Daily Archives: 2/21/2006

Maps for ipod, the Juan Buhler way…

San Francisco Courtesy of Google MapsJuan Buhler (former SIGGRAPH sketch chair, current Pixarian, and cool street photographer) sent me a link to his cool idea for using the video ipod to store maps. He realized that the thumbnail viewer in his iPod video displays six thumbnails in each row of his video iPod, so he stitched together a map of San Francisco from Google Maps that was 6 times the native screen resolution of the video iPod, (6×320=1920).   He then used the Python imaging toolkit to break the big map up into columns of six pictures using the Python Imaging Library, and loaded them onto his video iPod.  Now, he can quickly scroll through the map of San Francisco, and bring up individual maps at the native resolution.

What a cool idea!

Addendum: I did something kind of similar a couple of years ago with Python and the Terraserver.  You could basically convert latitude and longitude into a collection of urls, and then download the tiles from the Microsoft Terraserver and stitch them together, allowing you to create pictures like this one of San Francisco.

[tags]iPod Hack,Juan Buhler,Google Maps,Google Maps Hack[/tags]

Intelligent Design the Future: Make Mine Ham and Pineapple

The perversion of intelligent design can be seen in Cornelius’s Hunter’s title and opening paragraph on ID The Future:

The main problem with our red state-blue state culture today is that good pizza is only available in the blue zones. As Harold Hubis, moderator of last night’s evolution vs. ID debate had warned me, last night we were not merely in a blue zone, but a Navy Blue zone. And it showed–the pizza was great.

Dear lord, is there a more perverse collection of pizza toppings than ham and pineapple?

His treatment of his debate seemed no better than his choice of pizza toppings.

Pencil Drawing

Josh over at tinyscreenfuls is digging some of the fancy “pencil sketch” effects that the Mac can do with its internal camera.  Back in 1998, I experimented with writing some filters that did much the same, with some examples that I generated shown on the right.   Macintosh?  I don’t need no steekin’ Macintosh. 🙂

And now, for your next project, render an entire feature length film.   Beneath your desk, you’ll find a pencil, a yellow pad, and a C compiler…