Category: Outdoors

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Building a mobile app for Linux, part 4: GPS/mobile tracking

Another important part of many mobile apps is location tracking – there is, fortunately, there is a built in api for most Linux systems called Geoclue that should work… There is even a Python-geoclue package, but after some digging I found that this package does not work in Python3. In fact it’s hard to find examples or documentation, if you look at the files of the package you can see there are some basic docs:

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Building an amateur radio app for Linux, part 2

In the previous post I showed how to add some icons to an application showing OpenStreetMap, with Python and GTK+. Next, I’ll show how to make a listing of nearest repeaters to selected area. The listing of all repeaters is in the local array, and since there is a .distance(lat,lon) that gives the distance to a point, the list of repeaters can be sorted by closest to a certain point that is selected – in the on_button_release function. The Python Gtk guide shows an example that can be integrated in to the code to add a Listbox. The listbox should be “self.listbox” so various functions can access and change it. Below the other widget/control code, this must be added, within a gtkScrollWindow or adding many items will expand the window awkwardly:

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Adding BLM Land Use Maps to Osmand on Android

In the US, various hunters and fishers use the Bureau of Land Management’s maps. There are of course several apps that can let you add BLM maps…

  • Avenza has some maps provided by BLM specifically for avenza app.
  • Gaia maps pro has had the public lands feature for years.
  • Osmand has not the greatest support for viewing what land area you are in and looking at, but many local points of interest are in this app that are not in others as it uses the Openstreetmap which can be added and edited by locals with places they actually care about. Also unlike most other offline mapping apps it is open-source, available on F-Droid store, and very extensive, and respects user freedoms and an active developer community.

For some time I have wondered why the public domain BLM land use maps aren’t an option in Osmand, I tried mobac but found no way to get the maps I wanted, but after a bit of research I found the answer! Here are the steps to add land use maps to Osmand. Continue reading “Adding BLM Land Use Maps to Osmand on Android”