Man Scrawls World’s Biggest Message With GPS ‘Pen’
Posted in: gps, Hacks, Mods and DIY, Today's Chili
One man drove 12,238 miles across 30 states to scrawl a message that can only be viewed using Google Earth. His big shoutout: “Read Ayn Rand.”
Nick Newcomen did a road trip over 30 days that covered stretches from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean. First, he identified on a map the route he would need to drive to spell out the message. He put a GPS device in his car to trace the route he would follow. Then, he hit the road.
“The main reason I did it is because I am an Ayn Rand fan,” he says. “In my opinion if more people would read her books and take her ideas seriously, the country and world would be a better place — freer, more prosperous and we would have a more optimistic view of the future.”
Newcomen, unlike previous GPS artists, actually traveled the lines he traced on the map. He used a GPS logger (Qstarz BT-Q1000X) to “ink” the message. Starting his trip in Marshall, Texas, he turned on the device when he wanted to write a letter and turned off the device between letters. The recorded GPS data was loaded into Google Earth to produce the image above.
“The first word I wrote actually was the word ‘Rand’, then I went up North to do the word ‘Read’ and finished it with ‘Ayn,’” says Newcomen.
And for those who don’t know, Ayn Rand is a Russian-American writer whose books Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead are among the world’s best-selling novels.
Newcomen’s venture sounds pretty crazy, though he gets points for ambition.
What message would you write using a GPS?
Photo: Nick Newcomen
A pair of software updates from Apple have patched the rather dangerous security hole that allowed any website to run arbitrary code on the iPhone and iPad. The hole was exploited by hacker Comex to allow users to jailbreak their iOS devices just by visiting a website and tapping a link.
by Jesus Diaz
