Marc’s Musings and Random Rants

Due to the decent weather I decided to go for a walk this morning. See if you can spot the unintentional mistake!

Stats

• Distance: 20.85 km / 12.92 mi
• Journey Time: 3h 31m 7s
• Altitude (m): min 111 max 153 tot 42

View in Google Earth

To save battery power on my HTC Desire last night I turned off GPS and WiFi whilst on my way to a mate’s birthday. The bus route I was taking was fairly unfamiliar to me so I was tracking the progress using Google Maps for Mobile. I noticed something rather odd: the light blue ‘accuracy’ circle around the ‘My Location‘ blob was a lot larger to what I was used to seeing. It also seemed to update a lot less frequently than I was used to.

Odd, I thought, as I believed that Google used network cell strength to obtain the location through triangulation. Surely the area of Leeds I was travelling to wasn’t in any more of a network blackspot than anywhere else in the city? Then I remembered reading on Friday about Google’s admission on capturing SSID information (and “accidentally” payload data too) from their Street View cars.

I turned WiFi on. Sure enough, within a couple of minutes the ‘My Location’ accuracy circle had shrunk right down around the central blob. Google was using both network cell strength and the physical location of visible WiFi routers in the residential area to find out where I was.So that must have been the reason why they captured all of that information from their “experimental WiFi project”. Impressive stuff.

I’ll let them off, but I don’t think the German DPA will give in so easily.

Version 1.2 of the rather smart WordPress app was launched yesterday on Android. All I need to do now is upgrade the blog with the geolocation plugin…

Download

Posted from Leeds, England, United Kingdom.

Sometimes I feel like time has opened up and various items of pop culture have been slotted in with me being the only one who has noticed.

For example, where did that awful Journey song come from? The first time I heard it was on an episode of Family Guy a few years back and the next thing you know everyone is singing along and there is no escape.

It is like someone from the future has gone back in time, inserted this racket and then gone back to their own time to reap the rewards. Or just annoy me. Then again, surely a time traveller would buy a lottery ticket, or would that be too suspicious?

I realised this morning that the bands/artists I hate the most seem to begin with a ‘K’. Is this some kind of conspiracy?

• Killers
• Keane
• Kaiser Chiefs
• KT (aka Ugly) Tunstall
• Kylie Minogue