DIY Amateur Plane Table Surveying II
So I attempted to utilise an old telescope tripod, some old bolts I had lying around in my cellar and cut a piece of old cupboard I found in the scrap wood at the local recycling centre. Several problems were encountered.
First the tripod head was earlier an old equatorial scope head and had lots of oil on the top, making it rather unpleasant to operate. I have also a camera tripod which may be more suitable.
Second, cutting the plane table itself proved tough using a jigsaw – it looks horribly ziggy zaggy with regards to the straight cut I wanted.
Finally, the alidade was hard to develop. As you can see I cut out a long strip to make perhaps a ruler to draw along. Again, with the poor cut of the jigsaw this was hard to achieve.
All in all my first attempt to build a plane table is wobbly and looks something like out if a Bruce Forsyth Generation Game two minute challenge!
Can anyone send me some unused gear?
Giving up Sugar – the Bitter Truth
I have just watched a video which went viral on the Internet and received 3.5 million hits. I could not follow the biochemistry easily but I stayed with it till the recommendations came which follow below. My lifestyle is such that I gave up alcohol 9 months ago and have been a member of a gym 3 years, yet am no less fat than I used to be! Given we are a family who exercise perhaps above average – we downhill- and cross-country- ski in winter, and mountain bike in summer, it must be thus something else. I notice that I replaced alcohol with alcohol free beer in the evenings, and have developed a sweet tooth so this video is helping to understand why I did that.
Here is the video and here are the recommendations:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
Get rid of all sugared liquids – drink only water and milk
Eat carbohydrate with flour
Wait 20 minutes for second portions
Buy your screen time minute for minute with physical activity
Here are the steps I am gong to take in our case:
Cut out cereal products – no bread, pasta, potatoes (jesus) – that will be hard!
Drink fart water (soda stream water) in the evenings. Not even alcohol free beer.
Cut out sweets completely!
Weirdly I think the gym is unhealthy! There is fresh air out there, trails to bike and run, and also get in a yoga class.
I’m also going to attempt to get onto the paleo diet which seems like a radical change to our lives foodwise. Seems to be the way to go.
Hypertension?
Paleo Diet?
Mobile Apps killed the GIS Star
Feeling a bit fed up today, remembering the day back when when people such as my wife and I were stars. We both practise something known as Geographic Information Systems, back in the day – we are talking early 1990s, we were both young, excited and (at least in my wife’s case) good looking. Back then, the gear you needed to do GIS was very heavy duty and expensive. Let me describe it.
You needed to input the maps by hand. Because the maps were HUGE, sometimes A0 size, you needed a big table to place your map upon. You needed to learn topology, as when you digitized polygon after polygon, the computer – either a huge Sun Workstation or a super powered 386 IBM PC if you were lucky, would make beeps, a high beep if the polygon “snapped”, or a low beep if it failed. Then would come hours at the PC making sure the polygons all had integrity and fit together.
The other end of the business was the plotter. Before the inkjet days, these were enormous complex systems, with pens which needed replacing often. A complicated map might take two hours to plot. In the middle stood a paperweight Sun Workstation or a Tektronix workstation linked to a VAX mainframe which would be the centrepiece of such a lab.
You’d set off a job, and come back to your GIS Lab next morning.
Ah, a GIS “Lab”. I built one up in my Saudi research institute worth 50,00 dollars, I was so proud. I was one of those evangelised by the subject, how it would change the world, how we’d be able to map soil erosion creeping down a slope, how we’d map how Saddam might destroy the Arabian Gulf habitats. I found myself battling for my life upside down in the Red Sea with the “lung” icon flashing on my dive computer as I lacked adequate dive experience yet wanted so much to be part of mapping the Red Sea. All for a map. I found myself in between flaming oil platforms in the Arabian Gulf mapping shallow banks in the Abu Safah oilfield, and holding on for dear life as we hurtled back at 60kph back to Dammam port. I would have almost died for the subject I believed so much in it.
