Converting image to svg

Came across this tool, for making svgs out of images! Looks veery promising for plotting photos. I’m going to give it a try, just want to share it already!

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That looks neat. Let us know what you do with it!

Check out this collection, msurguy (Maksim Surguy) · GitHub

He always has cool stuff on twitter. I really wanted to try something on my big Zen but got a little sidetracked.

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Haha, this is embarassing! I’ve been trying to get this thing compiled on my windows machine. I didn’t recognize the windows exec. Github is confusing!

Edit: I’m sorry for all the edits and rants. I’ll shut up for a while. I haven’t really understood how this plugin is supposed to work. Please let me know if anyone tries!

We were digging at our holiday house this weekend and cut the water pipe by accident. The closing valve didn’t work, so we had to repair it while fighting a massive water leakage. It was a mess and my head is not working very well since then, been super tired.

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What a bummer!

I had a similar thing happen, my main shut off did not fully work and the house shutoff didn’t work at all. Messy stressful rushed worked.

Messy indeed! The accident turned out quite fortunate actually. We thought the main shut off was working, but this showed the opposite. We had to install a new main valve on our property to stop the flow, which now will be our main shut off. The in-house shut off is not very reliable, so we’re happy in the end. But the stress, panic and mess was intense!

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Mine was the sewer main backed up…tree roots. Plumber ran a camera and the main was completely split and just over 5’ deep. 3 days later the water main line broke, same tree. For some reason they planted a giant tree in betwean the water, sewer, sidewalk (already replaced before I moved in) and the cable lines. So completely boxed in on all sides none of which were more than 4 feet away.

City cut the tree down but would only cover the sewer damage since the roots were in the pipe, the water main was cracked from roots under it…so not covered. Never easy with that sort of stuff, just glad I have the skills to fix most of it myself.

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A complicated mess… you never think of pipes in the ground, before they one day break. We were lucky that they neighbor farmer had all the necessary gear, being prepared for these things that happen more often than we’re aware. He was also super relaxed, which was of great comfort. We thought the house foundation would crumble down into the water filled ditch, but our neighbor just smiled in a “welcome-to-the-club” kind of way :grinning:

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Oh man. I had one neighbor get down in the muddy hole with me, the other volunteered his tools but wasn’t about to get muddy, he hung out and kept us laughing though. Overall,


it was a pretty fun day.

Only decent pic I have, I did get a butt crack sunburn from bending over all day but no one needs to see that pic!

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Nice pool. I would go a little bigger though.

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The pool was much bigger! Before we dug an emergency ditch to lead the water away it filled the whole ditch. Would have been super pool for the kids, luckily for us they weren’t there - unfortunately for them :smiley:

If you had showed us a pic of the sunburnt ass crack, this forum would’ve taken a very strange turn of direction :crazy_face:
Such happenings are hectic when they are ongoing. The feeling of relief and accomplishment afterward is quite nice though!

Side note: it’s amazing and scary how much water a 1" pipe deliver - when on full preassure!!

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Argh! I managed to install vpyper flow image on ubuntu instead, but now the machine is acting out on me… I feel like everything is finicky atm. I guess it’s the dog days!

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Thanks for sharing the link! I came across this tool some time ago, but forgot to bookmark it and then later couldn’t remember the name and the browser history was already gone out the window.

As far as the dog days go, Florence + the Machine proclaimed 2008 that they were over! :wink:

If you live by the sea, you’ll know that the dog days is the time of year when rotten biomass floats to the surface. Things go bad easily, dogs and insects are aggressive. The relief when the crisp air of autumn comes is very well captured in this song, I really like it! :grinning:

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Finally! The dog days are not over, but I found a way.

I did a clean windows re-install on my main computer, because it was filled up with arduino IDEs, vs versions and developer tools, and things got chaotic. 20 .net versions in the Uninstaller, at least! I find the whole programming realm quite messy and hard to understand the layout and whereabouts of the files and packages.

My old Ubuntu MacBook died, moklist and pci errors, didn’t get past gnu grub in the end… (obsolete hardware with new kernel I think)

Sooo - my solution was to set up an Ubuntu VM on my relatively well spec’ed windows machine. And voila! Only had to get git, pip and python-venv. Phew!! I haven’t looked at flow imager settings, but this is a first try using default everything.

