I was fortunate enough to be able to have the week between Christmas and New Year off work, and I dedicated the entire week to nerdly persuits. I sense a new tradition coming on! One of the things I did this week was start playing Dungeons and Dragons, which sparked off a thought about how I play games.

There are two reasons why I play games. Only two, and almost by definition they’re mutually exclusive:

1. Because the game is a fun, normally multiplayer, pick-up-and go action/platformer.
2. Because the game has an involving storyline I can engross myself in.

Part of my personality is that I get way too attached to characters in a good story, especially in films and TV shows. Up? Cried. Twice. At the start. That episode of Bones when Brennan and Booth finally tell each other how they feel, but decide to keep apart because they work together? Floods of tears.

This invariably moves over to video games, when the story is good. Unfortunately, video game writing is, as a rule, pretty bad - I have a pile of games that I’ve started playing and left after a couple of hours as the storyline simply hasn’t drawn me in at all. A couple of notable exceptions in my mind are Blizzard and Rockstar.

Major Spoilers for the endings of Red Dead Redemption and World of Warcraft: Cataclysm Ahead! You can safely skip these if you don’t want the stories of these games spoiled without missing the main point of this post.

The key, in games, is to get the buildup right. Red Dead Redemption does this very well - the entire storyline is about the main character chasing down an outlaw for the Feds in order to be reunited with his family. In the mission where you finally corner the outlaw and are closing in, the music slowly ramps up in intensity as you ascend the hill towards him. When he’s finally down, you’re free - the Feds let you go, and you spend the next few minutes riding your horse through a sunset-lit forest towards your family as a perfect song plays in the background. It’s such a wonderful moment, and since I got far too attached to this guy I was once again in floods of tears as I get reunited with my family and play through a few missions getting back into the swing of normal life.

Then? The Feds betray you. A bit cliché, to be honest, but I guess it’s time to take them down too. Then? BAM. You’re dead. I was so shocked by this that I missed half of the cutscene afterwards, scrabbling around on Google to confirm that the main character just got killed. I mean, they never kill off the main character!

When the game finally ends, I feel kinda hollow. I’ve spent so long with this character, reuniting him with his family, and it was all for nothing? Should I feel betrayed by Rockstar for doing this? I dunno, but it’s damn good storytelling.

Blizzard are another company who can tell an excellent story, and in the case of World of Warcraft, the story is even optional. The buildup to Cataclysm’s ending has been literally a year in the making, and a great example of the optional story. If you don’t care about story, you get:

• Dragon burns down your capital city, tears up the world, kills your friends.
• Dragon spends a year or so taunting you while you take down his cronies.
• You finally kill Dragon. Hooray!

… and the whole thing is thoroughly enjoyable. If you do care about story, though, there’s a huge, deep, subplot involving the dragon forming a cult to infiltrate the upper powers of the land, twisting them to his will.

End Spoilers!

You Play World of Warcraft?!

The interesting thing about enjoying the story in video games is that a lot of people see them as children’s toys or nerd obsessions. It’s completely normal to sit and read about adventures in a fantasy world in a book, but from a game? I actually find that older generations can understand it better than younger generations who grew up in schools where computers were using by “the nerdy kids” while they ran around kicking balls around feeling all masculine.

This mentality is even present in my place of work, which is kinda surprising since I work at a tech company with a very high level of tech-savvy people. We were eating lunch one day when I was discussing Dungeons and Dragons with a friend. I’ve never played it, but I’d love to try, and my friend was the same. Someone else on the table whom I’d never met before cried “Dungeons and Dragons?! Oh my God, you guys are such nerds! Next you’ll be telling me that you play World of Warcraft!”. The rest of the table simply sat there staring at him in stunned silence, partly because it’s the first time we’d heard the word “nerd” used as an insult from one of our own, and partly because they all played either Dungeons and Dragons, World of Warcraft, something else similar, or all three.

The Inevitable Happens

I am completely invested in the story of the Warcraft universe and the characters within. I hate Garrosh for killing Cairne. I’m angry at Varian for acting like a complete asshole while his son grows out of him and looks destined to become a greater king than he’ll ever be. I was absolutely devastated with what happened to the Dragon Aspects after we killed Deathwing.

This passion for storytelling and living the story through games is what’s drawing me to Dungeons and Dragons. I was joking around yesterday and started making up a story about a dragon called Sid who was lonely and wanted to make friends with the local villagers, only to be chased out of town after he hiccupped and accidentally burned a family’s house down. After I’d finished telling the stupid story (Sid brought the hungry villagers some sheep he’d been keeping in his cave and won their friendship), I carried on thinking about the world this dragon might live in, the people in there, the geography of the place and so on.

