willidiots

I've used EGS for this sort of thing before. Not sure if they cover that area.

http://www.egstech.com/geodata/buildingheights.html

I've been using IFTTT to syndicate my Twitter posts to App.net. Guess now I'll have to default to App.net and syndicate to Twitter instead. Say goodbye to my ad revenue, Twitter.

Carriers realize the value in WiFi - it's present everywhere, cheap to deploy at scale and already exists on most mobile devices. There's precedent for WiFi offload - particularly in dense urban areas - and the industry is moving to support that model even further with Hotspot 2.0 and Passpoint certification.

That said, WiFi's not a panacea. Technologically it's subject to interference, the protocols allow for NO control over the handset (at present), and its range is limited. Speaking from experience running several large muni WiFi networks, the protocol does not handle power asymmetry well - your phone's WiFi needs to be roughly as strong as the AP or performance is terrible. Compare this to licensed cellular technologies which can pull in a tiny weak handset signal from miles away.

From a business perspective, there's a breakpoint between licensed and unlicensed use - at the point that WiFi's shortcomings have less impact than the cost of deploying licensed spectrum, it gets used. There's plenty of talk about small cells in the industry and I think we'll see a hybrid deployment style emerge over the next few years, with WiFi handling the densest of deployments. Carriers want to offer plentiful data but they want to do it in a way they can control, for good reasons - people are paying them and expecting a service in exchange.

From a good-of-all-mankind perspective, what I'd like to see happen is a transition to all-IP on the handset, seamlessly decoupling every feature from the cellular network. Apple showed the potential here with iMessage, which works well if everyone's on an iPhone. SMS and voice themselves need to be carried over IP in a device-independent manner. When I can send an SMS from my Android phone to my iPhone over IP, and call a POTS number over IP, I'm truly carrier-independent and effectively paying them to be a WISP. That gives me (and the market) opportunities to build a service tailored to my needs.

Flagrant self-promotion: if you're interested in this sort of thing, check out myscribr.com. We're all about preserving your life for future days.

We start by importing the information you're already posting to Facebook, Twitter etc. We'll send you a nightly email asking how your day went - simply reply and we'll save your response as a private entry. View your past on any day of the year, or browse through an aggregate timeline. When it suits you, you can click a few buttons and order your past in printed book form, suitable for shelving.

Title != Content IMHO. This is mostly just a rant about Lion. But while I think some of the author's problems are self-imposed (close your windows when you're done with them!), I agree with the sentiment. I've been an Apple user since 1986 and I've never seen them get closer to Microsoftian behavior than in the last year.

For another great example of this, look at Airport Utility 5 vs 6.

You gain:

  * A big shiny globe and background  
  * iOS-style badges for firmware upgrades

You lose:

  * Client lists  
  * Logging and statistics  
  * IPv6 settings  
  * Wireless multicast rate, txpower, 40MHz channels, interference robustness  
  * Printer support  
  * I'm sure some other stuff

I learned this the hard way the other day. I went to look up a DHCP client and found the table no longer exists! The recommended solution is to install Airport utility 5 ALONGSIDE Airport utility 6. What?! I completely understand the Apple mantra of simple usability, but the power user functions have always been hidden behind that veneer. Now they're just GONE.

I worked at NASA in a past life. Whole-disk encryption was banned at our center because it caused "problems" for the IT contractors. If you had ITAR/SBU data, you were to encrypt and decrypt it manually using Entrust, which is the biggest pile of dogshit PKI I've ever seen. So of course people forgot, or got lazy.

Another center was forced to keep using LEAP for years after it was broken, due to contract requirements.

I am completely unsurprised by this. Saddened, but unsurprised.

What do I do when I forget the wording of a menu item? (or I guess a "HUD command")

Menus form a strong spatial association - I remember a lot of options by their placement, and only recall the exact wording when I see it. (Is it "re-open last tab", "reopen last tab", "re-open closed tab", or "reopen closed tab"?) Not saying that HUD is inherently bad because of this, but I'm curious how they deal with it? Am I missing something?

