Kia Ora Friend,

I hope everyone had a good festive season and New Year. I haven't been able to publish a newsletter since I've moved house. And we can't forget, it's also the holidays.

I did manage to bang out a small project. In early December, a family holiday to Mt Maunganui and two walks up Mauao acted as inspiration.

At the summit of Mauao, my unnatural way of adoring beauty in nature drew me, not to the breathtaking views of kilometer-long sandy peninsula, but a man-made metal structure sitting on the highest point of the hill.

A small metal plaque on this structure displays it's name, 'Trig Station', and a small description.

This description is best paraphrased: this is a beacon, which is part of the New Zealand geodetic system. Geodetic system is basically geo-data. Land Information New Zealand (LINZ) is responsible for curating this data.

Where there is data, there is opportunity to play around with it. A simple project idea is building a map of New Zealand using this data curated by LINZ.

A quick search shows that Koordinates is responsible for housing the data, and this data can be accessed for free. All you have to do is create an account.

Here are some interesting facts:

• There are 105,582 geodetic markers around New Zealand

• The tallest marker is on the summit of Mt Aspring, which is at an altitude of about 3029 meters

• Not all heights are the same: ortho-metric heights are not the same as ellipsoidal heights

Please check out the project with the links below. Let me know if you have any more ideas for what can be done with this data.

Here is a blog post of this project on my site.

Here it is on medium

And github.

Did you find this useful? If you did, please forward this on to family and friends so they can find it useful too.

Thanks for reading and all the best for the year ahead!

Mā te wā,

Shivan :)

Recent Blog Post

How a walk up Mt Maunganui leads to creating a map of New Zealand — shivansivakumaran.com

I did manage to bang out a small project. In early December, a family holiday to Mt Maunganui and two walks up Mauao acted as inspiration.

Kindle Highlight of the Week

To be known. To be heard. To have one’s unique identity recognized and seen as worthy. It was a universal human desire, I thought, as true for nations and peoples as it was for individuals

Barack Obama, A Promised Land