I’d like to think this would make me a good Dungeon Master in D&D - the idea of leading others through a world and stories I help create sounds very appealing. So, the other day I picked up a D&D Starter Kit and started playing through it.

A few friends are also interesting in playing, so hopefully this will amount to something good!

I’ve been getting bored of my old domain, danielkennett.org, for a while. It’s long and boring, and is pretty much the only thing online that uses my real name. I don’t mind my real name being common online, but since I’m iKenndac on more or less every service I’m a member of, having my website be different seemed a bit weird.

A couple of weeks ago, I registered a nifty new domain: ikennd.ac. It’s perfect - short, sweet, and to the point. The problem is, though, that my blog had a big “danielkennett.org” logo on the top of it, and no other title or strapline. Replacing it with an “ikennd.ac” logo seems silly since I’ll be keeping the danielkennett.org domain alive for linking, and I was stumped.

That is, until today. A superb conversation popped up on Spotify’s internal IRC from Tobi, one of the designers, a slightly trimmed version of which I present here (I’m dan):

• tobi: RIGHT
• tobi: Time for weird theory
• tobi: WHAT IF
• tobi: “broken” was spelled “borken” from the beginning
• dan: ?!
• tobi: Then to enforce that something was broken, they broke the word
• tobi: IE, they spelled “borken” -> “broken”
• dan: But if it was spelled that way from the beginning, it wouldn’t be broken
• dan: “borken” would be correct
• tobi: yes, borken would be correct
• tobi: NOWADAYS “broken” is correct
• tobi: and borken is broken
• tobi: but it may be turning back!
• dan: And then hundreds of years later, people like you would be all “WHAT IF they spelled it ‘broken’ to break the word?!?!”
• tobi: Exactly
• dan: I should make a book of Tobi’s “theories”
• tobi: dan: Best book ever
• dan: Call it “Tales of an unchecked mind”
• dan: HOLY SHIT
• dan: http://www.google.com/search?&q=%22tales+of+an+unchecked+mind%22
• dan: DIBS
• tobi: dan: hahaha
• dan: I can’t believe I came up with a unique title of something that sounds somewhat good
• dan: That’s totally being my blog’s title :-P
• tobi: :-D
• tobi: dan: butbutbutbut I should use that!
• dan: Too late
• tobi: you don’t have weird enough theories
• dan: COPYRIGHT
• dan: ©

In it, I spontaneously came up with the phrase “Tales of an unchecked mind”, which is both a cheesy tagline and perfect for a blog, but more importantly at the time of writing had ZERO results on Google when the exact phrase was entered!

I changed it slightly to “Tales From An Unchecked Mind” and am now using it as the title for my blog. I’ve been wanting to make my blog more personal for a while now, including more writing about non-tech stuff along with an about.me-style page with my bio on it, and I think the new title will fit well.

We’ve been promised self-driving cars for years. Hell, even flying cars! Where are they? Nowhere, that’s where!

Well, I’ve decided to take this into my own hands. In my previous post I mentioned that I’ve got a “more ambitious” Arduino project in the works, and today it arrived:

It turns out that interfacing with an RC is dead-simple - both the servo and the speed controller use the servo electronic interface, which the Arduino has libraries for.

Over time, I want to be able to solve the following challenge:

Here’s a GPS coordinate: (x, y). Get there.

The constraints of the challenge will be along the lines of:

• The environment will be a fairly open area with large obstacles (fields with trees, etc).
• The car won’t have to worry about staying on roads.
• The car should take a reactionary approach to navigation and not do a grid-search of the area.
• The car should be able to go at a reasonable speed (> 10km/h or so).
• The car should recognise potential dead-ends and stop in time.
• The car should recognise when a fatal problem (like ending up upside-down) has occured and give up.

Given those constraints, the car will need at least the following sensors:

• GPS
• Gyroscope
• Long-ish range distance (sonar or otherwise)
• Long-ish range wireless for diagnostics and emergency-stops

Thankfully, all of those are available for the Arduino. A friend of mine immediately started talking about advanced algorithms and video analysis when I mentioned this idea, but I hope to keep it much simpler than that, and given the environment the car will be in I hope to be able to pull off something with this project.

This will be a long-term project, especially since winter is rapidly approaching and if it’s anything like last year’s we’ll be knee-deep in snow in less than a month. Still, I’ll build the car soon and at least get it moving a bit under Arduino control.

