I first went to the airport and took some pics of the her side profile with my N900 and sketched some ideas with pen and paper and finally in Inkscape where I opened a 5.5 meter by one meter canvas...

The flight manual of the plane contains a three-way view of the aircraft, so scanned the page and used Inkscape's excellent tracing tool to turn it into a base for my design, and resized it to the corrent size of the aircraft.. This must have been the largest canvas size I have had so far in a design project...

Design work done in Inkscape

The design evolved a quite a bit and I always had a bunch of the latest sketches in my N900 to show to club members who gave me good feedback... And eventually we had something we were happy with, and  a PDF file of the design was sent to the paint shop a while ago. Stripping a plane from the old paint is quite a lot of work, and takes a while, so they sent us back some photos of the work in progress..

Aircraft partially disassembled before paint stripping

Paint stripped, masked for spraying

Empty canvas!

And finally today we got the much anticipated message in our mailboxes, the work was nearing completion!

Stripes in place!

It's always nice and rewarding to see a design work transform from bits and bytes into something physical. Even better if you can strap yourself into it and go flying...

The last 7 days or so have been pretty incredible weather-wise - as if someone had stolen all the weather from scandinavia... No need to use my N800 to check weather this time
I went flying on wednesday evening at dusk, incredibly smooth air and very beautiful up there in a weather like this..

Does anyone know a flight tracking service one could use to hook it as a backend to geoclue?

A lot of interesting announcements seem to occur this year, and two interesting ones come from the good old Cessna - A concept light aircraft for the new "spot pilot" class, which looks interesting and cute, but even more unexpected and cool was apparently a surprise flyby of the new rumoured Cessna 5-seater light aircraft, that looks pretty sweet at least from a distance. They apparently didn't even land, just did a quick "flash" and went away. That one looks very nice too. Mmm.. now if I only had the money to get one..

There are some more pics of the LSA plane here and some photos of the other plane's flyby here. Pretty thing that bigger bird, if you ask me..

Edit: Ok, looks like planet does not include the embedded iframe, perhaps it's a wise move to avoid abuse.. it would have been nice though. Jeff, maybe you can have a look at it sometime? For everyone interested who is reading this through planet gnome or maemo, click the post title above to see the embedded map as well. For those interested, it's our flight route we had on saturday while visiting the annual pilots' fly-in in Jämijärvi, Finland. Some photos of the event can be found here. (heh, I used *all* my blog categories in this post, except for "work", since I am on vacation, of course.. )

This would have been handy during Guadec, for the ice cream case. So much easier than taking screenshots and using the Gimp to plot stuff on the map..

Now, what if this was combined to some "friends" -system so that everyone who was a member of the "guadec" group could have added their own interesting notes and tags on the map? That would have been very interesting...

First to Frankfurt.. wish us luck.

Update: Woo hoo!

Sitting in the familiar Finnair Airbus again.. Phew..

Guadec was worth all this though, awesome to see everyone again. I was worried it would be too awkward, working now for a different company, to meet all the Monkeys... My fear was in vain though, you again showed how great communty we are, accross country and company borders!

This is something I did for our aviation club recently. The base photo is a "blank" side view of the airplane, a Cessna Skyhawk - the same type we have on the club. I loaded it into Inkscape, and sketched the paint scheme over it with Inkscape's great bezier tool. Inkscape has layers so it was easy to "lock" the photo on the background without accidentally moving it while sketching on top.

This is definitely one of the interesting graphics applications to keep your eyes on.

If you have done print design yourself, you know the feeling when you see the first printouts of the job you worked on, sweating to get it all right and correct.. to see it on paper, in physical form. I dont know if I am weird, but it feels warm and fuzzy (given the print company did not botch it completely )

Now, to see your design, applied by a painter guy, with masking tape, and having it turn out pretty much like you originally intended, and seeing it in real life, 3D for the first time.. that is pretty cool too!

Cool things you can do with free software..

A battery-propelled self-starting sailplane (glider) with embedded linux controlling the lithium-ion battery pack and engine system

"The advantages" (of Linux) "are obvious -- we can modify or adapt anything we want. And we are starting to know the system well."

Pretty cool! Wish I had one of those.. Some day when I have a lot of free time (hah) I want to design graphics and usability stuff for airplane cockpit displays. On Linux.

Oh, and for those who are interested in the Tango project, there's an IRC channel #tango on freenode.

Remember, Tango is not "yet another theme", what I am even more interested in is to really look outside our "Gnome/KDE/Whatever" sandbox and try to fix the overall user experience on "Linux Desktop" - we need to co-operate really. Unified look and feel is one step in that direction, and a logical one for me as an artist. But anyway, time to catch the flight..

But I wanted to say this: Blue One - the SAS-owned Finnish airline has an awesome spirit for serving the customer. Basically, my initial SAS flight from Stuttgart was delayed due to the plane being late arriving to Stuttgart - we took off about 30 minutes late I think. This resulted in a pretty quick switch in Copenhagen, I basically walked very fast to the departure gate, and the plane started to board right away, so I knew there was no way my checked in bag could make it. "They'll bring it to me tomorrow, suck, but such is life.." I thought. But I was happy to be proven wrong.

We taxied off for takeoff, and I found it peculiar that we took a rather long route to the runway - usually it has been pretty straightforward and short way until takeoff, but this time it felt a bit like a detour. Then we stopped for a moment and suddenly it all made sense: I think I heard a "thunk" from the cargo bay, and then I saw the "baggage belt" vehicle speed ahead away from the plane. They had stopped at the edge of the technical area and the ramp dude must have brought my bag into the plane - since there it was in the baggage belt in Helsinki when I arrived!

All I can say is thank you! This is one of the small things that makes me choose your company the next time as well if possible.