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A tabby cat resting on a patterned blanket with patches of light filtering through an object with circular cut-outs, casting a pattern of shadows over the scene.

Portland, Oregon. 3rd February, 2024.

A walkway with a mesh fence on either side leading towards a cityscape, with a cable car system overhead and people walking along the path.

About 75% of the time I write a reply to anything on any social media platform, after I’m done writing and editing, I (intentionally) hit “Cancel” instead of “Submit”. Works really well!

70 Flights on Mars

70 Flights on Mars

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…

Urban park scene with a walkway, dried vegetation, two children playing on a grassy hill, and modern buildings in the background.

Ran into my friend Tim…

A man with a beard holding a camera, standing on a wooden walkway in a park with bare trees and a modern building in the background.

Black and white photograph of a modern building with vertical lines on the façade, trees, and a unique-looking tower in the background. There are people walking and a person with two dogs on a grassy area.

A panoramic view of a clear blue sky between two modern high-rise buildings with a visible helicopter appearing to fly in between.

Silhouette of a “monkey puzzle” tree and residential houses at sunset with clouds illuminated by the golden light against a darkening sky. Power lines intersect the view.

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

A desert landscape at sunset with a pink and orange sky, mountains in the background, and various types of cacti and desert vegetation in the foreground. Several rabbits are visible among the plants.

A vibrant sunset with orange and pink hues in the sky, featuring cloud patterns above a silhouette of tree tops and a distant mountain range.

A vibrant sunset with blue and purple hues blending into orange and yellow, silhouetting sparse desert vegetation.

Sunset sky with vibrant orange and red colors, silhouetted tree branches in the foreground, and desert vegetation on the horizon.

The image shows two contrasting scenes of a desert landscape with text indicating the transition from the year 2023 to 2024. The top half under “Goodbye 2023” displays a vibrant sunset with red and orange hues in the sky. The bottom half under “Hello 2024” displays a bright sunrise with yellow and blue hues in the sky.