A month or so ago, I wrote a post detailing how I put together an Arduino Mega 2560, a couple of chips and a pile of wires to allow me to control the colour of a set of IKEA Dioder RGB LED strips in software, then a follow-up post on how to emulate Philips’ Ambilight technology to create a pleasing ambient light effect behind your computer’s display.

Today, we’ll be tidying up the hardware side of the project from the current sprawling mess of wires:

To a neat little box:

Creating an Arduino Shield for DIODER LED Strips

An Arduino shield is a circuit board that connects to an Arduino and contains a certain number of electrical components that perform a certain task — you can buy pre-made shields to give your Arduino an ethernet port, a display, and so on. We’re going to make a shield that stacks on top of the Arduino Mega 2560 and you can connect the LED strips to.

On top of the things you already have, you’ll need the following (Links to Swedish store):

• Soldering Equipment. If you haven’t soldered electronics before, get a strip board and some spare components like resistors to practice with first.
• Assorted lengths of wire. [Link] [Real Link]
• 1x Box for Arduino. [Link]
• 1x Proto-Shield for Arduino that includes stacking components. [Link]
• 16x Right-Angled Strip Headers [Link]

Rather than step you through creating the board, I’ll simply leave you with the circuit diagram to implement and some photos of my finished board.

A few notes:

• You’ll notice that the circuit diagram is a bit different to the one originally presented in the first part of this series. This is to make creating a circuit board easier, and I’ve gone back and updated both the original post and the code on GitHub for this new layout.
• You can probably make your board look way neater than mine!
• The connector pins for the LEDs are right-angled because there’s not enough space in the box for vertical pins and the LED connectors. Angle the two sets of pins that aren’t hanging off the board upwards slightly to make connection easier.
• You can download a PDF of the diagram here.

Once you’re completed the board, it will stack on top of the Arduino Mega just fine. Cop a bit out of the box to allow the Dioder cables through, and you’re set!

Moving Forward

As before, let me know on Twitter if you’d like to share and thoughts or idea about this project. Now we have a nice, neat box, in a couple of weeks I’ll post the final part of this series — a System Preference pane with accompanying service to let the lights respond to various system events, falling back to the ambient lighting when nothing else is happening. After that, I’ll take a bit of a break before starting the next, more ambitious, Arduino project.

Have fun!

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post detailing the process of combining a set of colour-changing IKEA LED strips, an Arduino, a few simple electronic components and a lot of nerdiness into a project that allowed you to control the colour of the LEDs though a simple application running on your computer.

Over the coming weeks and months, I’ll be presenting cool things you can do with this project here on my blog. However, I wasplanning on working up to this post, but since lots of people were enthusiastic about this particular part (as can be seen from the screenshot of my Facebook stream to the right), I jumped ahead a bit.

Now, Philips have a very similar system in a lot of their TVs, and as a colleague at work who called me “Mr. Patent Infringer” pointed out, they probably have a buttload of patents covering their technology.

So, please allow me to present…

An Ambient Lighting Solution Similar To But Legally Distinct From Philips® Ambilight®

So, what’s the challenge here? Well, actually, the core challenge is pretty damn simple:

1. Sample the screen.
2. Push an appropriate colour based on the edges of the screen image to the lights.

Philips’ hardware also does a fuckton of image processing to smoothly animate between colours and even provides an “aggressiveness” setting to control how sensitive the LEDs are to colour change. I’ll be leaving this as an exercise to the reader for now.

As always, all the code is available at the project’s home on GitHub.

First Attempt: Who let *him* near a computer?

So, I’m not going to lie — my first attempt at this, was, well, lame. For a start, I learned that if you leak a screen’s worth of pixel data every time the screen refreshes (that’s 2560 x 1440 x 4 bytes = just over 14Mb per frame at up to 60Hz), things go very bad very quickly. Once that was fixed, my technique was:

1. Register for screen update callbacks using CGRegisterScreenRefreshCallback().
2. Every time I got one of those, render the entire screen image into a new buffer.
3. Loop through allof the pixels in the top, bottom, left and right 1/4 rectangles of the image buffer.
4. Average the RGB values therein.
5. Push those to the Arduino.

As you might imagine, that method is rather inefficient. In fact, it’s downright idiotic, and took nearly 60% of my CPU all the time.

