I wanted to create a track to follow for my GPS based on property lines which are part of the public record. A little searching revealed that most GIS software can do this these days.<\/p>\n
Years ago, I supported an installation of the GRASS GIS at the University of Washington. It was notoriously difficult to install and configure. About three years ago, I played with installing GRASS on my home computer, and discovered that it’s approximately as difficult to learn to use as it is to install. A pity, as it is<\/em> free and by all accounts very powerful.<\/p>\n So I did more searching to see if someone had come up with an easier-to-use open-source GIS. Indeed they had, and it’s called QGIS. Actually, that’s only about half-true; from what I’ve been able to gather, QGIS is mostly a user-friendly front-end for GRASS.<\/p>\n And user-friendly it is. In an evening, I managed to import a bunch of GIS data available for free from my county of residence<\/a> and use the resulting GIS project to draw and export the desired track to my GPS. It took a fair amount of web searches and searching through the documentation, I never did figure out how to import the road and place labels, and the process of exporting the GPS track was more than a little bit fiddly.<\/p>\n