Shredding Fail

A few years ago I blogged about the importance of using a good paper shredder. A crappy shredder is just (bad) security through obscurity, and easily leaks all kinds of info. So I was delighted and horrified to find this package show up in the mail, using shreds as packing protection for the item I had ordered.

 

30 seconds of searching turned up a number of interesting bits (plus a few more with full names which I have kindly omitted):

Let’s count a few of the obvious mistakes here:

1. Using a cheap, damaged, or simply overloaded shredder that doesn’t even fully cut the paper. I got an inch-wide swath of two pages for free.
2. Not using a cross-cut shredder. (In part, there is a mix of both types.)
3. Shredding in the direction of the printed text.
4. Sending the poorly-shredded output to a random person who bought something from your business.

And of course it would have been better security to use a microcut shredder.

Now, to be fair, even this poor shredding has technically done its job. Other than a few alluring snippets, it’s not worth my time to assemble the rest to see the full details of these banking, business, and health care records. But then I’m a nice guy who isn’t interested in committing fraud or identity theft, which is an unreasonable risk to assume of every customer.

Satellite Radio

In my last blog post, I wrote about how I helped fund the launch of a satellite via KickStarter, and that after launch I would have more to say about receiving radio signals from it. This is that update.

The good news is that SpaceX’s Falcon 9 finally launched last Friday. It’s had two delays since the originally scheduled date of March 30th. No big deal, it happens. Here’s the launch video, showing liftoff, onboard rocketcam, staging, and separation of the Dragon cargo capsule: (YouTube)

This is the CRS-3 flight — the 3rd  Commercial Resupply Service flight hauling cargo to the International Space Station. With the retirement of the Space Shuttle, CRS flights are the only US vehicles going to ISS, although other countries have their own capabilities. This is also the first flight where SpaceX has successfully flown the first stage back to Earth for a landing (albeit in the ocean, for safety, as it’s still experimental). Usually rockets like this are expendable – they just reenter the atmosphere and burn up. But SpaceX plans to fly them back to reuse the hardware and enable lower costs. It’s a pretty stunning concept. There’s no video of CRS-3’s Falcon 9 returning (yet?), just two tweets confirming it was successful. But it just so happens they did a test flight last week that demonstrates the idea: (YouTube)

So back to to satellite I funded: KickSat. The “carrier” was successfully deployed, and the first telemetry packets have been received and decoded. In a couple of weeks (May 4th) it will deploy its 104 “Sprite” nanosatellites, which will each start broadcasting their own unique signals. Things are off to a great start!

The slightly bad news is that I haven’t been completely successful in capturing Kicksat broadcasts with my own ground equipment. Yet.

It’s challenging for a few reasons…

The biggest factor is that the signals are inherently just not very strong, due to power limitations. The KickSat carrier is a 3U cubesat, with limited area for solar-cells. It periodically broadcasts a brief telemetry packet with a 1-watt radio, which is what I’m trying to capture.

And of course the Sprites it carries are even smaller, and will only be transmitting with a mere 10mW of power. The silver area in the Sprite I’m holding below is where the solar cell goes. (It turns out that satellite-grade solar cells are export-restricted under US law, so the sample units shipped without ’em!)

Such faint signals need some modestly specialized (but still off-the-shelf) equipment to enable reception. I’ve got a yagi antenna and low-noise amplifier, as recommended on the KickSat wiki. Successfully making use of it is a little tricky, though. You need to use orbit tracking tools (e.g. gpredict or via Heavens Above) to know when a satellite pass will occur, and where in the local sky its path will be. Yagis are directional, and thus need to be pointed (at least roughly) to the right place. Not every pass is directly overhead, and if it’s too low on the horizon it may be too hard to receive (due to strength or interference).

Additionally, KickSat only broadcasts a short packet once every 30 or 250 seconds (depending on what mode it’s in), and during a pass it’s only above the horizon for a few minutes. That makes for a rather ephemeral indication that it’s even there. Blink and it’s gone! My location has about 4 pass opportunities a day, but not all are useful.

Oh, and did I mention I’m doing this all with a cheap $20 RTL2832U software defined radio?! Heck, the coax cables connecting my dongle to the antenna cost more than the radio itself!

I decided to start off by first trying to catch signals from some other satellites. I went through AMSAT’s status page and DK3WN’s fantastic satellite blog and gathered a list of a couple dozen satellites known to be active on the same 70cm (~435Mhz) band KickSat is using.