As the implementation matured, various optimisations of course took place — only an idiot would allocate a new buffer each time the image changes, for instance. In addition, the CGRegisterScreenRefreshCallback() callback looks like this:

void screenDidUpdate(CGRectCount count, const CGRect *rectArray, void *userParameter);

Which provides a lovely rect array telling you which parts of the screen image changed, which is perfect since we only care about parts of the image.

Final Attempt: Passable, I guess

As I attempted to improve the efficiency of the project, I tried only sampling every fourth pixel, scaling the image down, etc, since we obviously don’t need every single pixel sampled to get a single average colour that’s good enough for the lights. However, the very act of rendering the screenshot into a pixel buffer was by far the most intensive part of the whole thing. I was publicly fishing for help on Twitter when @uliwitness reminded me that Core Image exists.

A few minutes later, I’d replaced 90% of my code with a call to a Core Image Filter called CIAreaAverage, which calculates the average colour of a given image. Since Core Image is badass and much better than me, this actually causes all the work to be kept on the graphics card and caused CPU usage to tumble.

The final project for this post contains two methods of calculating colours:

Pick A Pixel: Literally pick a single pixel near each edge of the screen and use that. Not very clever.

Average RGB: Use Core Image to calculate the average colour of the edge rectangles of the scree as discussed above.

I was also planning on doing an Average Hue method too, since I was expecting Average RGB to give brown every time (possibly a side-effect of always getting shades of brown when mixing colours in art at school). However, Average RGB works just fine so I never implemented it.

Project Status

As of now (commit b3a1b17c038458d498d551a18d120435daf9f778), the project has undergone a few improvements since Part 1 of this series:

• Removed AMSerialPort for my own DKSerialPort class. AMSerialPort was buggy and didn’t work with connection speeds over 9600 baud. DKSerialPort is also a lot smaller.
• Created a class called ArduinoDioderCommunicationController, which abstracts away all the work of communicating with the Arduino running the included sketch. This allows future projects in this series (and you, of course) to drop in the class and just push colours without caring about how it all works.

Of course, I have to include a video of this project in action. The colour changing is a little crappy since I don’t do any smoothing, and unfortunately my camera picked up an odd flickering which isn’t visible by the naked eye, but you get the idea:

Moving Forward

As before, let me know on Twitter if you’d like to share and thoughts or idea about this project. In a week or two I’ll put up another post discussing some more code to make the LED strips respond to system events and so on.

I hope this is enough to get you started, though. Have fun!

A few weeks ago, it came to my attention that IKEA do a set of colour-changeable LED strips. I’ve been looking for a decent way of providing some lighting behind my computer to reduce eye-strain for a long time, and these seemed perfect:

I was very pleased with them, but no self-respecting nerd would stop here. Especially one who’s seen Philips’ Ambilight technology in action!

Over a series of blog posts, I’ll be explaining how I built a simple controller for IKEA Dioder lights using an Arduino Mega2560 unit, then moving on to explore various ways to utilise this control in software for fun and awesomeness.

In this post, I’ll be building an Arduino layout that controls the Dioder LED strips, programming it to listen to messages on its serial port and set the LED strips’ colours accordingly, then making a simple Cocoa application in Xcode that sends messages to the unit to match the strips to colour wells in a window on-screen.

Note: If you see a paragraph starting with Tangent:, you can skip it without losing information on how to build this project.

I care not for your long and boring descriptions! Just give me the code and wiring diagrams!

You can grab the code over at the project’s homeon GitHub, which includes both Arduino sketches for uploading to the device and Xcode projects for controlling it. The Arduino sketches require the Arduino software and the Xcode projects were written on Mac OS X 10.7.

You can download a PDF wiring diagram here.

Enjoy!

Part 1: Creating the Arduino-based hardware layout

IKEA sell Dioder lights in a number of configurations — I went with the set that includes four multicolour strips, a control box and a power adapter (Store links: Sweden/UK/USA). The control box and power adapter won’t be used once they’re connected to the Arduino, though.

The Dioder LED strips have 12VDC on a common anode, with three return paths for the red, green and blue channels.

Ingredients (links to Swedish stores):

• 1 x Arduino Mega2560 [Link]
• 1 x 12v AC-DC Adapter [Link]
• 1 x A-B USB Cable [Link]
• ~40 x Male-Male Jump Cables (I got four packs of ten) [Link]
• 2 x ULN2003 DIP-profile chips [Link]
• 1x Breadboard with at least 20 lanes [Link]

The layout here is fairly simple — power the Arduino with the 12V power adapter, then tap into that for the anode on each LED strip. PWM pins 2-13 (0 and 1 collide with serial communication, which we’ll be using on this project) on the Arduino are connected to the ULN2003 chips, which act as relays for the red, green and blue cathodes from the LED strips. Finally, the ground pins on the ULN2003s are connected to the Arduino’s ground to complete the circuit.

