By way of tidying up a thread that was left dangling when I took my little blog sabbatical last year, this is the concluding instalment of my development of a map of Alaska in QGIS. By the end of my last post on this topic, I’d added roads, railways and settlements to my map. To … Continue reading Natural Earth Data In QGIS: Part 4
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Natural Earth Data In QGIS 3: Part 3
Last time, I finished working on my Alaska map with political boundaries and shading in place, and the major rivers and lakes depicted. This time, I’m going to use some more Natural Earth data to add more information to the map. The first thing I want is some towns and villages, so I download the … Continue reading Natural Earth Data In QGIS 3: Part 3
Natural Earth Data in QGIS 3: Part 2
Last time, I described how I used free Natural Earth data and the software package QGIS to produce a basic map of Alaska and its surroundings, shown above. This time, I’m going to lay some more vector datasets on top of this map to make it a little more useful. First, I want to add … Continue reading Natural Earth Data in QGIS 3: Part 2
Natural Earth Data in QGIS 3: Part 1
A while ago, I wrote about my experience using Ordnance Survey data to generate maps of the UK using the free and open-source Geographical Information System package QGIS 3. At that time I was using the then-current Long-Term Release, QGIS 3.4. Things have moved on, though, and this report uses the current QGIS LTR, version … Continue reading Natural Earth Data in QGIS 3: Part 1
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How To Model Rotating Propeller Discs
There are some things I hate about “in-flight” models of piston-engine aircraft. One is when the aircraft appear to be flying without a pilot; the other is a stationary propeller.
Modellers have a couple of ways of dealing with this second problem. One is to simply remove the propeller blades, leaving only the filled and smoothed spinner visible—it’s a well-recognized technique which many feel produces the most realistic appearance. But it always makes me think, Where’s the propeller? I find the complete absence of anything in the space where the propeller should be is a little distracting. I’m also not very keen on the photo-etched “prop-blur” option, which aims to produce a blurred sector for each prop blade, reproducing what we see in photos and movies, but not what we see with the naked ey
Ordnance Survey OpenData In QGIS 3: Part 4
At the end of my previous post on this topic, I left you with this map of the area around the mountain of Blaven (Gaelic Bla Bheinn) on the Isle of Skye: That concluded a three-part tutorial on using Ordnance Survey OpenData products in QGIS mapping software. (To go to the start of the series, … Continue reading Ordnance Survey OpenData In QGIS 3: Part 4
Ordnance Survey OpenData In QGIS 3: Part 3
I finish my last post about using Ordnance Survey OpenData in QGIS having produced this map of the area around Blaven, on the Isle of Skye: It’s tinted for height, shaded and marked up with contours to emphasize landforms, and has features such as surface water, coastline, roads and buildings added. Now it needs some … Continue reading Ordnance Survey OpenData In QGIS 3: Part 3
Ordnance Survey OpenData In QGIS 3: Part 2
So, by the end of my previous post on this topic, I’d used Ordnance Survey OpenData products in QGIS to produce a nice smooth depiction of the topography of Ordnance Survey grid square NG, tinted to show height and shaded to show relief. It looked like this: A detail, showing the region around the mountain … Continue reading Ordnance Survey OpenData In QGIS 3: Part 2
Ordnance Survey OpenData In QGIS 3: Part 1
Recently, I’ve been preparing my UK walking maps using the Ordnance Survey’s free OpenData products, which I’ve rendered into maps using a free, open-source Geographical Information System, QGIS. I thought I’d write a little bit about that, now that I’ve got my maps looking more or less as I’d like them. For this first part, … Continue reading Ordnance Survey OpenData In QGIS 3: Part 1
Running Windows XP Under VirtualBox
As I write, it’s only another month until Microsoft’s free upgrade offer on Windows 10 expires (on 29 July 2016). I am so looking forward to that day, in the hope that it’ll mean an end to Microsoft’s intrusive little pop-up messages in the lower right corner of my monitor, and their increasingly devious attempts … Continue reading Running Windows XP Under VirtualBox