Numpty's Progress

Month: January 2013

  • QGIS: Getting your ClickFu back (summary: nope)

    ClickFu is dead in QGIS 3. Please try to forget how useful it was. nextgis / clickfu appears to be an updated version, but it has old QT dependencies and no longer works either.

    Since QGIS 1.8 took the rather boneheaded move of hiding all the plugin sources except the official one, here’s how to get the other repositories back:

    Now you can add all the plugins!

    ClickFu is kind of magic. It allows you to choose an online map service, click anywhere on your GIS viewport, and the correct location link opens in your browser. Very handy for sharing locations with people who don’t have a GIS setup. It properly takes coordinate reference systems into account, too, so no messing about with datum shifts and the like.

    Another plugin that hasn’t made it to the official repo is Luiz Motta’s Zip Layers. It still lurks at http://pyqgis.org/repo/contributed.

    Click Fu runs just fun under QGIS 2.2 – as long as you remember to delete any pre-2.0 versions and then reinstall.

  • GeoURIs for fun and profit

    Behold the GeoURI:

    geo:37.22976,-93.28663

    It’s just a simple lat/long pair which some browsers (mostly mobile) will parse as locations. It probably won’t work in your desktop browser, but here’s an example as a link: Askinosie Chocolate — Springfield, MO.

    You can encode case-insensitive URIs very efficiently as QR Codes. If you’re okay with ~10m resolution on your locations, you can make very tiny QR Codes indeed:

    qrencode -i -o Askinosie.png 'geo:37.2298,-93.2866'

    Askinosie locationI’ve half a mind to make a little GPS-enable box that prints QR Code stickers with the current location, and the caption You are here.