Most of my computer life of the last few years has lived within Dropbox. It's proven to be a very hands off largely no-thought means of ensuring the 3 Windows computers I use regularly at work and home all have almost identical tool chains and environments. It's always bugged me though, that my "home" is buried under C:\Users\matt\Dropbox (though at least with Win7 it's not under that horrible "Documents and Settings" folder!). Way too freakin much typing just to get to the point of starting work, or fun.

I've tried several methods for making this more livable, and each succeeds to …continue.

The standard documentation for the argparse python module, while excellent I'm sure, is too much for my tiny brain to grasp. I don't need to do math on the command line or meddle with formatting lines on the screen or change option characters. All I want to do is "if arg is A, do this, if B do that, if none of the above show help and quit"

The attached geotiff image has two collars to be removed. The outermost consists of pure black (0,0,0) while the innermost is off-white (ranges from 240 thru 255). I used gdalsetnull to change 0,0,0 to nodata, then ran `nearblack -white` on the result. I detect no difference in the output image even with a very large fuzz factor (-near 50) .

What am I doing wrong?

Answers

From Even Rouault I learned that nearblack doesn't grok nodata, it just looks at the pixel values. Consequently it never sees the white collar, except a small portion at the very top of the image.

Thankfully Luke Pinner, who's come to my aid before, has an elegant solution using a VRT intermediate file (ref):

#Change 

this page is to support the GIS.stackexhange.com question of the same name, namely how does one most efficiently use arcgis and feature classes to achieve some the same things which used to be possible with arcinfo workstation and region sub-coverages.

Please see attached archives for a v10 map package which demonstrates the problem and (simulated) desired results, and the source arcinfo coverage from which the simulation is built.

or, How to be my own bank.

To date we've been keeping our finances parceled out into a series of accounts, separated according to intended use: monthly expenses, savings for investment, savings for renovations, his, hers, kids, etc. It would make more sense (and cents) if these various accounts were merged into a single account to take advantage of cumulative interest. I did try this for awhile, and kept track of how much was in each category using a spreadsheet. However I wasn't very good at keeping it synchronised or up to date and it fell into disuse. Part of this was due to the constant mental friction of …continue.

My reputation on Meta StackOverflow, as of April 2010, is still a meagre 1 in spite of my only 2 contributions to MetaSO having 17 and 18 upvotes respectively. I did not realise the system was weighted to reward self aggrandizement over community service and have been systematically making all contributions community wiki. This is broken, but I'm happy to finally understand why there's been so little movement in my score. It's not even like I care that much about my reputation, I only want enough to be able to participate in the community: up and down vote content, edit so-called community wiki posts, and perhaps close or re-open my questions. …continue.

((In response to: Choices = Headaches and Windows Shutdown Crapfest))

ahem, rather than fixing the Shutdown feature, uh… menu I mean, how about fixing the real problem: my circa 2004 computer is more than 5 times as slow as my 1994 computer. In 1994 I pressed the power button and within 30 seconds I could get to work typing a letter, playing a game or whatever. Today I press the power button, go to the bathroom, get a fresh cup of coffee and THEN sit down to work. (150s to login prompt, plus 55s to point of being able to open the start menu). If I was in to computing in …continue.