Blog posts written by aaron cope

Holding Hands with the “Fediverse” – ActivityPub at SFO Museum

Holding Hands with the

SFO Museum has joined the “Fediverse”. We have begun to operate a series of automated “bot” accounts that are published using the ActivityPub protocols and that can be subscribed to from any client, like Mastodon, that supports those standards. These are automated, low-frequency, accounts and they currently only support a limited set of interactions: Accounts can be followed or unfollowed, individual posts can be “liked”, “boosted” or replied to but those replies will not be answered (yet) or published on the SFO Museum websites. To get started we’ve created three “groups” of accounts: Things which have happened recently involving the SFO Museum Aviation Collection; Things which have happened in the terminals (new and old) and; Things from the collection which are related to flights in and out of SFO.

This is a blog post by aaron cope. It was published on March 12, 2024 and tagged collection, activitypub, socialmedia and golang.

The SFO Museum Aviation Collection Website Shoebox

The SFO Museum Aviation Collection Website Shoebox

This is a blog post about something that’s been hiding in plain sight on the SFO Museum Aviation Collection website for over a month now: The ability to save collection objects to a personal “shoebox”. If that sounds like a simple bookmarking system limited to items in the SFO Museum collection that’s because it is. For now. The shoebox and the introduction of user accounts are the first steps, the first building blocks, towards developing more sophisticated functionality and applications for the museum and its collection.

This is a blog post by aaron cope. It was published on January 22, 2024 and tagged collection and shoebox.

Coloring Books Pages For the SFO Museum Aviation Collection

Coloring Books Pages For the SFO Museum Aviation Collection

We have launched a new experimental feature on the SFO Museum Aviation Website: Coloring book pages (or sheets) for a subset of the objects in our collection. Coloring books are PDF files with a stylized, black and white outline of an object for you to print out and color as you see fit and can be thought of as a second attempt at producing a museum artifact that can follow you “out of the building”.

This is a blog post by aaron cope. It was published on December 18, 2023 and tagged collection, rustlang, golang, roboteyes, publications and coloringbooks.

Experiments in Photogrammetry

Experiments in Photogrammetry

This is a blog post about using consumer-grade hardware and a suite of open-source software tools to generate high-quality 3D models from photographic imagery, a process commonly referred to as “photogrammetry”, which can be viewed and interacted within a web browser. This is a fairly technical blog post but the non-technical takeaways are: It’s possible, it’s affordable or at least meaningfully cheaper than it used to be, it’s harder than it should be, we have developed tooling to make things easier and we would love your help to make it all better.

This is a blog post by aaron cope. It was published on November 29, 2023 and tagged swift, 3d, photogrammetry and blender.

Extracting Subjects from Images in Swift (and gRPC)

Extracting Subjects from Images in Swift (and gRPC)

In the Searching Text in Images on the Aviation Collection Website blog post I introduced the swift-text-emboss Swift package, a wrapper library around Apple’s Vision Framework to simplify extracting text from images. In this blog I’d like to introduce the swift-image-emboss Swift package. Like the swift-text-emboss package this is also a wrapper around code provided by Apple’s Vision Framework with the goal simplifying the code necessary to extract, or “lift”, one or more subjects from an image.

This is a blog post by aaron cope. It was published on October 31, 2023 and tagged swift, tools, grpc, golang and roboteyes.

Searching Text in Images on the Aviation Collection Website

Searching Text in Images on the Aviation Collection Website

We want to see what these technologies make possible, though, and a very real and immediate opportunity is the ability to index search terms that the curators and registrars haven’t already included in the titles or descriptions for objects in our collection. For example, this travel bag from Canadian Pacific Airlines, covered in the names of cities the airline traveled to, is not included in the search results for the terms “montreal” or “saskatoon” using the default search functionality but it’s the first result when we also search for the text in images.

This is a blog post by aaron cope. It was published on September 14, 2023 and tagged search, swift, collection, roboteyes, grpc and tools.

Updating the SFO Museum Wayfinding Service - Past Galleries (and Exhibitions) Along a Route

Updating the SFO Museum Wayfinding Service - Past Galleries (and Exhibitions) Along a Route

Not all past exhibitions in past galleries displayed along a route in the SFO Museum Wayfinding system have studio-quality photographs of their objects but for many of those exhibitions we have “installation” photos and those will be integrated in to the Wayfinding system shortly.

This is a blog post by aaron cope. It was published on September 12, 2023 and tagged wayfinding.

Updating the SFO Museum Wayfinding Service - Past exhibitions for galleries along a route

Updating the SFO Museum Wayfinding Service - Past exhibitions for galleries along a route

SFO Museum has been producing exhibitions since 1980 and if people sometimes have trouble wrapping their heads around what’s on display today it’s easy to imagine that most people have no idea what we’ve done in the past (and that we’ve been doing it for over 40 years). By including past exhibitions in wayfinding routes and publications we’re hoping to show people not only all the cool and interesting stuff we’ve displayed over the years but also the breadth and velocity of that work to help reenforce the idea that “the airport is the museum”.

This is a blog post by aaron cope. It was published on August 16, 2023 and tagged wayfinding.

Updating the SFO Museum Wayfinding Service - EPUB (ebook) publications

Updating the SFO Museum Wayfinding Service - EPUB (ebook) publications

This is a short blog post to announce that we have enabled support for generating publications of all the SFO Museum galleries and exhibitions and public art works from the San Francisco Arts Commission along a wayfinding route as EPUB documents.

This is a blog post by aaron cope. It was published on July 10, 2023 and tagged wayfinding and epub.