for his next delivery, remember that this map is north down (viewed from Hampstead looking south).

Geomatico nació allá por 2011 como un grupo de desarrolladores quemados del trabajo por cuenta ajena. Un grupo de personas que quería ser dueña de sus propias decisiones, cansada de estar supeditada a un modelo de trabajo con el que no se sentían alineadas.

Durante ocho años, Geomatico fue una red de autónomos autogestionada: personas independientes unidas en la toma de decisiones.

Hacia 2017 se planteó la necesidad de dar un salto y crear una estructura que nos permitiese acceder a determinadas ofertas a las que esta red de trabajadores independientes no podía llegar.

En ese momento decidimos constituir una sociedad mercantil para cubrir esa necesidad concreta. En aquella aventura solo dos de los miembros estaban disponibles y la opción viable fue crear una sociedad limitada.

Reinder said “I saw this brand new edition of Ulysses in a 2nd hand bookshop in Leiden. Quite remarkable I think, that this design with a Dublin town plan was not used earlier… or was it?”

Reinder spotted this poster for Billy Wilder’s 1953 film Roman Holiday nestled amongst underwear in a clothing shop in Rome

Elizabeth spotted this in a cafe opposite Gospel Oak station, probably Little Oak Coffee. Looks like both Kentish Town and this cafe are worth visiting.

Running in 2025 started out badly, but I hung in there, rode my bike and chugged on the elliptical machine when I couldn't run, did a lot of physical therapy, and finally got into good enough shape that I could plausibly try the Bear 100 mile race again.

Aspen, fir, and spruce trees bordering the Sinks area at the top of Logan Canyon. September, 2025.

I had little margin for error at the Bear, and misplayed my hand. I went out too fast and suffered for it after mile 35. I did manage to battle on for another 18 hours and 40 miles, and reached a new personal distance best. The best part of the whole event was the road trip with Ruthie, my crew chief, and staying with my aunt in Cache Valley before and after the run. And the fall colors. There were a lot of good parts. Crossing the finish line, sadly, was not one of them.

Another one from Reinder’s trip to Rome.

“Saw this textile work of art in Rome, in the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art. It dates from 1990 and is made by  Alighiero Boetti” I had never heard of Boetti, it is worth clicking on the link to look at his Mappe series.

Another piece by Kerry James Marshall.

“The past and future merge in this work. The Afrofuturist household appears to be in a cosmos far from Earth. The domestic interior is decorated with modernist furniture and ancient African artefacts, such as Yoruba sculptures. As the children look back at Earth, a hologram of the floating globe positions Africa towards the viewer.”

Prezado leitor,

Caso você ainda não tenha acompanhado as últimas novidades do projeto, no primeiro semestre de 2026 a equipe do GeoServer irá disponibilizar a versão 3.0.

Mais do que uma simples mudança de numeração, essa nova versão representa uma atualização tecnológica profunda, essencial para garantir a evolução, a segurança e a sustentabilidade do GeoServer nos próximos anos.

A proposta do GeoServer 3 é transformar a forma como você interage com dados geoespaciais, tornando a plataforma mais rápida, mais intuitiva e mais segura, tanto para administradores quanto para desenvolvedores e usuários finais.

A principal motivação por trás do GeoServer 3 é a atualização do Spring Framework, que evolui da versão 5.3 para a versão 6.

We went to an exhibition of paintings by Kerry James Marshall at the Royal Academy, there were a couple of maps in the wild tucked away in his fabulous work.

The gallery blurb says “In Terra Incognita, Marshall uses multiple techniques that call attention to the complicated legacy of the Middle Passage. The collage-like composition shifts our gaze around the painting. The waiter in the middle of the painting, dressed in the colours representing Eshu, Elegba, spirit of the crossroads and of changes, stands between an ocean liner and a compass. Around them are the longitudinal and latitudinal coordinates of the Atlantic. The drawing of the map below disrupts our sense of time, with its image of an African warrior, a list of commodities extracted from Africa and names of nation states post-independence.” – Quite!