Below are photos of the completed unit as well as a diagram of the wiring. You may notice that the wiring in the photos isn’t quite the same as in the wiring diagrams — that’s because I miswired the project when I took photos of it. All code and future projects are based on the wiring diagram.

You can download a PDF of the diagram here.

Part 2: Programming the Arduino

Rather than stepping through the process of listening to the serial port and controlling the PWM pins, I’m going to jump straight to what I implemented for the Arduino to listen to messages on its serial port and set the PWM output values accordingly. However, if you haven’t programmed Arduino before, I strongly recommend visiting the Arduino reference guides and looking at the sample projects included with the Arduino software to learn how it all works — it’s a lot of fun!

The protocol I implemented is very simple — two constant header bytes, 12 “body” bytes (one for each red, green and blue pin over four separate LED strips) and a checksum byte (a bitwise XOR of all the body bytes).

A message setting all connected LED strips to white/GBR(255,255,255)

Tangent: Originally, I’d implemented the protocol without headers or checksums — the Arduino would listen to the serial port and push each 12 bytes it got to the PWM pins. However, this was such a dumb idea — if you accidentally sent the wrong length of data or some other app sent data to it (which happened more than once), you’d never be able to get it back in sync! You can find the Arduino sketch that listens for that “protocol” in the sample code repository linked below at Arduino Projects/FourChannelRGBDumbListener/FourChannelRGBDumbListener.pde. Don’t use it, though — it’s dumb!

You can grab the finished Arduino sketch over at the project’s home on GitHub, at Arduino Projects/FourChannelRGBSmartListener/FourChannelRGBSmartListener.pde.

Part 3: Creating a Cocoa application to send messages to the Arduino

By now, you should have an Arduino successfully controlling your Dioder LED strips. You can test this by connecting it all together (make sure you connect the 12V adapter to the Arduino or the LED strips won’t be powered) and switching on the Arduino — the Arduino sketch I wrote will switch all four strips to white until told otherwise over the serial port.

My Dioder LED strips are attached to the back of my iMac as shown in the photo at the start of this post, so I made this very simple application — choose the Arduino’s serial port from the menu, then change the colour of the colour wells — the corresponding LED strip will change colour to match!

The full Xcode project can be found over at the project’s home on GitHub, at Xcode Projects/Dioder Colour Wells/Dioder Colour Wells.xcodeproj. Just to show how cool this looks in real life, I recorded a video to show it off:

Moving Forward

Hopefully you’ve got a few cool ideas on what to do next — let me know on Twitter if you’d like to share! In a week or two I’ll put up another post discussing some more advanced code to make the LED strips respond to system events and so on. A little bit further down the line, we’ll start to get to the juicy stuff like live image processing for having the LEDs react to what’s on screen.

I hope this is enough to get you started, though. Have fun!

The Past

One year ago yesterday, my fiancé and I pulled up outside an apartment a few kilometres south of Stockholm at 11am. We’d just spent the last four days driving through equally driving rain from the UK through France, Belgium, Germany, Denmark and Sweden. We’d camped each night in the rain. We were wet, our tent was wet, our stuff was wet.

We breathed a sigh of relief. We were happy to finally arrive, even through our journey had been gruelling but a lot of fun. We’d stopped by the Nürburgring and the world’s largest model railway on the way, both of which were amazing. We took a 15 minute break before hauling all of our stuff up three flights of stairs into our apartment.

We’d just moved to Sweden. We were both nervous and excited about the time ahead, comforting ourselves with the fact that we could “just move back to England” if it didn’t work out.

The Present

One year later, and we’ve just moved into another flat — one with no maximum term, which we’re happy about since we can stay here for decades if we want to. Both my fiancé and I have jobs at Spotify, which we’re both enjoying more than we thought a day job could be enjoyed.

Living in Sweden is completely normal now. We get up and go to work, then come home again. Drive to the supermarket to do our shopping. Have LAN parties with our friends. Living in the UK seems like a distant dream — not a good one, at times.

