QGIS

I was experimenting with Simplify in QGIS the other day and I wanted to get an idea of how many vertices were being removed from my geometries when I adjusted the Simplify settings.

I woke up thinking about a fragment of a map the other day, and it occurred to me that what I was picturing could probably be made using geometry generators in QGIS. I was picturing something like this:

So I thought I’d have a whack at making it.

Things I got up to in the last week:

• published blog post: systems, processes, and tools
• read an essay on systems design: https://apenwarr.ca/log/20201227 (via this tweet)
• phone link dump, all the way down to zero tabs open…
• got stuck into Observable Getting Started guides and the like and…
• started playing with my own dataset on powerplants
• did more of the Esri Cartography MOOC (running a bit behind, need to catch up!)
• discovered, fixed an issue with, and blogged about QGIS MapSwipe Tool Plugin
• published blog post: Spilhaus World Ocean Map
• started drafting up a new About page for my website (I’ve just had placeholder text there for a few years now…)
• started shopping for proper storage for my atlases and maps collection
• signed up for OpenStreetMap!

And some more words about a few of those…

I’ve been using ArcGIS for the first time in the last couple of weeks and I’ve come across the Swipe tool. My immediate thought was “oh that’s awesome” which was swiftly followed by “I wonder if QGIS has this as well?”

Last month I took part in my first 30DayMapChallenge – a daily mapmaking challenge that takes place in November each year.

For the graded assignment in the Introduction to Mapping, Spatial Data and GIS course I completed in June I made the following map:

Things I got up to in the last week:

• GEOG 868: Lesson 5: Working with Esri’s Desktop Geodatabases
• read some of my BCS cartography book
• accidentally started a website redesign project

Some rambles about each of those:

In Lesson 4 of GEOG 868 I completed a site selection using PostGIS.

The Making Maps unit for the Introduction to Mapping, Spatial Data and GIS course I completed in June featured a tourism case study. The exercise that week was to create a tourist map of Melbourne in Australia.

In Lesson 3 of GEOG 868 I played around with PostgreSQL and PostGIS for the first time. For the project at the end you are given a class_roster.txt file that contains a list of students and their postal codes. The task was to join that with data provided earlier in the lesson and then plot the students’ locations on a map in QGIS. Here’s how I went about doing that.

As noted in Hello (GIS) World I was recently working on the first assignment in the QGIS Training Manual. I planned to do 3 things for the assignment:

I am exploring the world of Geographic Information Systems (GIS).

I have been reading the Gentle Introduction to GIS from the QGIS documentation and also working through the QGIS Training Manual. In the last couple of weeks I completed the first assignment.