To a degree, we want to capture both the deep meaningful thoughts and the inane daily business, to capture a whole picture of someone. It's interesting seeing how little things (a check-in, say) can trigger associated memories for the reader.

That said, there are certainly a number of people who fill their social networks with crap, and just don't care about it. For them, we have the option of omitting services from the book, and as we add more blogging platforms the value may increase.

We also encourage users to keep a journal within Scribr itself via our nightly email, which makes the process super-easy.

New parents are definitely a target market for us, we have a few in our Alpha group and we're finding they're really into it.

We figure it'll happen someday. Of course, it may be centuries in the future when the roach kings rule, and our paperback book may not last that long.

Blog support is a top-priority next feature for us.

Absolutely, was mostly joking about the flipbook. Mostly.

We definitely want to add the services that people are using. YouTube wasn't high on our list but you make a good point about vloggers, it might have to get bumped up the priorities a bit.

Not sure how we'd print YouTube, a flipbook maybe? :)

We use Lulu, they've been absolutely great to work with.

Founder of Scribr here. We're stoked to see this on HN and curious to see what the minds here think of it.

TheNextWeb has a good article detailing our book here:

http://thenextweb.com/apps/2011/12/30/scribr-preserves-your-...

We also have Timeline-esque features that aren't very public at the moment. We delve into these in our blog here:

http://blog.myscribr.com/post/15036430644

whois 1e100.net <snip>

Registrant: DNS Admin Google Inc. 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View CA 94043

Assuming "all these obscurely named TCP connections" means 1e100 hostnames, why exactly did you need to do this for "each one", why was this such a time sink, and how would "googleserver.com" be any more implicitly trustworthy?

So this is a thing I've been working on for a while.

In a nutshell, we: 1. Import the content you're posting to fb/twitter/fsq/flickr/tumble and use it to build a journal.

2. Send you a nightly email asking how your day went, reply and we save it to your journal.

3. Make it a 4-click process to convert this journal into a real, color book.

I've always valued HN's feedback - this is a great place to grow an idea, and a place where people won't hesitate to criticize. I'd love any comments from the community here.

"She didn't know how to answer it"

Yeah, I have a lot of trouble understanding "SLIDE TO ANSWER" too.

iDevices don't support FLAC, IIRC.

"The whole operation runs on donations, of course."

You're not really "living" on $10 / day if your necessities are donated and you're occupying a public space. The costs of supporting you are borne by the donators and the taxpayers, respectively. EDIT: Turns out the park is privately owned by Brookfield Properties, and was created by US Steel.

An amazing spectacle, absolutely. Our generation's Woodstock, perhaps. But the title's misleading.

My intent was never to discount the importance of hope and positivity, nor the value of lifestyle changes such as the author's. I am intimately close with the affected person in my life; the disease (and its treatment) has a way of consuming her life, it's supporting to hear a positive tale.

It's semantics to me - the term "overcame", the tone of the article. I get the feeling that the author believes he's permanently rid himself of the disease, and that he's suggesting others can do the same (through whatever method). The disease is with you for life, you manage it. The author never makes that clear, and I hope (for his sake) he realizes that.

This is a dangerous article. A dangerous, slightly manic article.

Someone close to me is affected with bipolar, which drags me into that universe. People who self-medicate - such as the author - are very common with this disease. There are a million people who claim they've "overcome" it, some through alcohol or street drugs, some through nutrition and lifestyle changes. The danger is that when you're manic, you are your own blind spot - you're in no position to self-assess, you think things are great when they clearly aren't.

It's been three years since the end of his "challenge", and from the sound of it, three lovely years. Meeting a new love, getting married, positive things. How will the unmedicated author react when, say, a parent dies? Or the marriage ends?

There's nothing wrong with trying to understand the disease, its effects on your body, and the effects of alternative therapies - I commend the author for that. However, the claim that he's "overcome" bipolar this way is reckless and frankly dangerous. There are countless bipolar patients out there who struggle every day with their medications; the costs, the terrible side effects, and who fight a battle of willpower to stay on them despite feeling "cured". One article like this, one claim to the opposite, is all it takes to break them.

