Last Sunday I had the pleasure to participate in making an aerial map, a very detailed overhead image of Dolores Park taken from 200’ to 400’. The fine folks at Public Laboratories have published the result. A couple of direct links: a full page slippy map and aerial video. I also got a nice single shot of the new Dolores Park playground (full size).

This kind of mapping comes from Public Laboratory, a cool non-profit helping ordinary people make their own aerial maps. You don’t need a satellite or fancy cameras on a plane to make a “satellite map”. All you need is a kite or balloon, a cheap point and shoot camera, and a little software.

I particularly like how low tech the setup is. The lift comes from something as simple as a mylar balloon filled with helium (we used a car dealership ad balloon). No fancy cradle, just some rubber bands holding the camera to a plastic soda bottle with the soda cap as the clamp. And no special camera, just an ordinary consumer camera set to continuous drive with another rubber band holding down the button. Launch, fly for awhile, pick the best photos, then stitch them together into a map. (That last part takes some effort; you can do it by hand in Photoshop or use the MapKnitter web app).

The Dolores Park shoot was mostly for fun, a nice way to be outside on a sunny day and excite a bunch of kids. But Public Laboratories participates in more serious projects too, like documenting the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. A key thing about this kind of mapping is anyone can do it relatively cheaply and quickly. You can also fly other sensors, they’re doing a lot of work in environment monitoring,

Many thanks to Stewart Long and Bobby Sudekum for letting me tag along on the fun photo shoot.

I have an increasingly bad feeling about Apple’s efforts to control what software runs on the computers they sell. Not just the business implications, but technical issues.

There’s two ways to get software onto a Mac: buy it directly from the developer or buy it via Apple’s Mac app store. App store versions are almost always worse; fewer features, more awkward updates. And now, with the sandbox requirements, total contortions.

I bought NZBVortex via the app store. Version 2.7 was recently released to be sandbox compatible. But for it to work completely you have to download a “helper application” that runs outside the sandbox. It’s a clever workaround, but it’s needless complexity and subverts the whole purpose of sandboxing.

I also bought Alfred, an awesome app launcher. At first I got the free version via the app store but that turned out to be a mistake, because you really want the (for pay) Powerpack but because of the sandbox restrictions the Powerpack is not available via the app store. The Alfred developers optimistically say “the Mac App Store is one of many ways to buy software for your Mac,” and encourage you to buy directly from them. Which works today.

But what if the Mac App Store becomes the only easy way to buy software for your Mac? Gatekeeper is a step down that road; you’ll still be able to run software from other sources, but only if it’s signed by an Apple-issued developer key or you personally disable a security setting. So far Apple’s not dictating policy on what key-signed code is allowed to do. But what if they decide to?

Meanwhile, over in Apple’s actual computer market, iPhones and iPads, total lockdown has been the rule since day one. And sometimes it goes badly. The most recent kerfuffle is over Dropbox signups; Dropbox has capitulated, removing some aspects of user signups to satisfy Apple’s market monopoly demands. And Apple has behaved poorly in the past, for example blocking Google Voice and Camera+ for ridiculous reasons.

I admire Apple. I sympathize with their desire to control the quality and security of software. But I don’t want to have to completely trust them to make the right decisions.

There’s a whole second Internet out there, in mainland China. It’s hugely innovative and we in the west can learn a lot from what’s going on there.

We have Google and Bing: in China they have Baidu. Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo are the Twitter equivalents, Renren is Facebook. The Chinese eBay is Taobao (owned by Alibaba). NetEase is like Yahoo without the miasma. There’s a robust variety of big Chinese websites. Online games, too, Western juggernauts like World of Wacraft are also-rans compared to local games.

Here in the US we tend to dismiss the Chinese Internet as a backwater, some second-rate place that clones American technologies while laboring under the yoke of communist oppression. Nothing could be further from the truth, there’s a lot of interesting innovation and an enormous ecosystem developing independently in China. As a small example, consider maps. Baidu launched indoor maps before Google. Sina Weibo just blew past Twitter in mapping microblog posts. And no one can touch Baidu’s awesomely unique isometric pixel art maps.

I’m trying to learn more about Internet development in China but unfortunately I don’t read Chinese and surfing via Google translate is pretty bad. (Maybe I should try Baidu Fanyi). But thanks to a tip from Richard Chen I’ve been reading the Tech in Asia blog, a great bit of news coverage of consumer Internet stuff in Asia. About 10 posts a day, not just China, most quite readable. The Economist’s new expanded Chinese coverage is also helpful for a broad perspective.

