OhRyan.ca

My new employer Think Shift is looking to fill 2 full-time positions.

1. A web developer with a bunch of ASP experience. Full posting.

2. Production & Media Coordinator – as far as I understand this is a bit of a crazy hybrid position where you get to tell a bunch of nerds what to do every day. Full posting.

Feel free to hit me on twitter or leave a comment for more info.

In an attempt to revive my blog from the grips of death, I am going to bring back my (short-lived) lunch hour link log.

Here are some things I think you might be interested in:

• Hunch Stats Profile Mac vs. PC People – Hint: Macs really love hummus
• Clever Bike Rack Concept – 10 bikes = 1 car
• You are not a User Experience Designer
• Nokia has a new typeface

It looks like the privacy hippies were finally right about something, your mobile phone really is a pocket sized tracking device.

Turns out that as of iOS 4.0, iPhones have been tracking your physical movements and logging it along with the phone’s backups.

A small team of researchers have discovered these logs in iTune’s backup files, they’ve released a handy little app that collects all the data from your user folder and plots it on a map. iPhoneTracker.app and further information available here.

Here is the visualization of everywhere I’ve been since Sept 28, 2010:

You can see lots of activity in and around Winnipeg (including trips up to the Gimli and Victoria Beach), a flight to Toronto and subsequent travel around southern Ontario and a road trip to Minneapolis. It’s fascinating.

I’m not sure if this is a terrifying privacy hole or a neat little hidden feature. I’m leaning towards neat feature, since the data is stored locally on your computer and can be encrypted automatically by iTunes.

At this point in time a method for disabling the “feature” does not exist. I expect Apple will be responding in short order.

Canadian Tech Roundup posts are moving to their own blog, will no longer be posted here.
Episode 19

This year’s flood season is too be the biggest since 1997. Back then the Internet wasn’t really the internet as we know it. This year I’ve come across a few flood resources online.

MBFloods.ca is a resource for crowd-sourced flood data. Background info is on Ushahidi.com.

MTS has a few webcams setup around the province, The Winnipeg Free Press plotted them on a google map.

Look at all the water!