Above is a map from the 2026 Geohipster Calendar by Antonio Smith - Noteworthy because it's East Tennessee. The 2027 Geohipster calendar is now accepting admissions. You may think "Well it's a bunch of open source weirdos over at Geohipster" and you could be right -...
NRGS Ramblings on the World Wide Web
Laissez les bons temps rouler
I was asked today how I rated this trip and I give it an 8 out of 10. As I was telling people in class it's been "Pre-Katrina" since I was in Louisiana. I'm actually down here training people on using QGIS. It's been a while since I did the 8 hour intro class. It's...
QGIS Offline Help
Through a long series of events I found myself teaching QGIS in a classroom again. It's been a while. I used to just "hold" classes and sometime during the pandemic I jsut stopped. Occasionally I'll get a call for 3 or 4 people that want training but generally I've...
The online training website that I hardly talk about
I had mentioned it some but it's probably been coming up on 6 months since I even mentioned training. Right before I decided to attempt to die in 2025 I had started building a training website at training.northrivergeographic.com. Basically it's my Intro to QGIS class...
QGIS Fun: Chickamauga Mound
I've been trying to stop once a week and do something fun with QGIS. Post Heart Incident I do a lot of walking. I've been re-exploring some places I used to go in town to exercise and one is the TN River Walk. I realized the other day I needed to do some OpenStreetMap...
QGIS-US Updates
I said at the start of the year I wanted to blog once a week. I've been simplifying my website and I just want to put "more stuff" out there. Some posts may be work related - some may not be. So this isn't work - but it is work: QGIS-US. I've not said a ton about the...
The Trail Map – Part 1
A few posts ago I babbled about cartography. I've never had the patience for Cartography mainly because two things usually happen...well three things: the map can't be bigger than 8x11 the map must have everything on it Make the map however you want except we will...
The Big TN Conference Pt 2
...aaand I'm back home. So I've been to a lot of conferences. Some Good. Some Bad. This one was good. Better than I had hoped. So what was my main takeaway from it? They keynotes were a great contrast of people/computers. OSM is all about the people. I had no clue how...
The Big Tn Conference
By the time you read this I will be sitting in the outskirts of Nashville Tennessee for the annual State Wide GIS Conference. I've attended this conference for the last 15 or so years off and on. There were come years I missed - some I went joyfully...some I just...
My So called Life as a Map Maker
I can sum it up: It's not much of one. Way back in my younger days I was infatuated with ArcPlot (which was the plotting portion of ArcINFO). From there I moved to Arcview, ArcMap, and eventually here to QGIS. All of my work typically revolves around Data. I usually...
Tricks with an ESRI File Geodatabase
A few years back I jumped in way over my head with QGIS/Postgis. I had moved a process out of one software and into my favorite two (QGIS/PostGIS) and little did I know the final output had to be a ESRI File Geodatabase. So what did I do? I shamed them into using a...
Making the Invalid Valid
I could argue I'm doing that on multiple levels these days. Except I want to talk Geometry, QGIS, and Forks in the Road. I haven't done just a "QGIS Tech Post" in a while. I talk about it and training and generalities but hardly dive into the specifics. So here is a...

