Make:

• Octopulse instrument
• The automata of Tom Haney
• Pill head / Numb skull
• Image transfer
• Singing with the fishes
• Steel sand-casting flask

How do you get a GPS receiver to work inside a metal sipping or air freight container?

Seems a bit suspect to me.

How do you get a GPS receiver to work inside a metal shipping or air freight container?

Seems a bit suspect to me.

Even more suspicious than getting a GPS to work inside a metal box is getting a plane of shipping company to go to the north atlantic and steam in circles.

@digger: maybe DHL have trucks that drive around in circles in the Arctic (they *are* pretty good at it here, on solid land)?

According to the project's "travel instructions", DHL went not just to known placenames but followed sequences of lat/long coordinates. Hmmm, maybe they really did fly/drive around in circles?

Way to go DHL, burn all that fuel for some dipsh*t project which would have been better off being hacked straight into a GPX file.

is what this smells like to me, other wise there would be more information such as how he got over the technical difficulties and how he approached DHL and got him to let him shoot his package going onto the plane, man there is just no way this is anything but a "viral" video put together by whoever does ads for DHL

Could you guys stop taking stuff directly from hackaday? It's pretty lame to have the exact same thing twice in my RSS reader.

Posted by: Phillip Torrone on May 24, 2008 at 11:59 AM

@bbot

-i saw this on sparkfun this morning, i didn't see it on hack-a-day (our post was published before theirs its seems too) if i did see it there i would have via/credited them. MAKE is one of the sites that actually does that.

-some trivia, i was the founder, designer and creator of hack-a-day :)

that was pretty funny. had a sort of Indiana Jones travel montage feel to it.

I doubt that would be that easy on a flat/square map of the earth though. I would think there may be some serious distortion in his image when translating to the actual traveling routes.

total BS.

where did they land? it just looks like the line keeps going without stopping anywhere. i mean, sure it hits stockholm, but it looks as if it just flew in a loop around it without landing.

Lmao well it dose look like the case is plastic, but you would still have to get it to work through the metal on the jet, well unless of course this wonderful person requested that DHL tape the box on the out side of the plane and fly in loops that make no sense. Oh and the best part is hope they don't Xray the damn thing then blow it up because it looks like a bomb on the Xray. Seriously to get DHL to even do something close to this in a shipping way, it would be about a million dollar bill for the shipping.

Every once in a while April fools comes early.

If this is an accurate drawing of the flight plan, then wouldn't the end of the line on the right be at the same lattitude as on the left? Since this drawing would actually be wrapped around a globe. Also, the lines just look suspiciously like adobe fireworks or illustrator. what a joke.

Posted by: blubrick on May 24, 2008 at 5:57 PM

I don't believe it is the largest drawing in the world. It doesn't even exist until it is traced out on a map, and it would need to be a huge scale map in order to rival any of the following geoglyphs:
the Cerne Abbas Giant
the Long Man of Wilmington
the Uffington White Horse
Nazca Lines
Maree Man

And all those were done without the aid of GPS (with the possible exception of Maree Man).

Posted by: macetech.com on May 24, 2008 at 6:04 PM

If you watch the video, it shows him riding with the GPS unit everywhere it went. Basically he rode along with drivers and in the DHL jet cockpits giving coordinates to the pilot. DHL has it own planes, they can do loops in the middle of the ocean if they feel like it.

However, yes, it would be easy to fake. I don't think DHL would want to risk that, though.

99.9999999999999%

hrm, no comment as to its authenticity

however, the fact that the site is done in ASP.NET is a dead giveaway for a corporate ad gig

Was the guy a hunchback?

The cost in fuel to do this would be astronomical, it seems unlikely that even the richest of the rich would be willing to spend this kind of money on fuel without some tangible payoff. Furthermore, since I can't get online and view it on google's satellite view, it's not there, and finally, even if it were real, that would be worse, because it would be a giant waste of resources for something that is essentially worthless. It's a stupid prank no matter how you look at it.

This looked too good to be true so I made some research.

I started by running a whois on biggestdrawingintheworld.com

The domain name owner is Jakob Fridholm and he is actually living in Stockholm. He bought the domain name at the Swedish domain name registry loopia.se

I live also in Sweden and I can confirm that he speaks Swedish in the beginning of the first movie.

So... either this is real, or somebody from Stockholm tries to fake us.

Anyhow... this is not a commercial for DHL from DHL

@ hojo:

The cost in fuel would be huge if he chartered a plane and flew the little box around by itself.
But this whole project claims to have been done by shipping- if he transposed the drawing onto existing delivery routes, his little package would just be hitching a ride, and then the fuel consumed by the project would kinda be like the fuel consumption of a hamburger stuck under your car seat. That seems to be what he claimed to have done- just figured out an insane amount of routing. in that case the GPS is overkill- the waybills would be more convincing proof. From images on the site, he has a huge pile of waybills, he ought to scan them in. I'd find it a lot more interesting to look at the waybills and see all the destinations that made up the drawing.

I actually saw this the other week, when I attended to his exam showcase at Beckmans (A design school in Stockholm, Sweden). The GPS was on display there, and the movie was rolling on a flat panel TV. Also an entire wall was covered with the map with the route drawn in, and the other wall with a list of the waypoints, name and coordinates for each. Doesn't really prove authenticy in any way at all, but it does make it seems quite legit, being his exam work, and being on display there.

I also don't belive that... there are too many loops on the trajectory (some over the sea!), and this would be a veryyy inneficent way to ship packets. Is a loop the shortest way between two points??? Shipping packets these way would cause DHL to lose a lot of money ( time and gas )

Who cares if it's true? it's a creative thought and it got all of you to have some kind of reaction. That seems artful enough to me.

I already did this last year but forgot to document it. My girlfriend challenged me to do it right after I challenged her to eat a wheelchair. She did it, so in turn I did my self-portrait with the world as my canvass. She is still passing some little nuts.

i do not know if it said this before, but as of right now the site has bold red letters at the very bottom stating that it is a fake.

wtf?

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