Pirmin's Blog

My desktop environment in 2026

A short tour of the hardware, desktop and tools I use for daily work in 2026: a Rust-flavoured Linux desktop, a handful of terminal tools and my editors for code and Markdown.

Equal Earth OpenLayers sprint in Graz

After my initial work on using the Equal Earth map projection in web mapping during my sabbatical in 2024, it was time for implementing extensions to web mapping libraries for a seamless integration of Equal Earth in interactive maps.

Equal Earth projection for web mapping

As a follow-up to the State of the Map Europe presentation, this article shows the current state of the proof-of-concept implementation using an Equal Earth projection in web mapping.

BBOX 0.5.0 release

BBOX provides composable spatial services written in Rust. After more than tree years of development, 6 alpha and 4 beta releases, the first official version 0.5.0 is released.

Quick note - Using DuckDB as CLI for SQLite and PostgreSQL

With the introduction of multi-database support in DuckDB 0.10.0, it's possible to use it as a frontend for MySQL, Postgres and SQLite databases. This comes in addition to the file based DuckDB storage format and native Parquet support.

After using DuckDB for analyzing GTFS data in CSV format, I got used to the nice CLI and decided to give it a try as frontend for my most often used Postgres and SQLite databases.