If you’ve lived in San Francisco for a while, you may have gotten curious about the big red triangular tower at the top of Twin Peaks. Most of us know that it’s called Sutro Tower, and that it has something to do with broadcasting TV and radio for the Bay Area.
I thought it would be nice to bring San Franciscans closer to our most prominent landmark with a really beautiful model of the tower that you can fly through at your own pace. There are many little tidbits about the tower’s workings and history to discover. If you’re on a phone, you can also engage AR mode by clicking the little cube, but the model is best experienced on a computer.
If you have trouble loading the model on this page, you can also viewing it directly.
This scan is made possible by recent advances in Gaussian Splatting. This is an emerging technology that lets us quickly create very detailed models just from photographs. For this model (or splat, as we call them), my friend Daylen and I flew our drones around Sutro Tower at a respectful distance for an afternoon until we had collected a few thousand photographs.
I then aligned these pictures in free software called RealityCapture. Alignment is the process that teaches the computer that a bunch of points in different images all actually correspond with the same point in real life. Then I used another piece of free software called gsplat to produce the 3D model itself.
Normally these models would be too large to share with you easily, but thanks to advances in the last year, we’ve developed new compression techniques. This model only weighs about 30 megabytes, which is about the same as a couple minutes of TikTok video!
Sutro Tower is a wonderful building, and I hope you enjoy learning a bit about it here. If you want to learn more, check out the much more thorough official digital tour.
After 6 months of on-and-off-again labor, I released a feature-length film composed mostly of footage obtained by attaching
a camera to the front of a BART train.
You can watch the movie in its entirety for free on YouTube, as well as the
impromptu panel Q&A I hosted at the Roxie premiere.
The Roxie is an important San Francisco nonprofit theater and I want to thank them again for showing my film.
Live Zoom Backgrounds
If you’ve ever been stuck in a Zoom meeting and wished you were on BART instead, I have a few fun looping Zoom
backgrounds you can use:
A few months later, I completed scanning old issues of BART’s internal employee newsletter, BARTalk, from 1981 to 2003.
In addition to fun Christmas covers, BARTalk features workaday profiles of life at BART as a station agent, operator, or maintenance person, as well as recaps of anything fun that might be happening at BART. It’s written in a relaxed way you don’t see in their public-facing comms
My favorite running feature of BARTalk is the internal efficiency award program, which awards clever employees with money commensurate with how much money their idea saves BART. Here is the largest award winner (for a cheap way to reduce the resistance of the third rail).
The newsletter is also where the district celebrates its own achievements, like its service in the wake of Loma Prieta closing the bay bridge, or winning the International Roadeo (a competition for transit workers).
A newsletter like this is also an interesting look at pre-electronic communication at a company that spans a wide geography and thousands of employees. They didn’t have email yet, so some of it is devoted to prosaic stuff like “for sale” listings and social club advertisements.
I’d like to thank Dany Qumsiyeh, inventor of the linear book scanner, for helping me with the Noisebridge book scanner. I’d also like to thank Michael Healy, from whose collection these newsletters were borrowed.
I recently wrote a short piece about how a YC-funded cryptocurrency startup lost $46M of its customers funds by investing it all in what was effectively a ponzi scheme.
Against my better judgment, and almost two years after my original reporting, I returned to the story of Lambda School once more. In the intervening time, the school had gone through many changes, most of which seemed to be for the worse. Subsequently to my reporting, the school changed its name to the “Bloom Institute of Technology.”
Here are some artifacts from this go-around:
The kickoff piece in Business Insider, which uses leaked documents and student testimony to paint a portrait of a struggling school.
A twitter thread wherein I scoop that the school was about to change its name and tuition financing model.
I recently concluded some investigative reporting on Lambda School, which basically accused the school and its chief officer of fraud. I won’t bother to summarize these claims here. Instead, I’ll just link to the artifacts this investigation produced:
The audio recording of the interview I conducted with Austen Allred, their chief executive.
An interview I gave on This Week In Startups, in response to criticism of my piece on a previous episode of TWiS by the host of the show and Austen Allred.
