When Perseverance rover landed on Mars, it brought along a little helicopter in its belly. The helicopter, named Ingenuity, was a 30-day technology demonstration sent to see if we could fly an aircraft in the very thin Martian atmosphere.

As is often with NASA’s robotic missions to Mars in recent times, it did that, and exceeded all expectations. It became a companion to the rover and performed about 70 flights over the nearly three years that it flew on Mars. Then last month it encountered an accident that left one of its propeller damaged. That ended the mission.

I’ve been fascinated by this little flying helicopter and have often looked at the photos it was sending back. So much so that I have now compiled a video of all the photos taken by the navigation camera on Ingenuity. This downward pointing camera photographs the ground below it, and so the helicopter is always seen by its shadow, scuttling about the Martian landscape for a cumulative 17 km (10.5 miles) over its mission timeline.

No doubt, Ingenuity has shown that a flying robot is a very useful tool in exploring Mars, like wheeled rovers showed over the last few decades. Perhaps enough that future missions will bring more along.

For more information and a lot more interesting media, like the locations of all these flights, check out its official website.

Direct link to video file

Went out to take some photos this afternoon…

Ran into my friend Tim…

Downloaded a small dataset of cat and dog images for training a simple classifier. Super surprised that one image in the test data is a photo I took some years ago.

Update: Ok, so I double checked and it seems like I was wrong. But I was convinced that I was right. Ugh. Sorry about that folks.

Did you notice that there is a quick access way to Generate Alt Text from the context menu on an image? (Link to the video embedded below).

Hope you like it!

Get Mimi from the App Store!

Three Bunnies and a Sunset

The latest version of Mimi Uploader is out, and with it brings a new alt text generation feature. You can now generate alt text for photos using machine learning (AI)! This is a powerful new feature that should reduce the friction in drafting alt text for your uploads. It’s been in beta for a few weeks and I wrote a detailed description of how it works in case you’re curious.

This feature is being offered exclusively to Supporters. I’m grateful to those of you that have signed up to Become a Supporter via the Settings screen in the last release. Thank you!

Also new in this release:

• View your uploads for the last few years with some nice charts and groupings! Find the icon at the top of the Recent Uploads screen.
• Export text adds an extra new line between images.
• A new screen to check and manage your Supporter status.
• Bug fixes and other small improvements.

Get it from the App Store!

Happy New Year!

Another beta update is out, now with a grid of the entire year’s uploads!

Caveat: This might take a while to generate, and may be too tiny if you have a lot of images!