I just came off two conferences with one being in Montana and one being in Tennessee. Both Geo related. It was my first time attending the MAGIP conference. Not that you need a long overly drawn out review of both – here are some of the highlights: TNGIC was fun. It was a different approach this year focused on people more than “the usual conference thing”. There was a service project. A hike involving GPS. We had an open source session which was standing room only. A nerf gun fight broke out. Most fun I’ve had in a good bit. MAGIP was a fun. It was a different conference setup than I expecte ..read more

At the TNGIC conference I did a workshop on LIDAR and QGIS. I was completely blasted out by ESRI’s Avenue for the Web class but I had a few souls come in and take a look at it. I finished it off with “I don’t use LIDAR that much”. Well…..I’m finally using it. It took a lot of convincing but the last two forestry jobs have involved LIDAR. Yesterday’s job was interesting enough to warrant me scribbling something down. In the following pic you’ll see a boundary and NAIP imagery…and a few red polygons. The red are recent tree planting areas. The question is “How tall are the trees?”. Using my fore ..read more

So – if you’re coming to the 2024 TNGIC (TN Geographic Information Council) meeting (April 9-11 2024) to talk about how no one understands what you do……I’m doing a workshop. What workshop? It’s a new workshop. QGIS and LIDAR data. As to what I do with the class after I run this workshop I have no clue. This was a “last minute” idea because I hardly ever use LIDAR for anything in my day to day life but people do and TN has a massive collection of this data. QGIS (thanks to PDAL) has done some pretty amazing things with LIDAR in the last few releases so I’m going to walk you through the TN LIDAR ..read more

I am probably the worst for being able to properly name “things”. There are big trees and little trees. There are the annoying bugs and the not so annoying bugs. There are ducks, birds, bigger birds, and the birds that hang out at my bird feeder. As much time as I have spent on the earth and out in the woods, I should be able to name more things or at least be able to tell more about my surroundings. A while back I volunteered for half a day to help a “bio blitz”……and what was I doing there besides “Oh look a big Tree?”. I was attempting to get everyone using INaturalist. What is Inaturalist ..read more

I don’t know if I would label this exercise as fun but I’ve learned alot. I don’t do a ton of data collection these days. At one time a few years ago I was out in the field with Fulcrum, a laptop, and sketchy internet for days at a time. These days I’m hardly ever without internet for long. I’ve been using Mergin Maps (hint I’m a BP) and I’ve been learning the ins and outs of data collection with QGIS. My general thoughts on data collection is collect everything you need to collect as quickly as possible. Don’t lose anything. Don’t over collect. Come back in and integrate that data with your i ..read more

I said this year I was cutting back on conferences….and then someone called from Montana. I am headed to Montana to teach the Intro to QGIS Class. I’ll be doing that Tuesday April 16th – it will be the 1/2 day edition. At some point I’ll also be speaking. That should be fun as I’m probably the only person there with a East TN Accent. I expect a lot of people to go “WHAT?” as I speak. Why Montana? So if you flash back to 2015 I taught the Intro Class in San Francisco at the FOSS4GNA meeting in Burlingame CA. I had a guy name Andy Rahn from Montana come and take the class. What started from tha ..read more

This usually turns up in the QGIS world every two years – So it’s my turn to talk about it. This month I did a emergency install of the TN 911 database. Basically client had a problem, we solved it in the most elegant way possible, and I’m still sorting out a few things. Generally it went smooth. We went from no database to being able to edit the existing data in half a day. There were a few problems and I decided to sit down today and fix what I could. I think I’ve been actively using postgis for like 8 years now and there’s still things I learn. So after rewriting a couple of functions that ..read more

If you’re just tuning in I built a postgis database for the TN NG 911 project. What this has turned into is “small counties who can’t/don’t want to run with an ESRI solution”. I posted the code up on github (and I realize every day I suck at github). So what did I learn with this install? Originally it took about 3 or 4 days when I had 0 clue as to what I was doing to get all the data moved over. This time it took about 1 day to move all the data and correct underlying errors. I had two small errors in the scripts I need to work out but that was too be expected. Overall it’s working as intend ..read more

In my attempt to do one blog post a week on something – today it’s QGIS. One of my clients did a hefty install of QGIS and they went and touched every box and then had a list of “things to do” like installing plugins and connecting services. I know there are different avenues through windows (and probably through linux) to get things installed. One thing I wondered at the time is making it easier. Luckily I’m hardly ever on the front end of software deplyment. Digging around the other day I ran into this repo on github. You can install it through Pip or Docker and from my testing you can build ..read more

So I have 3 classes coming up in Mid January that I should have been talking about sooner but….December was a bit hectic. Exploring QGIS, Model Designer, and Tips and Tricks are happening. Jump over to the Support page and you’ll see the info with links. I’m pretty sure 2 of the 3 will make – but we shall see. I did change the pricing a bit to include a QGIS Certificate. I was slack on that end in 2023 so I’d like to be able to provide you with a certificate and QGIS with some money per student. With that there’s a new class in the works – QGIS and LIDAR. I’m probably going to be teaching thi ..read more