What I haven’t found is a good source for technical innovations. Where is the Chinese open source community, what is their GitHub, their Hacker News? There’s Chinese Linux distros; are there app server frameworks, NoSQL datastores, nerd fights over semicolons? There’s a lot of very smart computer scientists in China, where is their hacker output?

I can’t post this without a word on why the Internet in China is a separate place. Most US coverage talks about China’s censorship, in particular the “Great Firewall” that blocks politically sensitive topics (like Gu). Censorship is absolutely part of the Chinese Internet and is deplorable. But I think most of the division is simple language and cultural boundaries. A quarter of Web content is in Chinese and Americans never read it; why should we expect Chinese to read English content? There’s also a healthy dose of trade protectionism: China is explicitly trying to develop its own Internet industry to be independent of the US. Maybe we should start cloning some of the Chinese innovations.

I feel pretty lost without my iPhone, doubly so when traveling. Here’s some of the iPhone apps I found useful on a recent trip to France. Many of these apps cache data on the phone, both to save on roaming charges and for responsiveness.

MapsWithMe ($0): street maps. Caches vector data from OpenStreetMap and then renders maps on the phone. I used to use OffMaps but their raster tile approach just takes up too much space. With MapsWithMe I could download super-detailed maps for all of France with no sweat.

Navigon ($20 – $100): turn-by-turn driving directions. No need for a standalone GPS, the voice prompting and routing is good enough to drive all over France and Norway. Shop carefully to avoid their random pricing; right now it’s $65 for all of Europe, or $90 for just France. TomTom is a strong competitor. Bring a car charger.

Wiki Offline ($10) and AllOfWiki ($10): cached copies of Wikipedia. Really great for research. The 5GB data dump is text only and has some formatting issues, but it’s usable. Both apps work well and you only need one; I think I slightly prefer the Wiki Offline UI.

Accio French-English ($5): translation dictionary. There’s better language software out there, Accio is cheap and good enough for quick lookups.

Photogene² ($1): photo editing. Photogene makes it easy to crop, correct exposure, and upload. iPhone 4S photo quality is great and I really like uploading photos on the fly during a trip; I’ve been home 3 weeks and still haven’t gotten to the 200 photos on my “real” camera.

Twitter ($0): social networking. Tweets are the Internet’s postcards. Particularly good with photos. I’m still looking for a way to archive all my tweets into a journal; here’s a Storify view of my trip to France.

Traboules ($1): Lyon sightseeing. Only useful if you’re going to be in Lyon, I’m linking it here because it’s remarkable. The tourist office commissioned an augmented reality iPhone app; you look through the iPhone screen to see the world with overlaid markers for the Traboules, a hidden bit of Lyon.

The GPS antenna is in the top of the camera, above the lens. It's GPS only, no cell or wifi location, so it needs a view of the sky and won't work inside. There's three software GPS modes: entirely off, on when taking photos, or GPS tracking even when the camera is off. A warm start seems to find a position fix in 5–40 seconds. GPS location is written into EXIF tags in the photo and both Lightroom and Flickr understand the GPS format perfectly. There's no dedicated camera display of GPS data although you can see photos' locations in the viewer.

Digging deeper, exiv2 identifies 12 GPS tags in the JPEG and CR2 photo files. GPSVersionID is 2.3.0.0, there's lat/lon, altitude MSL (geoid corrected), timestamp, and minimal GPS status. Unfortunately location accuracy doesn't seem to be logged in the EXIF.

The GPS tracker is a nice bonus feature, I could see it being useful to document a photoshoot (although one wonders about battery life). Tracks are in standard NMEA format as a text file on the SD card. One fix is logged every 65-90 seconds. Each fix is logged both as GPGGA and GPRMC, basic position data. GPGGA includes HDOP and number of satellites and GPRMC includes speed and track. Note that as documented, the camera won't write GPS tracks to an Eye-Fi card but a standard SD card is no problem. Here's a sample log of me walking to lunch, see it mapped here. The track the S100 recorded is roughly accurate but missed logging my actual destination; compare to my AMOD dedicated tracker for the same walk. I'm pleased the S100 was able to log even when in my leather camera case on my belt.

The S100's GPS is a great addition to a great camera. It's not going to replace a serious GPS for navigation or technical measurements. But it's good enough for photos and terrific at making it easy to remember where you took your outdoor pictures.

Resolved: all software that has user data should use Dropbox for its network transport API. I’m about 3/4 serious. Files are the universal datastore for software and Dropbox solves the problem of distributing files between machines. And they have a developer program to make it easy to add Dropbox to products.

I’ve been using an iPhone GPS app to track my walks. They integrate with sites like RunKeeper to upload my data. But they don’t have a convenient way for me to get the track myself, say to import into Google Earth. I have to email it to myself, then download it out of Gmail. I wish the iOS app would just write the track into Dropbox and let me pick it up as a local file.