Occasionally I’ll be doing something thoroughly normaland the enormity of the last year will smack me in the face. Last time it happened, I was driving, in my Volvo, to IKEA. A completely normal, British thing to do. As I was driving, I noticed that the forest was nothing but pine trees, which I thought was odd. Then, I remembered. “The forest is nothing but pine trees because I live in fucking Sweden!” A smile spread uncontrollably across my face as I remembered the year and a half long buildup to moving, then one day packing as much stuff into the car as we could and starting the trip across Europe.

I still can’t decide if what we did was “big” or not — I’ve met quite a few people who travel between countries a lot, so if you ask them what we did is no big deal. Then again, I remember talking to some of our friends in the UK before we left and trying to convey to their confused-looking faces why on earth we’d move away from the town where we’d grown up, much less the country we live in — if you ask them, what we did would probably be an enormous thing.

The Future

After all the uncertainty and worry that it’d be a disaster, we’ve only been here for twelve months and I think we’re here to stay. Between my fiancé and I, we have around 48 years of collective experience of living in the UK and, well, we both were kind of expecting to miss the UK at least a bit. Personally, I miss a few of my friends but otherwise wouldn’t care if I never set foot in the country again. My fiancé is the same, albeit also having a tightly-knit family in the UK. Sweden is by no means perfect, but we seem to get on with the Swedish way of living much more than the UK way.

It doesn’t hurt, of course, that Sweden is beautiful. Of course, the UK is beautiful in places too, but the following snapshots were taken within 30km of the capital city. Try that around London!

That’s what she said!

I’ve always known that Stockholm is small compared to London. I mean, the population of Greater London is more than 80% of the population of the entire of Sweden. However, I didn’t really realise how small it is until I compared these two pictures I took. Obviously they’re not idea (visibility is greater in the Stockholm photo), but the London urban sprawl does on for as far as the eye can see!

A while ago, I posed an article discussing Reeder’s UI, and how it doesn’t really fit in with a desktop environment. That post got a lot of attention, and some people got really angry with me and misquoted me and sent hysterical emails and so on.

I still stand by the points made in that post, and the people mentioned above seemed to think that I hated the whole app - which is untrue. I still don’t really like many parts of the UI, but it’s still a beautiful reading experience provided you memorise what all the unlabelled buttons do.

Go buy it — I did!

iPhoneTracker came out today, and it’s a bit shocking to find out my location is being stored on my device. Indeed, my data goes back until the day I bought by phone in July 2010.

For a moment, I was very unnerved. I don’t like the idea of my location being stored in that much detail for so long. However, after actually looking at my data (I know, right?) I’m not so outraged, but it’s still pretty bad!

My conclusions based on cursory observation

• The data is recording the locations of the cell towers, not yours.
• If you don’t have a data connection, locations aren’t calculated.
• Cell information isn’t saved and locations calculated once you have data again.

A theory on wildly inaccurate results

Figure 2, below, shows locations in Sweden I’ve never been anywhere near in my life - mainly the ones down the west coast and southeast coast away from the big clumps.

I once visited a hotel with free WiFi. My iPad, only having WiFi to base its location on, put my position smack on a Travelodge hundreds of mies away. Turns out the base station used was moved from that Travelodge and the location never updated.

I wonder if the same happens here? It doesn’t seem implausible that cell towers are moved around without having their location updated in the relevant database.

My opinion

Location data is an incredibly personal thing. Coupled with a timestamp, you can infer all sorts of things about a person, and there have been several projects that can predict the location of a person based on historical location information like this. That they seem to be collecting cell tower data as opposed to your own location makes this less bad, but Apple really need to make it crystal clear to users that they’re storing this information in cleartext all the time they’re using their phones.

I’m not against the collection of this data at all. I understand that this sort of data is recorded all the time, either on the handset in question or by the networks themselves. My beef is that this data is being saved, seemingly permanently, unencrypted and in plain view for anyone to see, without telling me. It may well be buried in the license agreement nobody reads through, but that’s not really an excuse.

Interesting parts of my location history

Figure 1: Driving through Germany. We stayed overnight down near Belgium, then drove through Germany the next day before arriving near Hamburg for another overnight stop. I had Data Roaming switched on for a while at our stopovers, and occasionally switched it on throughout the drive to check Twitter.

Figure 2: Driving through Sweden. My data is on permanently in Sweden, of course, so the are a lot more cell towers here. There’s a very interesting hole in the data towards the South, which isn’t a one-time thing — this data was collected over three separate trips through the country: one in August 2010, the other two in March 2011.

Figure 3: Sailing past England. This data is from two separate trips, both in March 2011, on a ferry from Denmark to the UK. The ferry sailed along the British coast before heading over the North Sea to Denmark.