Raspberry Pi retail store Cambridge

MagPi Magazine: The new store sells a wide range of Raspberry Pi boards, accessories, kits, and merchandise. More importantly, it has interactive product demonstrations and breakout areas for people to learn all about digital making with Raspberry Pi.

Gordon Hollingworth, Director of Software Engineering at Raspberry Pi: “The concept is about trying to get closer to a less connected demographic, people who aren’t involved with technology, and show them that coding isn’t an inexplicable dark science reserved only for a few. Instead show them that it is possible, with the right instructions and an inquisitive nature, to learn about computers and coding.”

The Raspberry Pi store has been gestating for “over six years,” says Gordon. But each year Gordon and Eben Upton, Raspberry Pi CEO and co-founder, “decided against it.”

Things changed when Maplin closed all its stores in 2018. “With the demise of Maplin, we decided there was the possibility of recruiting just the right person to launch the store for us.”

See also: Other posts tagged ‘raspberry pi’

Craft and creativity

Raspberry Pi opens an official retail store in Cambridge

The vision of the store is to “promote and display” the capabilities of the Raspberry Pi computer and ecosystem.

Gallery

National Park typeface

National Park Service typeface

Johnston Falls sign Fast Company: If you’ve ever been to a National Park, chances are you’ve come across signage with the same distinctive lettering. The type, which features rounded edges carved into wood in all caps, has become an icon of the National Parks system.

[Jeremy] Shellhorn, who was on sabbatical from his current job as an associate professor of design at the University of Kansas, was redesigning the park’s newspaper and wanted to include the type found on National Park signs. But he soon discovered there was no digital typeface because the letters are simply formed with a CNC router in the park’s sign shop, chiseled into wood. The shape of the letters were determined by the size of the router bit.

Router path

It doesn’t really exist as a typeface unless a sign is made.

National Park typeface alphabet

Available for anyone to download for free, the typeface comes in four weights: light, regular, heavy, and outline.

See also

Craft and creativity

A typeface designed to mimic the National Park Service signs that are carved using a router bit

Since Shellhorn published the typeface in summer 2018, it’s been downloaded by people in all 50 states and in several other countries. Next, he hopes to assign students to create a series of dingbats to go along with the typeface.

Gallery

The Equal Earth Physical Map

Tom Patterson recently made available this high-resolution Equal Earth Physical Map as public domain.

Equal Earth - Physical Wall Map

The Equal Earth Physical Map focuses on the natural world—terrain, rivers and lakes, vegetation, land cover, and the ocean floor—free of obscuring country boundaries. Because the map projection is equal-area, continents and oceans are shown at their true sizes relative to each other.

The Equal Earth Wall Map is in the public domain. You may use the map any way you like, including modifying the content, reproducing it on any type of media, and selling it for profit. Consider it as yours.

 

It is a companion to his earlier Equal Earth political wall map, which is also provided in three versions, each centred on a different regions: Africa/Europe, the Americas, and East Asia/Australia.

Equal Earth - Political Wall Map

The Equal Earth Wall Map is for schools, organizations, or anyone who needs a map showing countries and continents at their true sizes relative to each other. Africa appears 14 times larger than Greenland as it actually is.

See also

Miscellany

High-res public domain maps of the world using the Equal Earth projection

The Equal Earth map projection is a new equal-area pseudocylindrical projection for world maps jointly developed by Bojan Šavrič (Esri), Tom Patterson (US National Park Service), and Bernhard Jenny (Monash University). It was created to provide a visually pleasing alternative to the Gall-Peters projection, which some schools and socially concerned groups have adopted out of concern for fairness. Their priority is to show developing countries in the tropics and developed countries in the north with correctly proportioned sizes.

Gallery

Council Against Intolerance in America

A Pretty 1940 Map of American Diversity, Annotated by Langston Hughes

Slate: This map, issued by the Council Against Intolerance in America in 1940, shows the ethnic groups living in the United States, offering a picture of their geographical locations, typical employment, and religious commitments.

The map omits state boundaries, opting instead to show the mix of ethnic groups by area. For heavily-populated areas, such as the Northeast or Chicago, pop-out keys framed with line drawings of people engaged in typical industries show the diversity of urban citizenry.

Altas Obscura: “Maps of this kind were not particularly common and especially not at this scale,” says Ian Fowler, the director of Osher Map Library at the University of Southern Maine, who notes that the physical map itself is quite large. “While this map does borrow stylistic elements from pictorial maps produced during the 1920s and ‘30s, it is very unique in its emphasis and display of information.”

See also

Progression and regression

Annotated map of diversity in 1940s America

The Council Against Intolerance, a New York group active from the late 1930s through the mid-1940s, was founded by left-leaning Jewish author James Waterman Wise. Wise is notable for having warned of the dangers of Nazism in several books as early as 1933. — Slate

Gallery

Dogs of the World

366 Dogs and Their Countries of Origin

A wonderful illustration by Lili Chin who has a whole series of posters for sale for dog and cat lovers.

See also: Urbano Monte’s remarkable 430-year-old map of the world

Humans and other animals

Map of the Dogs of the World

A wonderful infographic illustration by Lili Chin.

Gallery

Look at These Incredibly Realistic Faces Generated By A Neural Network

NVIDIA AI faces

Futurism: The results are spectacular. Even small seemingly random details like freckles, skin pores or stubble are convincingly distributed in the images the project generated.

See also: Sunspring: a short film written by an algorithm & Portraits of imaginary people

Shape of things to come

Incredibly realistic faces generated by a neural network

“Researchers at NVIDIA have harnessed the power of a generative adversarial network (GAN) — a class of neural network — to generate some extremely realistic faces. The results are more impressive than anything we’ve seen before.” — Futurism

Image