Then what happened? All the systems we learnt as students, spent hours reading the manuals, weekends even, reading up for our careers, how to model this, how to plot that. All eventually came to nought. We were experts in our fields. We were sent to exotic tropical countries (especially those with decent trekking mountains or beaches) to teach the spear throwing natives how to map their lands. I was flown into Mongolia, like a doctor with a briefcase coming in haste to tend a sick patient (Mongolia’s soils). Then I arrived and to my shock found they knew more than I did. These primitive people were bloody good at this stuff. They were enterprising, hard working and very very clever. Yes, cleverer than us.
So, here is a eulogy for the GIS “experts” of us who did back then enjoy minor celebrity status, and have lost it to some tiny “app” on some mobile phone. I had the exciting privilege of working for the very first photogrammetric company in Europe, only sadly to discover they were sending all the jobs to India. We’d email them the files to work on in their sweatshops poor buggers, and they’d come back with all manner of errors, the funniest of which was not understanding the “Sharp S” in German – a sort of huge “B” in a way, used most commonly in the word “Strasse”. Back would come faithful copies of work, only with “StraBe”!!!! We important “project managers” were reduced to the level of cartographic toilet cleaners. Rather fittingly when the company went bust, we dragged those huge old digitizing tables off to the dump.
So with tongue firmly in cheek, we offer up the following ditty meant to be sung like the Buggles song:
Mobile Apps killed the GIS Star
I saw you on the SunSparc back in Ninety Two.
Lying awake learning plotting on the CPU.
When I was young I didn’t stop learning all about you.
Oh-a oh
They took the credit for my awesome new map
And now it’s some shitty tiny app.
Destroyed by mobiles and new technology, and now I understand the
problems you can see.
Oh-a oh
I taught your children
Oh-a oh
What did you tell them?
Mobile Apps killed the GIS Star.
Mobile Apps killed the GIS Star.
Inkjets came and broke your heart.
Oh-a-a-a oh
And now we meet in an abandoned mapping lab.
We hear the plotter and it seems so long ago.
And you remember how the cartridges used to go.
Oh-a oh
You were the first one.
Oh-a oh
You were the last one.
Mobile Apps killed the GIS Star
Mobile Apps killed the GIS Star
On my map and in my chair, we can’t replot it isn’t fair
Oh-a-aho oh,
Oh-a-aho oh
Mobile Apps killed the GIS Star
Mobile Apps killed the GIS Star
On my map and in my chair, we can’t replot it isn’t fair ,
Phone apps came and broke your heart,
Put the blame on God knows who,
You are a mapping star.
You are a mapping star.
Mobile Apps killed the GIS Star
Mobile Apps killed the GIS Star
Mobile Apps killed the GIS Star
Mobile Apps killed the GIS Star
Mobile Apps killed the GIS Star
(You are a mapping star.)
An overview of creative projects in mind
I am creative. I write, take pictures, build the odd thing, yet I never ever seem to sit down, visualise the objective and carry it out. This thought came to me whilst in the sauna, and it struck me that even the act of writing this, as an aide memoire might help kick start me off making stuff again. So without further ado, let me list some of the projects I have in mind.
1. Building a garden chair for free out of wooden pallets as seen in the Instructables website.
2. Help my good friend Tracy Walker to develop a website about BASE jumping to teach newcomers about it. He has the content, I design the website.
3. Write a novel/ short story about my “Wichea” and “Birds” concepts.
4. Put together a DJ set of dance tunes, maybe in Ableton, or my home DJ gear I found in Vivo.
5. Make a beautiful arty documentary based round the PDF “Splitting Firewood”.
6. Mend the guitar I found in Vivo.
7. Build an ad hoc network between two WLANS and write about it. Research the “Freifunk” network.
8. Write a dance tune of my own.
9. Learn Blender 3d and make a piece inspired by “The Monolith” in 2001.
10. Go out with my telescope and make observations then make a decent drawing or photo of a planet.
11. Study the orbit of Venus whether it makes a 5 pointed pentagram as I read.
12. Shoot some film of local churches for Gae’s music pieces.
13. Dig out my Saudi slide collection and scan the best ones and make a set of prints entitled “Secret Arabia”.
14. Resurrect my stained glass hobby and build a third fish!
15. “Project Felix” – a balloon mapping project using a tetroon and a digital camera.
16. An Android app.
17. An Aquaponics system.
This is just a memory jogger, maybe a way of making me achieve these things. A lot of these will never be done! More ideas will be added to this blog as they occur to me.