My first success was HO-68 (aka Hope Oscar 68 aka XW-1). This is a Chinese satellite launched in 2009, broadcasting a fairly constant 200mW telemetry “beacon” in morse code. Picking out the dotted line in the GQRX waterfall display was pretty easy, even though it’s not exactly on the expected 435.790Mhz frequency due to inaccuracies in my radio and doppler shift(!).

This is what it sounds like: WAV | OGG. Why is the tone shifting? The gradual lowering is doppler shift. The abrupt jumps upward are just from me adjusting the radio tuning to keep it audible. My morse code skills are terrible, but I replayed it enough times to convince myself that it starts out with the expected “BJ1SA XW XW” (the radio sign and initials of its name), per the page describing the signal format. For the lazy, that’s – . . . / . – – – / . – – – – / . . . / . – / – . . – / . – – / – . . – / . – – in morse code.

Next up was FO-29.

Here’s a screengrab of gpredict, showing the predicted path low in the sky, from the southeast to north.

It’s got a stronger 1-watt beacon, which wasn’t too hard to spot. Here I’ve switched from GQRX on OS X to SDRSharp on Windows. It has more features, plugins, and makes it easy to zoom in on a signal. The signal with doppler-shift is readily apparent as a diagonal line.

Audio of FO-29’s beacon: WAV | OGG. Despite the stronger transmitter, the received signal is weaker (probably due to being low on the horizon), and the the morse code is sufficiently fast that I’m not able to decode it by ear. (There’s an app for automatic decoding, but I haven’t tried it yet.)

And lastly… *drumroll*… After a number of unsuccessful attempts to receive KickSat’s signal, I finally caught it today! There was a nearly-overhead pass in the afternoon, so the as-received signal strength was optimal.

I pointed my antenna upwards, tilted it to my clear northeast view, tuned SDRSharp to the 437.505 MHz KickSat frequency, and waited. This is one of the usecases where software radio is really useful… While waiting, I was was recording the entire raw ~2Mhz slice of bandwidth around that frequency. That’s 4.5GB for the 7 minutes I was recording. I actually missed the transmission the first time, as it’s indicated about 23kHz lower than expected (again, due to hardware inaccuracies and doppler shift). But no big deal, I just replayed the recorded data and fine tuned things to the right spot.

Here’s what it sounds like: WAV | OGG. Unlike the steady stream of analog dit-dahs from HO-68 and FO-29, this is just 2 seconds of digital “noise”, like you would hear from a dialup modem. In fact, it’s exactly what you’d hear from an old modem. KickSat is using the 1200bps AFSK-modulated format, which is apparently still widely used in amateur packet radio. There are decoders available to extract the digital data (GQRX has one built in, and SDRSharp output can be piped to the qtmm AFSK1200 decoder).

If you’ve got SDRSharp, here’s the raw IQ data for the packet (ZIP, 60.3MB). I cropped the data to just the relevant portion. Alas, I can’t seem to get the decoder to recognize the packet. 😦 I’m not quite sure what the problem is yet… I’ve successfully decoded other AFSK data with this setup, so I suspect my signal was just too weak/noisy. Could be poor antenna pointing, but this was an easy pass. Some folks have had success with improving SNR with shielding, but I haven’t been able to replicate their results. There are a number of knobs and dials in SDRSharp to adjust manual/automatic gain control, so I might need to tweak that. (Unfortunately difficult, as there are only a few brief chances a day to catch KickSat.) It’s also possible that this is just slightly beyond the capabilities of a $20 RTL2832U dongle. Other options exist. I’d love to get a HackRF SDR board, but they’re not available yet. The FUNcube Dongle Pro+ can be had for about $200, but from comparisons I’m not sure exactly how much better it is in this band, or if it’s worth it. I’d love to hear opinions from hams who know this stuff better, or have tried both!

Amusing aside: while poking around in the 70cm band for interesting things, I stumbled across Santa Clara County’s ARES/RACES packet radio BBS. (Apparently, Ted, that is indeed still a thing!) In fact, FO-29 is actually an orbiting BBS! It’s quaintly amusing in the Internet Age, but when it launched in 1990 it must have been amazing. I had just upgraded to a 2400bps modem and discovered FidoNet and UUCP to reach beyond the local area code BBS systems.

That’s it for now. Over the next few weeks I’ll be refining my equipment and skills, and hope to capture some solid transmissions by the time my Sprite deploys. That will be even tougher to catch, but it’s a fun challenge!

