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  More campus testing this evening with the Kite Drone - poor winds made for difficult flying but managed some test shots with updated software. A proper sortie to the Dales (at long last) and back to Cornwall soon. While my kite photos meet with complete indifference on BlueSky and Instagram (and I admit test shots are not always wildly exciting), I still think this has been a very cool project. Funding ends today, but work continues well into next year... #photography #kite #flight #aviation

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  After taking it to the airfield today, I finally managed to get enough ephemerides data that the GPS now quite quickly locks on, despite the wretched signal quality in my area. I can now properly praise this unit as about the only one doing GPS/IMU/Baro in a single package. Why is this useful? It's an ultra compact way of knowing where you are and what you are looking at, which is great if you want to correlate this with a suitable spatial data field... #gps #electronics #hardware #sat...

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  Have determined that every conversation on BlueSky revolves around either AI or The Odyssey. Appreciating the quietness of Mastodon by comparison.

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  UK Landclass and Elevation maps - Landclass is via ESA CCI LULC 2022 (300m), while Elevation is NASA HGT DEM (30m). Currently building the cross correlation script that can reference these alongside OSM data (e.g. 'what's within this bounding box? at what heights? what landclasses do they reside in?) #gis #maps #data #mapping

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  Hmm. The time might have come to move instances - zirk.us has had an air of abandonment for a while, and now I'm getting missives that it is potentially a host for spam accounts. Will need to check, as moving is not a one click process, but this might be a good excuse. (Any thoughts?) Any recs for instances that are alive and have a #humanities, #arts, or #creativeTechnology focus? #mastodon #instances #fedi #fediverse

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  @eldub @lexipenia Also received - I would like evidence of said bots, as it's a mildly arduous process to move, but I've been thinking of shifting for a while anyway, as it has felt unmaintained.

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  @ShaulaEvans - Hyo Yoon Kang is active on BlueSky, my understanding is that they are no longer involved in the zirk us project, and haven't been for some time.

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  *Updated* Heads up to everyone I know on here - I have decided to move* instances, and I am setting up a new account with hcommons.social (same username). This was spurred by reports of the parlous state of zirk.us, but I've now heard that there is new moderation + a cleanup operation underway. This is pleasant to learn (and a surprise!), so I am not going to be moving followers / closing this account just yet, though will consider options.

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  While sorting out other kinds of data, I re-exported my ESA CCI Landcover set at the fullest resolution I can muster. It's only 558mb @ 129600 x 64800 pixels, but I admit it's still rather stunning to look through - the world as an illustration, made up of 22 landcover types. #maps #data #maping #gis #silentSunday

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  RE: https://zirk.us/@richardacarter/113764512876218096 You can now vote for "Lines of Flight" in the Opening Up category of the New Media Writing Prize! (There are other cool entries too, of course, but I'm thoroughly biased here). https://newmediawritingprize.co.uk/opening-up-2025/ #art #design #dataviz #digitalHumanities

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  Bad weather beaten! Exciting sortie that was meant to be 3 minutes @ 1,500ft turning into a 25 minute 3,000ft climb followed by an "expedited" descent back to Earth to avoid the showers. So good to be back aloft again since January. #gliding #aviation #soaring #weather #silentSunday

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  From this to this... The simple flight simulation project is, at last, resembling what I recall zooming around in MSFS2002~ was like - but this time in-browser! #gameDev #indieDev #flightSim

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  One bit of fun today - I was at last able to use this gloriously dystopian 1984 Soviet short animation "There Will Come Soft Rains" (based on the 1950 Ray Bradbury story) as part of my teaching on smart homes earlier. The fictional apocalypse date is set for August 2026! Watch for yourself here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oxP3TyuQx0&feature=youtu.be #animation #technology #retro

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  Think I'm about done now (I think...!) It's a bit more FS2002 in apperance than FS98, but it's good enough to act as a generic visual engine for the rest of the simulation components to be built upon. #threeJS #gameDev #indieDev #flightSim #simulation

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  Satisfying shot of the newly delivered (smaller) Cody kite today #photography #kite #cloud #flight

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  Blue skies thinking - Conditions were finally right to properly try out the basic "Kite Drone" setup. While not carrying the actual 'scientific' payload, it was really satisfying to pull this off anyway, to get some meaningful imagery, and all with a 50 minute flight time exceeding most consumer drones - no batteries needed! #kite #photography #silentSunday #wind #sky

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  Getting some actual aerial imagery from the kite has given a useful block of testing data. Very small, general purpose models are, evidently, not as robust as even those that are marginally larger, but it's useful enough. Remember it is working on an image of max. 480 x 480px to keep processing fast on the RPi.

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  A true bird's (kite's!) eye view over the edge of York Campus East #york #photography #flight

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  Kite selfie from yesterday #york #flight #kite #photography

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  ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini. (Jean de Bosschère, "Weird Islands" 1921)

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  Pictured here, dangling from the end of my arm, is a technology that is 114 years old, a Picavet suspension mount, specifically designed to stabilise cameras carried aloft on kites. This version will carry the poetry camera soon enough - the plan is to get the entire rig flight ready this weekend. #photography #flight #kite

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  Now rigged and ready for initial flight testing. The package is heavier than I would like, at 900g, but hoping the "Beta" version being currently built will be a significant improvement on this. There is nothing especially exotic here, hardware wise, it's all in the software. I'm curently developing the latter such that each flight is something of a 'performance' - one that can be logged into by people on the ground, who thus form part of a wide...

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  This evening's clouds #photography #clouds #sky #silentSunday

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  Venus, before the rain clouds roll in. #photography #venus #clouds

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  1/ I am delighted to share that my interactive media artwork and critical reflection, Lines of Flight, is now available with Media+Environment, part of a special issue on Wind as Model, Media, and Experience https://mediaenviron.org/article/125744-lines-of-flight #publication #art #elit #eliterature #netart #poetry #generative