Bill Dugan chats about how @worldresources found new ways of communicating w/ data viz. #net2dc pic.twitter.com/u85yTexPUL
— NetSquared DC (@net2dc) October 25, 2016
So many good things to find here: A Complete History of the Millennium Falcon, exhaustively researched and illustrated. This is my favorite spaceship design, and what taught me at an early age that careful asymmetry was an excellent design choice.
Here are some crappy cellphone shots of my kick panels. The driver’s side was patched crudely before I got the truck, but the passenger’s side has always been swiss cheesy. I think I’ll wait for warm weather, take the angle grinder to both sides, and hit them with some rust encapsulator. One of my goals for this year is to get a decent welding rig and start practicing again so that I can take some smaller repair projects on; this would be a good one.
Driver’s side
Passenger’s side. Interesting to see the original gold paint there, isn’t it?
In other news, a printing vendor I use at work had a special on circle-cut stickers last week. I’ve been noodling with a design for our ad-hoc Maryland IH group, called Old Line State Binders, but I was having a hard time nailing down a design incorporating the Maryland flag. It’s a great flag but very visually busy, and in the last year there’s been a glut of shape-plus-flag stickers out there: a crab, deer, dogs, mustaches, etc.
My original idea was to use something ubiquitous to vintage 4-wheel-drive trucks: the locking hub. That part was pretty easy to nail down, and I took away some of the visual clutter to clean up the image. Integrating the flag and the name was the hard part. In order to keep the design circular (and get my cheap stickers before the deal expired), I left out the name and went with the following design:
Eventually I’ll figure out how the rest of the design should look. If you’d like a couple, drop me a line and I’ll send you one when I get them.
I’ve been really quiet on the Scout front for the last year or so due to work and family commitments. I haven’t visited the Binder Planet in ages. I’m hoping to get some time in the spring to organize a meeting and get back in touch with people.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
A nice fella on the Binder Planet had these stickers made up and offered them to the community. They were too groovy to pass up.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
I spend a lot of time in Photoshop trying to automate repetitive tasks. Here’s a great Introduction To Photoshop Scripting, using Javascript to handle complex tasks not possible with standard Actions.
From Ars Technica: How NASA brought the monstrous F-1 “moon rocket” engine back to life.
Each F-1 engine was uniquely built by hand, and each has its own undocumented quirks. In addition, the design process used in the 1960s was necessarily iterative: engineers would design a component, fabricate it, test it, and see how it performed. Then they would modify the design, build the new version, and test it again. This would continue until the design was “good enough.”
From The Truth About Cars, a great article about the VW Harlequin (1996 Golf).
At its core, the Golf Harlequin was, quite simply, a multi-colored Volkswagen Golf manufactured only for the 1996 model year. But, like most things in the car world – and everything in the Volkswagen world – there’s a lot more to it than that.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.