PoV Firefox

A nice project by Antonio Ospite:

It’s a device made of a programmable LED strip attached to a jump rope, which can be used with high exposure photography for Light Painting. The principle behind it is the same as those cool POV (Persistence of vision) displays.

Very cool!

(via Hack A Day)

Hacks all the way down

So, I did this thing… It’s a little complicated to explain, but bear with me: I used a Software Defined Radio to capture the radio transmissions from a Bravo Ph esophageal monitor, wrote a browser-based decoder using the AudioData API, and reverse-engineered the broadcast data packets. As a bonus, I hope to do something similar to catch signals from a tiny satellite I helped fund on Kickstarter, which launches this weekend on SpaceX’s CRS-3 mission to the International Space Station.

Phew. Ok, now let’s break that down. 🙂

Software Defined Radio

Software Defined Radio (SDR) is central to all of this. It’s a pretty complex field — and I am by no means an expert — but the simplified basics are not hard to understand. Traditionally, a radio is built for a specific purpose with specific hardware. It’s effectively a black box customized to convert audio/video/data to or from a particular pattern of electromagnetic radiation in some particular part of the spectrum. Each box is different; you need one for satellite TV, one for FM radio, one for WiFi, one for GPS, and so on. There are myriad variations, and devices that might seem similar can actually be completely different. You’ve probably seen news reports about police and fire departments who are responding to the same disaster, but are literally unable to talk to each other because their radio systems are different.

SDR is a radical departure from all that. You still need a piece of hardware that can tune to a relevant slice of the radio spectrum, but it becomes a general-purpose device that relies on software to do all the application-specific bits. For example, you might ask such a device to tune to 66Mhz, and capture 3Mhz of bandwidth on either side. You then feed the result to a software NTSC decoder, et voilà, you’re watching TV (analog channel 4). The hardware doesn’t know anything about the contents of what it’s receiving, since it’s the software that deals with it. If your device can capture more bandwidth, you could even watch multiple channels at the same time. And since it’s just generic data being processed by software, it doesn’t need to happen in real-time. You can record a stream of RF data, and process it in different ways after the fact.

Until recently, SDR was only possible with fairly expensive equipment, which made it a niche hobby. But in the 2010-2012 timeframe, some folks discovered that a cheap USB device intended for digital TV reception (“watch TV on your laptop!”) contained surprisingly capable hardware that could be repurposed as a general-purpose SDR. Specifically, the RTL2832U chipset and a variety of tuner chips. For $10 to $20 you could get one of these mass-produced dongles that, with the right software, let you receive and decode all kinds of interesting transmissions from roughly 50Mhz to 1800Mhz.

Here are just a few of the things possible:

• Most obviously, listen to voice broadcasts: AM/FM, shortwave, air traffic control, police/fire dispatch, etc.
• Monitor aircraft traffic (position, speed, ID) in realtime by decoding ADS-B signals. Help crowdsource global coverage on flightradar24.com, or generate your own maps/tracking locally. Ditto for large ships and weather balloons.
• Decode location data broadcast by a news helicopter during a police chase.
• Display the latest weather images directly from NOAA satellites
• Listen to spacewalks on the International Space Station, or ham packet data bounced off the ISS’s repeater.
• Determine your position via GPS.
• Basic radio astronomy.
• Read your wireless electric meter or control a ceiling fan.
• Play with new Bluetooth LE beacons
• Listen through another laptop’s microphone — even when it’s off!
• Crack poorly-encrypted GSM cellphone conversations (N.B., this is probably illegal!). Part 1, 2, 3, 4.
• Monitor and reprogram a pacemaker. (N.B., homicide is quite illegal!)
• Oh, and of course you can use these DVB-T dongles for their intended purpose: to watch broadcast digital television. (Still stuck with analog TV? No worries, they can just barely decode that too.)

There’s a whole world of analog and digital RF data being broadcast around us, which cheap Software Defined Radio hardware makes readily accessible.

The Bravo Ph system

Around the time I was starting to play with SDR, I had gone to my doctor because I was experiencing some of the symptoms of acid-reflux. Or, as it’s more formally known, gastroesophageal reflux disease: GERD. [Spoiler: no big deal, weightloss + antacid and I’m all good.] One of the steps in the diagnosis is monitoring the acidity level in your esophagus over time. This used to involve inserting a  tube into your nose and throat, leaving it there for a few days of measurement, and was generally quite unpleasant. Now they can just attach a tiny wireless sensor in you; it sticks there for about a week, and then gets eliminated naturally. It’s only a couple centimeters in size, and you don’t even notice it:

During the monitoring period, you carry around a receiver (which basically looks like a giant 1990-era pager). It’s supposed to be kept within 3 feet of you at all times, or else it makes an annoying beep when it loses the sensor’s signal. It records pH measurements every few seconds, and conveniently displays the last reading.

