Scraplab

A handful of people have asked me what happens to the images that Satellite Eyes produces, and how to get hold of them.

There's nothing particularly magic going on: they're just normal files on your disk, and the recent ones are kept around to make sure they're quick to load the next time you need them.

They're stored in ~/Library/Application Support/Satellite Eyes (the ~ is your home directory). They're PNG images, called odd things like map-f41aa9f2abf22c9d9f54f0e1a5775fc0.png. (The alphanumeric name is used to indicate which file references which map image. It's an MD5 sum of map style, corner coordinates, image effect and zoom level.)

To prevent them filling up your disk, only the last 20 are kept, and anything older is cleaned out when the application starts up. If you want Satellite Eyes to never clean out old images, you can change cleanCache to NO by running the following in Terminal:

defaults write ~/Library/Preferences/uk.co.tomtaylor.SatelliteEyes cleanCache -bool NO

Beware, they will fill your disk up eventually!

The other day I spotted a superb little IFTTT recipe which will automatically upload all the new images to a Tumblr, by passing them through a Dropbox account.

To do this you need to move the Satellite Eyes directory in ~/Library/Application Support into your Dropbox folder, and then redirect Satellite Eyes there using a symlink. The recipe notes have slightly mangled formatting, so here's what you need to run:

mv "~/Library/Application Support/Satellite Eyes" "~/Dropbox/Public/" && ln -s "~/Dropbox/Public/Satellite Eyes" "~/Library/Application Support/Satellite Eyes"

Activate the recipe, and voila, they should be automatically uploaded as soon as IFTTT processes them.

Incidentally, any of the Stamen map styles, including the one everyone loves: Watercolor, can be quickly turned into big downloadable images using their brand new Map → Image service.

Nice.

One of the things I've been enjoying the most about the Olympics and Paralympics are the live streams put out by the Olympic Broadcasting Service, on digital TV and online.

The pacing is wonderful, without the pressure to fill every second with action. A few minutes of sport; some cheering; a minute or two of stadium murmur and shuffling; a few minutes of medal ceremonies: proud athletes, whatever that synthey Olympic background music is, a national anthem; then more shuffling, this time with a distant entertainer buoying the crowd; a bit more sport; repeat.

The commentary is light, and only when there's actually something to comment on. In between the action the video is slow, with wide panning shots of the venues, and the audio soft, distant, ambient.

To me it feels less like broadcast television, and more like inviting a bit of the stadium, velodrome or aquatic centre into your life for a few hours. Sports Hurtigruten.

They're places full of buzz and excitement, but I think I'd like to watch and listen to something more mundane, but equally interesting (to me): the road I grew up on, the Bristol to Bath cycle route, Denham airfield, or the A431.

One of the things I remember doing online with any quasi-regularity was watching the Hawaii Traffic Cameras online. It was just astounding to me. It's on the other side of the world! It's midnight there! The roads are so wide! I think it made me realise all the trivial things the web made possible, and the massive interconnectedness of it all. It seemed important at the time anyway.

Russell wrote something (I can't find it, sorry) a while back about turning CCTV into something a bit less weird. I'm probably not remembering this right, but he wondered what it'd be like if there was a mechanism for the camera operator to not just watch, but to communicate back. Maybe you could ask the CCTV operators to keep score in a game of football, or to keep an eye on your bike.

That's fun, and a nice way to rebalance to odd power relationship around CCTV, but I'd like to suggest something else. I'd make it a law that all CCTV cameras pointing at a public place must have a publicly accessible live stream available online.

For a start, it'd be a amazing resource to build useful things with. Quite astounding — but that's another post. But also it'd make it possible to invite a million street corners, parks, libraries, roads, railway stations into your life for a little while.

I'll concede that could seem weird, but I don't want it to be like a vigilante or reality TV thing. I'd like it to be more like staring out of a cafe window: a thing to think at, something to unfocus on.

Like the Goodyear blimp circling over our house, I'm going to miss these live streams when it's over.

There was a warehouse here. It was shared with a troupe of acrobats. There was a massive shoe. You could row to Tesco. It’s a little thing, but it seems so significant.

I’ve just released a little Mac app I’ve been working on for a while. It’s called Satellite Eyes. It’s pretty simple. It just sits in your menu tray, and changes your desktop wallpaper to the satellite image or map view from overhead.

There’s a proper little site for it and everything.

It’s taken much longer than expected. I tried to put it into the Mac App Store, but frankly I got bored and gave up.

The app was rejected for using personal data without consent or option. Apparently they meant that because it requires Location Services, and it quits if it isn’t granted access, that that might confuse people. I disputed that, but them’s the rules.

I might have done something about that, such as adding a demo mode, or something similar, but Location Services is broken in the sandbox in 10.7.x (acknowledged by Apple in my bug report), and the Mac App Store now requires all apps to be sandboxed.

I could’ve waited for 10.8, or maybe a patch release for 10.7, but I’ve got enough unreleased projects making me feel guilty.

So, anyway, here it is. Enjoy!

We cycled from London to Rye last Saturday. Perfect weather, roads and company.