I'd love for this article to be true. I'd love it if my friend didn't have to spend thousands on medications that are slowly killing her, but somehow I doubt this is the answer.

Edit: What great feedback! It's interesting hearing people's different experiences with various forms of treatment. I think the lifestyle changes the author recommends are sane and sensible, helpful changes. They just aren't a "cure". You manage these diseases and you must be very careful when tweaking that management.

I highly recommend that anyone who's involved with - or interested in - a mood disorder read An Unquiet Mind, by Kay Redfield Jamison. It gives you an excellent understanding of the subtleties and trickery this cunning disease exhibits.

We're building a competitor app that solves this problem simply - we send you a book. Check us out - http://myscribr.com

I think this is more geared towards the narcissist in all of us. You read your own timeline, not your workmates'.

LiveATC is just scanners plugged into streaming boxes - the freqs covered depend on the feed.

For SJC there's 5 separate feeds - one for ground (4 freqs), two for approach (2 freqs), one for departure (1 freq) and one for tower (1 freq). To listen to the handoffs, you either have to stream them simultaneously or manually switch between feeds.

There's no awesome queueing / playback feature like you've got - it'd be super nice to have!

I've always thought this was a great idea. I've got this going along with LiveATC for SJC and I feel omnipresent!

Edit: Feature request - the ability to filter out certain talkgroups. The streets guys have verbal diarrhea.

I had this revelation a year ago. It's helped me massively.

Better get started on the pipeline. LA's residents are thirsty.

I know there's more to it than this. I realize this was CALEA's original intent, but I clearly recall around 2004-2005, the various TLA's expanded it to include ISPs.

Did a little research of my own and found EFF has a nice primer: https://www.eff.org/pages/calea-faq . It seems that CALEA started out in '94 for voice calls over the PSTN, but was expanded in 2004 to include "VoIP providers" and "broadband internet providers". Whether the latter are responsible only for monitoring voice-over-broadband, or all data exchanges, is very unclear. Looking at the case files it certainly SEEMS like they're already capturing data exchanges.

There are two major differentiators, however, that make H.R. 1981 much more scary. Firstly, the service providers are responsible for capturing this data proactively - effectively a constant blanket wiretap, at the provider's expense. Compare this to CALEA, where the capture begins only after a court order, and the cost is billed to the government.

Secondly, and more disturbingly, this bill represents the shift in mindsets of our elected officials. When drafting CALEA in '94, Congress went out of their way to ensure it only applied to PSTN calls (specifically stating it would NOT apply to data networks such as the Internet) and minimized the amount of content logged by the telcos. The baseline assumption was that people are innocent until proven guilty.

H.R. 1981 seems to think it's the other way around.

I'm against anything involving more information gathering, but I'm curious - can anyone explain how this differs from existing CALEA requirements?

The major problem with this proposal is scalability.

"Repeater mode" is usually WDS or a logical client bridge+AP. This is entirely layer 2, has no routing, no useful path metrics, and is completely unsuited for a network larger than a few nodes if you want any sort of reliability/usability.

True meshing algorithms like 802.11s or BATMAN can optimize the mesh topology, but you're still on one huge broadcast domain. The proposal needs to establish a means to restrict the size of these domains - convert each node (or a subset of supernodes) into "routers", and roll out a routing protocol which is optimized to this type of ad-hoc, organic deployment.

The other problem with scaling (no matter what your meshing algorithm does) is the half-duplex nature of RF - if you're doing this with single-radio SOHO routers, you're going to lose half of your throughput per hop. I run two 500-node muni WiFi nets, and we try never to exceed 2 hops between a node and its backhaul gateway - any more and you're in the sub-1Mbps range on 802.11g rates.

Fix these problems and you may be on to something. Of course you also need to bridge geographic gaps somehow.