Many apps have data that fits the Dropbox sync paradigm. My note taking app, for instance, becomes “cloud enabled” by simply storing the notes file Dropbox. People run their own private (or shared) GitHub by storing their git software repos in Dropbox. Want your music to be accessible wherever you are? No need for a special service like iTunes Match or Spotify; just put your MP3 files in Dropbox.

This idea isn’t new: there’s a lot of Dropbox hacks out there and cool services like the Dropbox Automator. But those are all presented as Dropbox addons. I want to turn that upside down, I want Dropbox to be the addon to a bunch of other products I already use.

I floated this idea on Twitter and got some pushback about how Dropbox wasn’t good enough, or not private enough, or had some other flaw compared to a custom transport protocol. I agree, it’s not perfect. But Dropbox works remarkably well and is a good match for a lot of products today. If you’re building something that needs a way to share data between machines, consider Dropbox for the transport.

nvALT is good software. Its a simple note taking app, a fork of Notational Velocity. The key thing is it is very simple. You have a bunch of text notes in a bag. You edit one note at a time. Notes can be stored as text files in Dropbox. It autosaves as you type and has a simple navigation search UI. That’s about it.

I’ve tried a bunch of note taking solutions. Either they’re too simple and unstructured (like a simple text file) or they have too many features with a busy UI (like Evernote). nvALT is just about the right level of complexity. I use it mostly to track projects. One note per project, like “blog about nvALT”. Tagged with category (“blog”, “code”) and a numeric priority. I also have a top level Tasks that I prepend the day’s action items to.

nvALT includes a MultiMarkdown formatter with live preview that is useful enough to, say, write blog posts in. What I really wish it had was a simple WYSIWYG editor with HTML output. For some reason there still is no good simple visual editor in the world that spits out clean simple HTML.

Apple’s new system to restrict programs on Macs is interesting. The default in the next version of OS X will only allow programs from the Mac App Store or programs digitally signed by an identified Apple developer. This could be a good feature, if Apple honestly only uses it to stop malware. But history has shown Apple can’t be entirely trusted.

The Mac App Store itself is not enough. App Store apps have to run in a restrictive sandbox. The sandbox isn’t a bad idea for a variety of ordinary iLife-like apps, but anything a little more technical or hooked into the OS is a non-starter. For example both app launcher Alfred and Git/Mercurial client SourceTree can’t operate in the sandbox.

So the ability to run any signed binary is essential. What will Apple’s policy about the signatures be? All the messaging so far has been about preventing malware. That sounds reasonable to me, but it’s going to be a challenge for Apple to make work. Launching an app the first time will require an online signature verification. Canceling a bad certificate will require some sort of revocation mechanism (something web browsers still can’t make work). And Apple has to administer the program, block spammers registering millions of certificates, deal with support requests from developers. It’s complicated.

The real danger is Apple might decide to use Gatekeeper to restrict what arbitrary apps do on the Mac. They say they won’t do that. Let’s hope not: the history of the iPhone app store with debacles like Google Voice or Camera+ shows Apple can’t be entirely trusted with this power. A power user could always just turn off Gatekeeper, but if it’s on by default there will be very little market for apps that can’t run with it.

The Vantec SATA/IDE to USB adapter is good hardware. It lets you quickly plug a variety of internal drives into a computer via USB. Great for rescuing data off of an old disk or from a dead computer. It supports SATA and IDE in a variety of form factors and includes a power connector.

There’s nothing special about this Vantec adapter; Amazon has hundreds of similar adapters for $5–$30. The cheapest ones have lousy power supplies that can fry a hard drive, the Vantec one seemed to have better reviews. If I were needing an adapter a lot I’d buy one that supports USB 3.0.

I recently switched to a new way to remove the underlines from hyperlinks in Google Chrome; modify the default stylesheet to not have them. Chrome’s user style support is still a little confusing to me, so I use the Stylebot extension to let me add styles and put this in the global stylesheet:

:link, :visited {
    text-decoration: none;
}
:link:hover, :visited:hover {
    text-decoration: underline;
}

By default links won’t have underlines. Sites can still explicitly add underlines. The second stanza adds underlines when you mouse over links. I kind of like that, but I’m on the fence. Tip o’ the hat to Steve Hollasch for the CSS.

Why doesn’t Chrome have the option to remove underlines? Back when it first launched, Chrome had a design philosophy of having a very simple UI with very few options built in, everything to be added by extensions. Feature creep means Chrome now has a confusing panoply of options, but still no underline choice. I used to use the Hyperlink Underline Remover extension but it caused bugs with a few sites.