We navigated by following a long piece of red string, and I tied a balloon with a camera to the back of my bike to record our adventure. It turned out something like this:

In September, F and I cycled from Land's End to John O'Groats, from tip to tip of the UK. And I've been trying to write about it ever since. It felt like something I should write about.

I think one of the reasons why I've found it hard to find the words is that it seems so far removed from everything that happened before and after. There's no narrative that leads in and out of the story. We said we'd do it, we planned it a bit, and then one day we got a train down to Cornwall and disappeared into a bubble for three weeks.

It didn't seem particularly real to me, looking east from Land's End in the lashing rain, thinking that we would now cycle to the other end of the country, and that I shouldn't freak out about this. I almost did.

And it didn't seem particularly real to me when we arrived in John O'Groats, with the light failing. As I looked out over the North Sea I could only wonder if there was anywhere else left to go. There wasn't; we'd done all 987 miles. That didn't seem right.

Then, the other day I watched this video by the director Seamus Murphy, for PJ Harvey. The short vignettes of British life reminded me of the things we spotted from our saddles. The detail and closeness of the footage reminded me of glancing through people's front windows, listening to their chatter and watching their fields. It reminded me of rolling through towns and villages as close, passive, and silent observers of British life.

It's a good song, I think, and I watched the video all the way through, before I realised what it was I felt looking out over the North Sea, shortly before we found the whisky.

I was proud, yes; proud we didn't give up; proud we kept each other going. But also something I've never really felt before: I was proud of this country. And I think that's something not many British people ever really let themselves feel.

We went to visit one of our printers today. They don't just print newspapers, they also print things like this:

It's a book of Admiralty Chart Correction Tracings. It contains a compilation of changes to marine navigation maps, published by the UK Hydrographic Office.

Ships will subscribe to the service through a third party, and receive the latest copy of the book when they dock at port. They tear out each page, and apply the relevant changes to their paper maps with a pencil and transfer paper. They're paper map diffs, if you like.

I love it. For a start, you can print on tracing paper - who knew? And it made me wonder if all of the maps that the UK Hydrographic Office maintain are entirely hand-drawn, or if only the changes are done by hand. And if they use paper as the primary workflow, how they store the changes so they can extract the appropriate patches for printing, at the same time as maintaining a master copy. Maybe someone out there knows.

The kind of processes and expertise that build up inside an organisation, over a long period of time, for managing a workflow like this, seem complex and fascinating.

And ignoring all of that, it's just a gorgeous book to pore over.

In case you missed it, a Firefox extension was released a couple of days ago called FireSheep. It's basically a simple, easy to use UI around a packet sniffer, allowing any user on an open wireless network to listen for authenticated HTTP requests from other users on that network, and use those to pose as them.

It uses an old technique, dating back to token ring or unswitched ethernet networks, when all packets passed through every node on the network, making it easy to grab them, but now it's a one-click install for anyone with a browser, specifically targeted at major social networking sites, and hijacking those connections seamlessly.

The author, Eric Butler, says:

Websites have a responsibility to protect the people who depend on their services. They've been ignoring this responsibility for too long, and it's time for everyone to demand a more secure web. My hope is that Firesheep will help the users win.

Eric isn't wrong. If all authenticated requests on the web used SSL, it would make packet sniffing and sidejacking impossible. In that sense, he's right.

But security is hard. Finding the balance between inconvenience and security is tricky. Facebook (to use an example) could issue card readers or fingerprint scanners, but they don't, because they figure that it would annoy their customers and the cost would be too high, relative to the potential risk.

The unspoken message is that your Facebook account is both not too important, nor too easy a target to require SSL for everything. Your bank considers your account to be at the other end of the scale - they use SSL, amongst other things, because it's an obvious target with a lot to lose if compromised.

But FireSheep has just changed the game. Your Facebook account is now a very easy target by any kid in your class at school. The relative easy of compromise means that it's a target, despite its relative unimportance.

(Side note: I wonder how prevalent FireSheep is at schools and universities at the moment.)

Given that this tool has received the attention it has, Facebook probably should make SSL mandatory, and I wouldn't be surprised if they did in the next couple of months (remember: it's harder than flicking a switch when you're at their scale).

Security isn't binary. Everything is insecure in some way, given enough effort.

What happens when the next tool comes out? Perhaps it pretends to be an access point of a similar name, or runs a rogue DHCP server on the same access point. It spoofs the DNS, and uses a self-certified SSL certificate (which most people will bypass) to proxy Facebook and the rest. I could probably write that in a long weekend, and have a post on Techcrunch on Monday.

And then maybe there will be some fuss, and eventually it'll die down, and maybe someone else will write another tool, using more advanced techniques (PDF).

Of course, forcing SSL doesn't add much inconvenience to users, nor is it a significant operations overhead for the services at risk, it's just that it's not the point here. The point is that making one-click tools that force the entire web to play catchup, whilst putting people at risk, just isn't a sensible way of talking about security.

There's a reason we (most of us, anyway) don't secure our houses with turret guns and dogs, and that's because most of the time, a lock and key is good enough. We want just enough security to feel safe at night, and not to cause us too much hassle.

And that's why this tool makes me sad. Because it's a symbol of an arms race - a fight to the death over unimportant things, when really, I'd rather not have to remember to lock my windows at night.