Just in time for the end of 2025, QField 4.0 is now available in a virtual store near you. This release brings significant improvements and marks an important usability milestone, worthy of a new major version. It’s truly never been easier to get started with QField—whether you’re a seasoned GIS professional or new to spatial data collection.

One of the most significant feature additions in this new version is right there on the welcome screen: a simple wizard for creating new projects. The wizard guides users through a set of questions covering the desired basemap style and actions such as note taking and position tracking. These projects can be published directly on QFieldCloud, so users can upload images, notes, and tracks that are accessible through web browsers or QGIS using QFieldSync.

Reionder said “In 2023 the artist Emilio Isgrò donated (t)his work of art called ‘Planetarium’ to the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art, in Rome (Italy). He definitely did something with black ink and place names – but I could not figure out what precisely. I hope you like it. “

Apparently this technique of redacting the names of places is erasure – apparently “The crucial point of Isgrò’s work is that the erasure is not a negative or destructive act. On the contrary, he sees it as a positive, transformative gesture.“

Jeremy spotted this in the Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition at the Natural History Museum in Kensington. Hands up if you knew that intactness was a word! Looks like the UK is no doing too well on this measure.

Reinder has been on a trip to Rome and sent loads of maps in the wild which we will feature over the next couple of weeks, interspersed with our Mappy Xmas specials. This one is from Sapienza University celebrating 40 years of Arctic research – we don’t get many maps of the White Continent.

We’re happy to announce that the next QGIS User Conference will take place in Switzerland in October 2026.

Please mark the following dates in your calendar:

• 4 October 2026 – Informal active outdoor pre-event day
• 5–6 October 2026 – QGIS User Conference
• 7 October 2026 – Workshops
• 7–9 (10) October 2026 – QGIS Contributors Meeting

As always, the conference will bring together users, developers, contributors, public administrations, companies, and educators from all over the world to share experiences, workflows, and ideas around QGIS and open-source GIS.

Location and further details will be published in January 2026.

For now, save the date and keep an eye out for the updates in January.

We’re looking forward to welcoming the global QGIS community to Switzerland.

This contemporary piece is called “I forget where we were” by artist Jon Mackay, it’s a mixed media piece created on a vintage map of “Oklahoma and Indian Territory”. I can’t remember why it was in the Secret Maps exhibition!

This bra and knickers set is made of Second World War escape maps – classified tools for evading enemy capture. It was made for Lady Mountbatten from RAF escape maps of Italy. Printed on silk for durability, these maps became surplus after the war when secrecy was no longer critical. Amid post-war silk shortages, these maps found surprising second lives. This example of wartime ingenuity reveals hidden histories in an unusually intimate form.

This is a really important map.

“The partition of British India in 1947 into the new nations of India and Pakistan resulted in massive displacement and loss of life. In 1946, this map was produced showing different potential boundary lines between the new countries, drawn by hand in black ink. The map accompanied this top-secret report commissioned by Earl Wavell, the Viceroy and Governor General of India, which investigated the potential impacts of partition on a newly created Pakistan”

2025 was another good year for gardening. We had only a tiny bit of hail damage in May and June, and a lengthy period of warm fall temperatures. I had the usual great green bean harvest, plentiful cucumbers and melons, and exceptional crops of peppers and tomatoes.

The Secret Maps exhibition at the British Library, London is well worth a visit. Over the next few days I am going to post some of the exhibits that were a bit Map in the Wild

First up is this 16th-century satirical engraving known as the Fool’s Cap Map of the World (circa 1590)

Saw this on a tour of The United Nations HQ in New York, it is part of a display of 30 wood block prints by Otavio Roth illustrating each of the articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

December 10 is Human Rights Day, a United Nations (UN) campaign that calls for people to know and push for their rights no matter where they are in the world.

Elizabeth spotted these mappy gift bags in a local shop

Reinder said “My wife and I did a presentation / lecture on our new book ‘Nederland Waterland’ in the city of Roermond, in the south of the Netherlands, at a bookshop called De kleine tovenaar (the little wizzard). At the children’s books department, they’ve got a few globes … “

Reinder and his wife have written a book on Dutch history based on 100 maps (of course!) “The book deals with the history of our country in 100 maps and 100 essays – with the emphasis on water: floods, rivers, islands, tourism, harbours  etc.”

