Steve Coast

I’m catching up my blog to the kickstarter updates I’ve been posting. Here’s the original.

Six prints are out the door and on their way. Six desktop images are out and emailed. I’d love pictures, to share, when you get them, please!

I would like to be further on than 12 out of 453. It’s better than zero, but there have been some interesting challenges. So, I’ll outline them and what I’m doing about them.

Some of the largest prints are 42 inches at their shortest length. I have 48 inch poster tubes, but it turns out that rolling a 42 inch poster in to a tube 1.5 inches wide damages it. In fact, I can’t even squeeze them in there. That means I need bigger poster tubes. So, I’ve ordered 4 inch tubes to fit the largest of the prints.

Second, printing has been more painful than I would like.

Print shops are typically set up for either large volumes of the same thing, or, incredibly bespoke one-off things. On the one hand, they like 1,000 copies of the same poster. On the other, they like the photo that has to be just right to be framed in the hallway.

Confronted with 453 prints, each very large, and each completely different, the systems for tracking everything break down. It becomes difficult to ship all the PDFs to the printer. It becomes difficult to pick them all up. Essentially, everything that worked well for me with a limited small run, doesn’t work any more.

So, I’m buying a printer.

The economics of buying vs. renting a printer (and the ink, electricity, time…) mean that it’s actually not really much more expensive to just buy a printer. This is especially true since print pricing assumes you’re using lots of ink, where our prints actually use very little compared to a full color photo.

The printer I’m buying is a Canon ipf8400. It weighs 500lbs, prints almost every color on every paper and it takes 44 inch paper (which I already have rolls of). It’s so badass, it has a 250Gb hard drive inside it (I’m still puzzled why that is, but hey). There’s a picture of it below. This thing costs about $3,500 and my worst-case scenario is to just sell it after these prints are done. But, I think I’ll find uses for it. It should arrive early next week.

Lastly, I broke some of the prints in the first run for two reasons.

GPS data has errors in it, which mean you can get some random lines which “jump around”. I filter these out by removing lines which are longer than 1/4 inch on the page, which stops the lines jumping across a city and then back again. But, when you zoom way out, even lines less than 1/4 inch are, still, hundreds of miles long and need to be cut. It is super hard to see these in the PDFs but very easy to see them in the prints. When it takes days to get a print… it takes days to find a bug like that.

The other bug is that I built a simple Mercator projection engine to render the prints. This works well when zoomed in, since you can stretch the vertical axis proportional to the cosine of the latitude. When you zoom out, the stretch varies by latitude itself, across the print, so you end up with broken prints. Long story short – the USA looks “squashed” but a city looks great. So, the USA prints broke. Again, hard to see in the PDFs on screen.

So, some delays.

I have backed kickstarters that failed. The Punk Mathematics Textbook raised $28,701 in 2010 and hasn’t shipped a damn thing, for example. I backed that, and it sucks. I’m highly aware of the responsibility of shipping actual posters to you all. So, apologies for this delay and I’ll keep you updated as much as I can.

To make up for it, here are some pictures of the prints that worked, taken with sexy focal lengths on a hardwood floor. You can’t even pay for that. There’s a picture of the posters that went out, too.

I’ll post another update soon. Feel free to send me questions, just be aware I’m getting a lot of them and might be delayed replying.

I’m catching up my blog to the kickstarter updates I’ve been posting. Here’s the original.

I’m catching up my blog to the kickstarter updates I’ve been posting. Here’s the original.

Hello, another update on your GPS ART POSTER print.

All but one of the $99 level prints are printed and I should pick them up this week. One didn’t quite make it in to the last run.

All but one of the $59 level prints (of those who responded to the survey) are now with the printer to be printed. One of them is proving a little difficult because it has a lot of lines on it. The original copy was nearly a 2Gb PDF which is about 10 times too big to actually print

I’ve just ordered about 450 poster tubes, which should be here in about a week. I’ve had to order them in blocks of 50, which means I’ll have lots of spare poster tubes. Presumably these will be useful for pretend sword fights.

This means, it’s time to open up the surveys, to $39 level supporters and below. So, expect a survey soon.

From my perspective, about 25% of the prints are “done” in the sense that they are printed, or waiting to be printed. Very roughly 50% are remaining to be shipped to the printer (the $39 and $19 levels) and then roughly 25% are digital, desktop wallpaper copies.

With luck, I should be able to get all of them shipped within the projected month of April. But it will be tight, and some might ship in May.  I view the process of putting the prints in to the tubes, labeling and mailing them, as largely a mechanical chore. Compared, that is, to the work involved in taking your descriptions and turning them in to PDF files for the printer. It will take a chunk of time, but hopefully there isn’t much that can go wrong (famous last words).

I’m adding in a little 30 second video of what it’s like to watch a large format printer produce one of these things. It might surprise you how much time it can take. As the tubes and prints start arriving, there should be more interesting pictures and videos to share.

I’m catching up my blog to the kickstarter updates I’ve been posting. Here’s the original.

Hi, thanks for supporting the GPS ART POSTER!

A quick note on the prints.

I’m working through your area selections. Some of them are incredibly detailed. This is a good thing, but it is taking time. For example, prints asking for “my house near the big park in my town” are really fun. I’m exploring all kinds of new places and making many beautiful prints.

I’ve sent the first batch to the printer, too.

But there is a dark side here, and I need to be extra, extra clear with you. If you didn’t pledge at the $99 level there is no feedback loop.

I will do my best to make a great print for you, but some of the area selections are very hard to get right. For example; county maps are very hard since county boundaries are hard to get right, since they don’t always follow roads or other things in the GPS traces. Instead they follow random other things, like rivers. Or, if you specify “New York” that can mean New York City, Manhattan, New York State… or anything in between.

So, if it is, really, really, important to you that the print is *just* *right* please drop me a message, and consider upgrading to the $99 level, because I want to make you happy.

I’m catching up my blog to the kickstarter updates I’ve been posting. Here’s the original.

I’m writing with a little update on the gps art poster you supported. Thanks for that!

Yay! Code rewrite madness! The original software for this could take up to 2 hours to make a complete print. That doesn’t work when you have lots of prints to make. It has been completely rewritten and now takes about 50 seconds.

(For the technically inclined, originally it scanned hundreds of gigabytes of CSV files on a spinning disk. Now, it works with a smaller MySQL spatial indexed database on an SSD. The code itself is a relatively short ruby script talking to MySQL on one end and the PrawnPDF library at the other. Win!)

The $99 level pledgees now all have previews of their art, or have finalized their print. Soon, they’ll start being printed.

This means it’s time to move to the $59 level pledgees. There are 8 times more of you, and I’ve learnt a few things along the way that should make your process easier. Expect a survey soon to get your info.

For the levels below $59, sit tight, I’ll get to you as soon as possible.

Lastly, here are a few of the preview images.