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Sounds almost Lovecraft-ian. Why do the dogs go crazy? Is it because of the smells?

Looks great! I wonder how long this will take to plot on the mpcnc? I have a homebrew, mostly 3D printed pen plotter à la Axidraw, and in A4 or slightly larger, it would probably take 8 to 10 hours for a dense piece like this.

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Dog days has an interesting wikipedia article. I have never thought about the saying before:

The dog days or dog days of summer are the hot, sultry days of summer. They were historically the period following the heliacal rising of the star system Sirius (known colloquially as the “Dog Star”), which Hellenistic astrology connected with heat, drought, sudden thunderstorms, lethargy, fever, mad dogs, and bad luck. They are now taken to be the hottest, most uncomfortable part of summer in the Northern Hemisphere.

Pliny’s Natural History notes an increase in attacks by dogs during July and August, and advises feeding them chicken manure to curb the tendency.

In the 1813 Clavis Calendria, the dog days are a time wherein “the Sea boiled, the Wine turned sour, Dogs grew mad, Quinto raged with anger, and all other creatures became languid; causing to man, among other diseases, burning fevers, hysterics, and phrensies”

Seems like a combination of the dog star, negative weather, and actual dogs.

I am curious what else Turbinbjorn has to say about it though.

Ouch… that is a big pile of dirt, and guessing by the background and circumstances, you all had to dig that by hand? I feel for you… you and your helpers deserve a good rest!

Just an FYI for other homeowners in more urban areas… usually the utility supply shutoff is not far from your house… usually under a 10” manhole cover in the front or backyard in my area. Those valves always work, and are easy to operate with pliers (1/4 turn). In my business I use those all of the time to repair main valves, or other valves when the main leaks too much. Technically you are supposed to call the utility to have them shut it off… but there is no real risk in using without permission it for a quick fix.

That said, I bet turninbjorn did not have such a valve nearby. I worked on some cabins in the Donner Summit area, and they had open pvc stretched across the hillside for supply, no valves lol. Just move the pvc so it catches a stream popping out of a rock somewhere uphill of the cabins.

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This forum and community is amazing. What started with a semi-relevant topic about making svgs for plotting/carving phots grew into a confused stream of emergency plumbing, dog days, and compiling github projects. As Willy Wonka would’ve said: “Wonderful!” Perhaps it should be split into three threads, but I’ll try to keep my balance:

Topic 1, vpype flow imager:

Good question! I think the magical equation here is the size of the svg, the thickness of and spacing between the lines, how well the thickness render the details in the photo, and the consistency of the tool used for plotting. I don’t have any answers yet, but I’m very certain that I can save time rendering the svg and plotting with the MPCN, if I use fewer lines in the svg and find the sweet spot between speed and image quality.

I have to add to this sub-topic that the virtual machine running Ubuntu works great. If anyone else are looking to try this - without having a linux box running, I can recommend it warmly. Virtualbox from oracle, and then set up a virtual machine with plenty of space. (I had to double from 15 to 30gb)

Topic 2, dog days:

Funny that you beat me with the wikipedia reference! That was my plan, but the day has been spent preparing the birthday for our 7 year old kid. I agree that the dog days-concept can sound a little lovecraftian as @diff-arch suggests, but honestly it’s quite simple biology. During summer, our hemisphere is heated. As the temperature increase, plant growth accelerates to a certain point where things are finished blossoming and they start to rot. The temperature in the ocean rises as well, so that the same processes happen there. After longer periods of heat, people get tired, irritated and aggressive (or passive?), I guess it might be the same for animals? What is special for the dog days along the coast here in Norway, is that this period is known for being the time of year where people having died and disappeared at sea float to the surface… biology can be brutal indeed.

Topic 3, emergency plumbing:

We DID have a valve between our house and the main pipe. The water is from a local water plant, for the whole village. We thought the valve was functioning, but when we tore the pipe in our yard, it turned out that it wasn’t… therefore things got quite stressful quite fast. Luckily we got a shut-off valve and an extension rod from out neighbor farmer, so now we have our own shut-off valve, which we needed, without knowing it!

We did have an 8ton excavator indeed, but when working around the water and drain pipes, we had to work by had not to damage anything again…

(side note - the water in the ground is NOT from the new valves, it’s ground water. We made sure they didn’t shed a single drop(being told so by my plumber friend), but it took several tries to get them properly tightened.)

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