Elizabeth spotted this butchers in Borough Market

Toby spotted these map earrings at Geomob Lisbon a couple of weeks ago. They are designed by Kateryna Konieva who is launching her new collection of mappy jewellery

If I wore earrings …

Reinder said “There is this quite prolific Dutch writer Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer, born in 1968. Today I heard a presentation on the work he did when he was a kid: he designed a country called Mocanië. The full design is extremely detailed, with even a language and a grammar. It was quite fascinating – and of course there were maps. It’s all in Dutch of course — but still. See https://literatuurmuseum.nl/verhalen/ilja-leonard-pfeijffer/het-ontstaan#wat-is-mocanie“

GeoSpatial Techno is a startup focused on geospatial information that is providing e-learning courses to enhance the knowledge of geospatial information users, students, and other startups. The main approach of this startup is providing quality, valid specialized training in the field of geospatial information.

( YouTube | LinkedIn | Facebook | X )

This blog post provides how to use the Buffer and Intersection analysis in the WPS Request Builder. The WPS Request Builder is a demo page used to try out the Web Processing Service (WPS) used to execute geospatial processes for transformation, summary and analysis.

A couple of churchy posts recently. I spotted this at St James Church in Muswell Hill when we were there for my wife’s choir performance.

Elizabeth spotted this notice board at the Muswell Hill Methodist Church

It doesn’t really show the lands that we know of from the bible?

Toby spotted this map of currencies and photos from around the world in a Vietnamese restaurant in Porto

Ana Letica shared these pix from Verbatim Books in San Diego. They sell maps as well!

Obviously not this clock maker who managed to fit everything else in!

Via Ken

A map of the Two Bays walking trail that came with a pair of Nike running shoes.

Ken said “It’s a brave move to target your product to a niche group but #mapsondrinks sells. If it’s got a map on it we’ll try it” I am not sure I would buy/try every type of booze with a map, maybe just the whiskies.

You may have noticed that https://github.com/microsoft/torchgeo is now https://github.com/torchgeo/torchgeo. This is not an accident! TorchGeo now belongs to YOU, please join our monthly Technical Steering Committee meetings! TorchGeo...

Est. reading time: 2 minutes

Full release notes at Release v0.8.0 · torchgeo/torchgeo · GitHub

TorchGeo is a PyTorch domain library, similar to torchvision, providing
datasets, samplers, transforms, and pre-trained models specific to
geospatial data.

Robert Simmon said “I have lived next to the lake for 7 years and never noticed this map before!”

Credits : Bru-nO (Pixabay Content License)

Thanks to funding from the Bordeaux Metropolis, I had the chance to work on CMYK (Cyan Magenta Yellow blacK) support in QGIS. The metropolis’ goal is to remove the last barrier preventing their complete migration from ArcGIS to QGIS.

The developments are now complete and will be available in QGIS version 3.40, scheduled for release in October 2024, before becoming the next LTR in February 2025. It should be noted, however, that CMYK support will only be complete in QGIS versions built with Qt 6 (still unofficial version) for reasons explained in the article. On Windows, this version can currently only be installed using OSGeo4W (qgis-qt6-dev version).

Ken must have been visiting Miami

TorchGeo 0.8 includes 28 new pre-trained model weights and a number of improvements required for better time series support, including a complete rewrite of all GeoDataset and GeoSampler internals, encompassing 8 months of hard work by 23 contributors from around the world.

You may have noticed that https://github.com/microsoft/torchgeo is now https://github.com/torchgeo/torchgeo. This is not an accident!

Note

TorchGeo now belongs to YOU, please join our monthly Technical Steering Committee meetings!

Jo said that this is one of his favourite maps, I can see why.

Geospatial FM shared this. The Šargan Eight narrow gauge railway. 15.5km of it was restored in 2000 after built 1921, whole route connected Belgrade and Sarajevo