Elephant Magazine: Aneta Bartos: Family Portrait 2015 – 2018 From the age of eight, Aneta Bartos was raised by her father alone in a small city in Poland. In 2013 Bartos, who now lives in New York, spent the summer back in her hometown shooting her father, a competitive bodybuilder. “At the age sixty-eight, my father asked me to take a couple of shots documenting his body,” Bartos explains. “He has been involved in competitive bodybuilding for over half a century, and wanted to be immortalized in a beautiful and artistic way before his body degenerated.”
And back deep into digital geekyness: Interface in Game: an online library of UI in gaming.
If you are anything like me, you’d consider an hourglass (or even a calendar) enough to record your own glacial pace around a racetrack, lap after lap. In reality, even if you are attending trackdays with your car or motorbike, like all of us, just for fun, having a vague idea of your lap times might be helpful to understand if you are improving your driving/riding or not.
As trackdays open to everyone are not competitive, it is forbidden to take lap times (at least here in the UK) and despite most sportbikes having a timer function embedded in their dashboards, I always found having to press the button at the end of every lap an unwelcome distraction.
Enter the omni-present GoPro camera, strapped somewhere on the bike. I’ve spent the last couple of years, timing my laps at home watching GoPro recordings of my sessions. It gets very tedious very quickly (just ask any of your friends you forced to watch said videos) and it is literally time consuming.
Recent GoPros have an integrated GPS chipset, running at 18Hz, that will give you more than enough accurate timing without having to buy any other dedicated hardware (laptimer apps and external GPS receivers).
To analyse the data I recently stumbled upon Race Technology’s GoPro Race Analysis Software. It runs on Windows only, but works smoothly for me on a VirtuaBox instance on Mac. The interface is… fairly unfriendly at first. It remains unfriendly even later on, but you can get the hang of it after a short while.
Once the .mp4 files from the GoPro are loaded in, the software will plot speed, position, accelerometer data, circuit layout and video preview. Once the start/finish line marker is added it will calculate lap times, and sectors can be added. You can compare laps or sectors and export the relevant data and/or video part.
There are extra functionalities like maths channels, ability to join GoPro chapters together (this is when the GoPro truncates videos in several 4Gb files), video overlays, and others that I haven’t really tried and probably won’t, as I’m more than satisfied with it just sifting through all the video and giving me the data without having to sit there spooling it all.
I’d love to see this running natively on Mac or even just have a decent user interface but, to be honest, it does exactly what it says on the tin and it is well worth the £50ish license fee.
I hoped the 20ies would have been more glamorous than being stuck, self-quarantined, at home because of Coronavirus.
Started a new job at the beginning of January, it kept me pretty busy, so I’ve had much less time to “look at nice things online”, hence the long hiatus.
I’m slightly obsessed with maps (this beauty hangs in my living room) and had a go Anvaka’s City Roads. It draws each road from city maps extracted from OSM. Results can be exported in raster or vector format to play with. London Vs Rome:
Exercise Book Archive – an ever-growing collection of old exercise books from all over the world.
Now, a few play things that will make your GPU/eGPU happy:
david.li – (awesome) experiments in WebGL. Code from the projects on GitHub too! This is his particle simulation in action:
Also, in other news, following the recent injection of capital, the guys at ReMarkable unveiled the new version of their tablet, that seems to fix a few shortcomings of the original version (battery life, cpu speed) and made it look sleek too: https://remarkable.com/
I came across the reMarkable a few months ago, after seeing a video of it used –magnificently– by Pinot Ichwandardi on either his Twitter or Instagram stream (you really should follow both).
For those of you not nerdy enough or who actually had a social life for the last couple of years, the reMarkable is an 11-ish inch tablet running on Linux with an epaper display and stylus. Its only function is note taking and sketching. It doesn’t do (intentionally) much more.
“Introducing” might be a wee bit pretentious. Just a bit. I Love Your Work is going to be a monthly collection of links to (mostly) design and photography work that I admire. The kind of beautiful stuff that makes you feel both completely worthless and inspires you to do better next time.
While on the theme of creativity (risky word), in today’s era of mostly corporate-anaesthetized content, art, and censored nipples, it is worth to sit back and relive the amazingly chaotic creative process of the legendary National Lampoon magazine via Dough Kenney’s life story and the stories about the making of Animal House.
On the way back from Corsica this summer, er route to meet a couple of friends to ride Furkapass, Grimselpass, Neufenpass, Sustenpass (aka the Swiss Rollercoaster), I took a small detour along a few gravel roads crossing the Alps.
The initial plan was to cross through Col du Parpaillon, then ride along the Assietta and proceed towards Susa. Sadly the Assietta is closed for work until next summer and I was able to explore just a very small section of it (just after the crest). The Parpaillon was open, and the sunny weather made for an amazing ride.
In the last couple of years I started being more and more obsessed by e‑paper displays. I partly blame my Kindle – by far my favourite and the best electronic device I own to date – and my love for 1‑bit graphics.
My first computer was a Macintosh SE and most of my early years in front of a monitor were spent experimenting with Hypercard: you tend to develop a certain (life-long) taste for black and white graphics.
Before summer I bought an Inky pHAT display and put it to use with a spare Raspberry Pi Zero W I had in a drawer in the office, and my old Playstation Eye camera.
The Playstation Eye works “out of the box” with the Pi: taking pictures with it is pretty straightforward. The next logical step for me was to display them as beautiful dithered black and white images on the small e‑paper display.
I’ve been an avid motorbike rider since I was old enough to ride legally (a few times before that too, but I digress). Sadly I’ve been riding less and less in the last few years. I’ve also never really enjoyed road-riding in the UK that much – well, mostly southern England to be honest.
Nowadays I tend to either spend quality time on track or traveling abroad when possible.
Riding back and forth within Italy and the UK, crossing the Alps in Switzerland, is a relatively common occurrence.
This Easter, with a friend we decided to board the ferry from Portsmouth to Bilbao, cross the Pyrenees (weather permitting) and then point back to London.