When the study is over, you return the receiver, your doctor downloads the data, and you get a nice little report with graphs and numbers to help your doctor make a diagnosis.

Capturing Data

So that’s SDR and Bravo Ph. Now, if you’re connecting the obvious dots like I was, you’re wondering if it might be possible to snoop on the sensor’s broadcasts to see what they contain. Indeed it is!

But the first step is finding the signal.

I wasn’t really sure where to start, but some Googling turned up a User’s Guide (doctor’s guide, really) for the system, and buried in an appendix was the info I needed:

Output & Transmission
EIRP: 17.6 μW (-47.53 dBm) at a 3-meter distance
Format: Amplitude-shift keying
Frequency: 433.92 MHz
Rate: 60 ms every 12 seconds

Bingo! All I needed to do was tune my dongle to around 433.92MHz, and look for a bursty signal repeating about every 12 seconds. It was literally as simple as that — here’s a waterfall display from the GQRX app I was using, showing two transmissions (time is the vertical axis, frequency is the horizontal):

And here’s what it sounds like as AM-demodulated audio: MP3 | WAV (Sorry, WordPress doesn’t seem to support inline HTML5 audio.)

Decoding Data

Ok, so now we get signal. But what’s in it? The brief bursts are obviously too fast for our meaty ears to discern meaning, so looking at the waveform in an audio editor was the easiest way to take a first look. I used Audacity on OS X:

Ah, there it is. Digital data. There are clear hi/lo levels, but what’s actually important is the length of the pulses. After examining a few more transmissions, the basic format of the data packet is apparent:

1. A preamble consisting of 10 500μs hi pulses (each separated by 500μs lo). This likely serves as a clear “beginning of message” indicator, and to establish clock speed.
2. 48 bits (6 bytes) of data. Each bit is 1 millisecond; with a “0” indicated by 250μs hi followed by 750μs lo, and a “1” indicated by 666μs hi followed by 333μs lo.
3. A single 500μs hi stop bit.

(Note that I’m slightly rounding the timings to what would seem to be likely values. The actual data is imprecise due to noise and rising/falling edges, on the order of tens-of-microseconds.)

I decoded a few packets by hand, both for fun and to validate the format. But it quickly became tiring to scribble down data like “pppppppppp111110111111101000000100110100011101000001100101s” and then convert it to hex (fbfa04d1d065), so I decided to write a tool to do it. In the browser, of course!

At the time, Firefox supported a simple low-level Audio API that was exactly what I was looking for. In a nutshell, you add a MozAudioAvailable event listener to an <audio> element, and the listener periodically gets an array of sample data as the media plays. I implemented a simple state machine to decode the data, based on a manually set threshold between the hi/lo states (and some fudge-factors to deal with the imprecision/noise previously noted). I’m sure there are more elegant and automatic ways to do this, but simple brute force was enough for my limited needs. The one annoying downside is that this API can only process in real-time(!); there’s no way to ignore playback speed and just get all the data as fast as possible. If you’d like to play around with it, here’s a live demo and the source on Github. (*cough* I’ve been so slow in finishing this post, that the Audio API I’m using has been removed from Firefox 28, in favor of the newer Web Audio API. So you’ll need an older Firefox, or just gaze upon the following screenshot.)

Ok, so now I’ve got a bunch of decoded data values to examine, such as:

fbfa04b4b79b
fbfa04b4a9a9
fbfa049b80eb
fbfa04857a07
fbfa04858af7
fbfa048483ff

What do they mean?

The first 3 bytes (0xFBFA04) are always the same, so that’s presumably a serial number or unique ID (and the manual confirms that during setup, there’s a step to ensure that the receiver is getting the expected sensor ID).

The next two bytes must be the actual pH measurements. They are usually similar to each other, and by graphing the values I can see they follow the trend of the pH values reported on the receiver (which I was writing down when capturing the transmissions). Why two values? The manual says that a measurement is made every 6 seconds but a transmission only every 12, which I assume is done to save power. The pH is roughly obtained by dividing the byte’s value by 25 — but it looks like it’s somewhat non-linear or uncalibrated, as data for the lowest pH values needs to instead be divided by 30 to match what the receiver reports.

