Site Navigation:
Craig's twitter feed:
Tweets by @gevmage
For over a year now, I've been working on a wall map made up of World Aeronautical charts. My concept was to have a map that I could mark to show places that I'd flown, once I got a pilot's license. My equivalent of a map with little pins with flags. Well, that map is finally up in a meaningful way. I started the map while living in Champaign, dismantled it, and set it up again in Kentucky, and now it's expanded as far as I want for the moment.
My concept of "flags" took some work. Aeronautical charts of information-dense enough and colorful enough that the traditional little flags wouldn't work. Nor did "erasable" marker when I tried that. What turns out works really well are notebook reinforcers. Those little white paper circles with holes in the center and adhesive on the back. They stick to the charts pretty well, their white color is pretty well contrasted to the chart itself, and the inside hole diameter is big enough that you can still clearly see the airport inside.
[Changing topics, but stay with me--they connect in a bit.] One bad (and good) thing about the world of open-source software is instead of like in the Windows world, where there is always a good piece of software to do what you want, instead there's several that all do slightly different things. This is a strength, because you always have a lot of options, but also a weakness, because often you can't find quite what you're looking for.
I've been trying to find a good image organization and display package for quite a while, and I've finally found that gthumb is almost exactly what I want. Sometime in December, I tried out several photo album construction programs. The first thing I did with each of them was pointed them to my folders full of pictures, and most of them, the first thing they did was to start to import all the photos into their own directories (as in, make copies of every photo). Well, the reason I wanted to organize photos into albums was that I didnt' want to have multiple copies of photos around at all. However, gthumb was quite sensible. It allows you to have source directories for photos, and albums, without having mutiple copies. It also makes decent web page photo albums, which is where we get back to the map stuff.
I have two pages talking about my big map. One is a hand-constructed page that shows the first half of the evolution of the map. The second one is an album generated by gthumb, showing the map from its first edition through the present, which I then annotated by hand. Just to remind you, the airports with the little white notebook re-enforcers around them are airports that I have been to. The ones with letters are airports that I have landed at myself.