Inkscape in action…
Some of you might have a hunch of my interest in aviation and airplanes, so it's no wonder I wanted to help our aviation club a little. The two-seater trainer aircraft was in a desperate ned of a new paint, and we wanted to have a new color scheme at the same time to freshen up the appearance. There were some restrictions for simple financial reasons, so the plane was to have a white base paint and all the color stripes would be done with stickers. Nevertheless I am pretty happy with the result.
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...
Photojourney with N900
Here are some of the best photos (in my opinion of course) that I have taken with the Nokia N900 during the recent months. I'm pretty amazed with the camera quality and the fact that it's so easy to tag pictures and to post them to flickr and facebook etc.. directly from the device itself. Hope you like them too
It's pretty sweet, especially when you think it's gstreamer and other Gnome technologies under the hood doing the work...
amazing N900 camera hack ;-)
My friend Mohammad made this amazing camera hack on his N900 and I had to try it too - works great for nice effect... It's very simple actually - basically take a piece of dark cardboard, make a small hole in the middle and try to position it in the center of the lens and place the back cover in, which locks it in place. Simple, but effective fun - one of those simple things that makes me smile... Thanks for sharing!
Mohammad in test shot (low light = lots of noise)
The Amazing Vignette Filter separated
Filter in place..
Anyone else done something like this? I started to ponder 3M magic tape for "haze" effect already...
Thought of the day
I think Strobist has changed the way I look at photography, flash units and light, forever. Thank you!
Now, all I have to do is practice.
Flickr backup
I found a simple Java application to backup my flickr photos to local harddisk - while many of them exist on my computer already and were just added to flickr for sharing, there are lots of camera phone pictures I don't have around anywhere else. Thus such a thing makes sense.
However, the tool is a bit simple, does not understand incremental backups etc, it seems. Anyone in the (lazy)web2.0 circles done something like this with Python or something that also syncs the tags and other metadata?
Accidental art?
Last week I was riding the bus to work.. and I looked at the back window.
I first thought there was an ad of some tribal art exhibition in a museum, as there clearly was an image of a horse or cow skull staring at me.
But another look revealed it was nothing like that. Yes, it was an advertisement sticker, but the image was in the back: the sticker had become partly loose, and soot and dirt had crept under it, creating this pretty incredible picture.. wow.
Camera store
Just to let you know, there's a really really good camera store in Cambridge, MA, near the Galleria shopping center. Google maps directions here, it's about a mile away from MIT Media Lab.
2002: A Barbican Odyssey
Originally uploaded by docpi
Oh man. This photo, taken by Daniel, is really interesting in a strange way. It just captures you very strongly. Wow.
Quick maps
Stumbled on this pretty nice site which lets you plot stuff on a map, using the google maps API and lets you either link to the map (like this) or embed it on your own site (let's see how this works, below - and whether planet likes it or not..)
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...
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