Comment by Fwirt
20 hours ago
As a hacker, a really fun thing to do with QGIS is locate your local government’s GIS data portal. At least in the US, most data is freely available and can be pulled into QGIS as layers. Fun things like lidar surveys, flood zones, property boundaries. If you’re at all interested in geography and want to explore your locality it can be great fun.
I spent the better part of a month doing just this. Really fascinating. There are also several public satellite imagery repos (mostly European sources, but they’re satellites, so they aren’t limited to Europe).
For those interested in remote sensing, there's also Landsat with freely available multi-band imagery https://landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/