Author Archives: scruss

QGIS: Getting your ClickFu back

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: Consult the External Author Repositories list In QGIS, go to Plugins -> Fetch Python … Continue reading

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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 … Continue reading

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Styling GeoBase land cover data

GeoBase provides the free Land Cover, Circa 2000 – Vector product which contains 1:250,000 land cover categories (water, ice, crops, urban, trees, …) for all of Canada. It has some use in wind energy development, as you can use it … Continue reading

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Making weird composite shapes with Shapely

Let’s say you operate microwave radio links, and you want to see if you could build a link between, say, the huge comms tower at Clear Creek, ON and your tower just south of Aylmer. You know that Erie Shores … Continue reading

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The Invisible City

There’s not a whole lot north of North Bay. Highway 11 winds through some extensive geometry, but few habitations. Until something wonderful (and quite a bit wrong) happened at 46° 31′ 21″ N, 79° 33′ 9″ W on OpenStreetMap. A … Continue reading

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Awesome USGS orthoimagery … in Canada?

Detail of Erie Shores Wind Farm showing USGS orthophotos from WMS I was trying to do some OpenStreetMap edits in rural southern Ontario, but the default Bing background aerial imagery is very poor. Clicking around in semi-plokta mode to find … Continue reading

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Mephisto’s Oriental Mystery — solved!

I bought a pair of Mephisto shoes today, and to go with their wayfaring imagery, the insoles are decked out with map-like symbols. Prominent is a map coordinate: N 38° 51.343′ E 94° 47.963′. If you look at a map … Continue reading

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geocoder.ca’s excellent database

geocoder.ca provides a crowdsourced postal code geocoder under the ODbL. You can download the database as CSV directly. Here’s a bash script to convert that text file into a (very large) point shapefile: Though the script is a bit Unix-centric, … Continue reading

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Georeferencing QGIS output rasters

Some of the design packages I rely on use very crude GIS facilities. In fact, all they can support is a georeferenced raster as a background image, so it’s more of a rough map than GIS. It helps if these … Continue reading

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