The last byte took a bit more effort to figure out. At first glance it appeared fairly random, so I assumed it was some kind of checksum. Validating medical data seems important, after all. Probably something simple to compute for an 8-bit microcontroller, so no fancy FEC or CRC magic… I fiddled around with a few guesses, but graphing the data led me to the answer:

The checksum value (green) looks like a stretched, inverted, and offset version of the average pH (yellow). How about (pH1 + pH2) ^ 0xFF + 7? (All modulo-255, since this is likely an 8-bit microcontroller.) That’s it! It correctly generates the observed checksum for each of the 144 packets I captured.

So with that, I’m able to decode, interpret, and validate the data packets. Neat. It’s not directly useful for anything, but made for a fun experiment.

Afterwards, I got to wondering if there might be some further technical details buried somewhere online to help explain or confirm what I found. I’ve seen patents and FCC filings used to glean data in other cases, so I went to look…

Patent US6689056 has a number of interesting tidbits. It indicates that the microcontroller in the sensor is probably a MicroChip 12C672 (a member of their PIC family, which is similar to the Atmel AVR family familiar to Arduino folks). There’s a basic description of the packet format, but the only detail I hadn’t caught was that the 3-byte header is actually a 2-byte ID and a 1-byte Message Type (I only ever saw one type). It does confirm that the last byte is a checksum, but doesn’t go into how it’s computed.

On the FCC’s website, I found a 4/25/2001 application from Meditronics for the PHZ-BRAVO100, which has a number of close-up photos and an extremely detailed Test Report. It basically confirms what I had found, with additional info on the bit timing and packet format, and also reveals that there is a “transmitter status” message type that’s sent once an hour.

Kicksat

Now let’s shift from inner space to outer space — or at least low Earth orbit. Back in November 2011, a fascinating project appeared on Kickstarter: “KickSat – Your personal spacecraft in space.” Usually satellites are large vehicles that cost millions, but recently this has been made more affordable by using  the small, standardized Cubesat format (a 10cm cube, weighing 1.3kg). KickSat takes this a step further, by packing a Cubesat carrier with tiny “nanosatellites” (3cm square, weighing a few grams). That brings the cost down to just $300 to sponsor a KickSat in orbit, broadcasting a custom callsign and other simple data. They don’t do much, but it helps demonstrate the concept of using a fleet of cheap, simple sensors instead of a single expensive “Cadillac” spacecraft. For example, instead of predicting space weather using reports from a handful of satellites, you might use a huge number of cheap nanosatellites monitoring a wide area.

As a bonafide space nerd, I jumped at the opportunity. And now, after a long wait, KickSat is poised to launch in just a few days (March 30th), onboard the SpaceX CRS-3 resupply flight to the International Space Station. Assuming all goes well, the KickSat CubeSat carrier will be deployed immediately after 2nd stage cutoff. It orbits by itself for 16 days, to ensure wide clearance from the ISS, and then deploys its 104 KickSats. Including mine, which will be broadcasting “MOZFF“. They’ll orbit for a few weeks, and then burn-up as they reenter the atmosphere. (No space junk!)

The project is publishing info about the satellite’s transmissions, as well as info on how to set an inexpensive ground station using… That’s right, software defined radio (GNURadio + RTL2832U dongle). I’ve got my equipment ready, and will attempt to capture signals from KickSat while it’s in orbit. More on that after launch!

Ten year year retrospective

Think back to 10 years ago. February 1st 2003, around 9am (EST) in the morning. Some of you will have this date burned into your memory, but many will not. Do you remember where you were, when you first heard?

I do, and won’t ever forget.

I woke up late that morning. I’d meant to watch the landing live, but getting up early isn’t exactly my favorite thing to do. To be honest, watching a routine touchdown isn’t terribly exciting. Intellectually interesting — oh my yes — but not as primally exciting as the thrill and danger of a launch. Sometimes the cable TV networks would even break away from the usual news drivel to show the first minute or two… The countdown and ignition still caught the public’s attention. The rest of the mission and landing? Not so much.

I loved every minute minute of it.

NASA’s a pretty easy thing for a geek like me to fall in love with (see #5). It wasn’t always easy to keep up with, though. The online streams often got swamped during a Shuttle mission (only a lucky few got NasaTV on their local cable station). If you knew about them, the sci.space.shuttle and sci.space.history groups on Usenet were great for technical tidbits, and even had an early cryptic hint that there might be something wrong with STS-107.

That morning it became tragically obvious as to just how wrong things were.

