• 14 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • It doesn’t seem so technically difficult if you can get the transit data. The phone GPS supplies your current location for the bus version, or alternatively you can just identify the most recent stop you saw. San Francisco has around 1000 city buses (I looked that up a while back) and you can put fairly precise coordinates, bus number, and route number of a bus into 4 or 5 bytes. So the complete locations of all the buses is around 20K which is less data than the javascript bloat that nextbus.com sends on every new visit. You do want the route maps (from transit agency) and street maps (openstreetmap) but overall it’s not huge.


  • Another idea I haven’t pursued: something that monitors the movement of local transit (BART trains, and buses) so I can check their ETA’s and locations from a phone browser. There are existing apps and sites for this but they unfortunately suck. They always answer “when will the next bus/train arrive at stop XYZ” which is almost never what I want to know.

    What I want is usually either “I’m on the #123 bus RIGHT NOW and want to get off at XYZ, how many more stops do I wait?”, or else “my friend is on BART and just passed station X. When will she get to station Y where I’m supposed to meet her?”. Anyone implementing anything like that, please take it into account. The transit agencies usually have API’s to get the relevant data.


  • I didn’t implement this because it stopped being needed, but a text to print converter for my hearing impaired and non-techie elderly mom. Basically an email gateway running on VPS so if she got an email or text from a family member, a raspberry pi in her bedroom would immediately print out the message on a receipt printer where she would see it. I was going to use a cheap thermal printer but another family member objected (I guess reasonably) to the toxic crap in thermal paper, so I found someone selling a still affordable impact receipt printer on craigslist. Nothing actually happened with this, but I liked the idea.







  • It says that after he (August Hanning) left his post, he became a consultant, and paid his successor (“Manfred D”) for copies of classified documents. It suggests that he was reselling the documents but I don’t think it established that as a fact. So it’s unclear who the beneficiary of the spying was supposed to be. It will be interesting to see how it plays out. In the past in the US, it’s been customary for ex-presidents and maybe military generals to keep their security clearances after leaving office, and it seems like a good bet that they traded on the information in whatever ways.