I slept through Columbia and her seven crew burning up on reentry. I think I’m glad I missed the immediate confusion over what was happening. But instead I got it all in one lump, when I finally started my day by reading the news on Fark.com. It took a moment to sink in — Fark was a unique blend of news and humor, but the “News Flash!” headline I saw was unusually direct and blunt:

“Space shuttle Columbia explodes on re-entry. All on board killed”

Oh… no. No.

Things moved quickly from there. The rough outline of what likely happened was publicly known within days (instead of weeks, as NASA was significantly more open than they were in the Challenger era). An accident investigation board was formed, and held regular sessions to update the public on their progress. A report was generated, leading to a NASA Shuttle program that was reformed but also put on a path to shutdown.

If you’re interested in a technical, engineering and systems view of what happened, there is no better resource than the final report from the Columbia Accident Investigation Board. It’s long but also highly readable. A large one-part PDF of volume 1 is available here.

Another retrospective on the Columbia accident can be found on former flight-director Wayne Hale’s blog. I watched it unfold on the Internet, but he was there.

The 1941 poem High Flight is a surprisingly prescient tribute:

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air….

Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace.
Where never lark, or even eagle flew —
And, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
– Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

Too long for Twitter

“Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital photo filters are a pretty neat idea.”

On analysts and reality

Saturday: “Piper Jaffray Senior Research Analyst, Gene Munster, on Saturday said he believes Apple sold between 600-700 thousand iPads on the first day.”

Monday: “Apple announced this morning that they had sold over 300,000 iPads on the first day.”

Observations from a Comcast outage.

I use a Comcast cable modem at home… I’ve been satisfied with the service; it’s fast enough for my needs and is generally dependable (brief glitches happen once in a while, which quickly fix themselves). However, for the past two days my modem wasn’t able to connect at all, so for the first time I actually had to call Comcast. A few observations on the experience…

* The first thing you hear when calling 1-800-COMCAST is “This is Shaquille O’Neal, and this is Ben Stein… Thank you for calling Comcast” (in their voices). This is a fantastic way to confuse callers, since it sounds like you’ve dialed a wrong number. Why have a celebrity voice on their number at all? I don’t get it.

* While their phone system routes your call to the right department, you get treated to a completely irrelevant advertisement for their telephony service. These kinds of forced ads piss me off to no end. [See also: long-winded offers you’re forced to listen to when activating a new credit card.]

* I was amused that their automated phone service suggested that if I was having problems connecting to the internet, I could get help on their website.

* I dread calling “technical support,” because it usually means wasting time as they run though a standard troubleshooting checklist unrelated to what the actual problem is. To Comcast’s credit, I wasn’t subjected to this and it was an efficient process. The techs were nice, but I wish they had better diagnostic tools — the first two calls resulted in “your cable modem is dead, buy a new one”, and then my “dead” modem started to work the next morning!

* The scripted “I’m sorry you’re having a problem, I can assist you with this issue” phrase techs are required to say sounds really corny when you’ve heard the exact same line on each call. Mix it up a little?

* Dear Apple and AT&T — it’s just days until 20-fucking-10, and I still can’t tether my iPhone to my MacBook for internet access in a pinch? Sheesh.

Image manipulations

Fred and Borris both recently blogged about intelligent image resizing. This previously came up about a year ago, probably when this research video started making the rounds:

It’s cool stuff, although I’m a little doubtful about it working well for general web content. It would be a fun experiment, though!

Also in the news today is this New York Times article (via Neatorama) about an automatic “beautification engine” that modifies images to make the people in them look better.

Would that be interesting in browsers? I suppose some people would find in interesting in some cases (*cough*porn*cough*), but it’s a little scary and creepy to think about the kinds of social and psychological effects that would arise from subtly applying such an algorithm everywhere. (Consider a similar vein: automatically rewriting web pages more cheerful. A news article about panic selling on Wall Street suddenly becomes a doubleplus good story about the great weather, buying opportunities, and fluffy kittens!)

Stupid MobileMe

A month or two ago this stupid little icon showed up on my menu bar. I found it kind of amusing (in a sad kind of way) because it appeared out of the blue, without my having approved anything, and the dropdown menu had a bunch of redundant items that were all variations of “you are not using MobileMe”.

I noticed today that now it’s complaining about sync conflicts. Which is also kind of sad, because I *still* have never used it, and have no idea what those conflicts could be for (turns out they’re for iCal conflicts… but I don’t use iCal any more). It even *says* that I’ve never used it, and that syncing is disabled!

WTF, Apple?!