Estimate Distances with Your Arm Your Thumb

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A neat little trick!

Basically, all you need to do to estimate a distance using this classic method is hold your arm out and stare at your thumb with an eye closed. Silly, yes, but it makes sense, because you’ll switch which eye you look through and sort out how far the object appears to have “jumped” to the side:

How far did it move? (Be sure to sight the same edge of your thumb when you switch eyes.) Let’s say it jumped about five times the width of the barn, or about 500 feet. Now multiply that figure by the handy constant 10 (the ratio of the length of your arm to the distance between your eyes), and you get the distance between you and the barn — 5,000 feet, or about one mile.

Estimate Distances with Your Arm and This Rule of Thumb – measurements – Lifehacker.

Back up your iPhone’s SMS Message Database

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The instructions are here – a good plan to do this before you update. Anyway, it turns out that they’re kept in a sqlite3 file in

/var/mobile/Library/SMS/sms.db

if you want to do this on the iphone itself through terminal you need to apt-get install sqlite3

Then you need to convert to CSV:

sqlite3 -csv -separator ',' sms.db "select * from message;" > output.csv

rowid: A unique identifier for each message
address: The telephone number of the sender / recipient
date: The Unix Timestamp of when the message was sent / received
text: The message content
flags: 3 Indicates that the message was sent, 2 indicates that it was received
group_id: Indicates the conversation the message belongs to (messages are linked together via groups and the group_member table).

If you use SSH to back up and replace the files, make sure you keep the permissions right:
-rw-r--r-- 1 mobile mobile 61440 Sep  2 22:35 /var/mobile/Library/SMS/sms.db

Exporting your iPhone’s SMS Message Database to a CSV file | Geekology.

UK Gov loses MORE data!

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Yet again the UK has managed to fluff it, losing a USB stick with all the logon data (yes, and passwords) to the UK Government Gateway. This holds all kinds of data about UK Citisens.

With the plan to link National ID cards to crime databases, they UK will not only give anyone who can access the databases a whole lot of personal information, but they’ll probably mail it to the local crime syndicate on USB stick, unencrypted.

Now it seems that project STORK is about linking all of these databases – across the EU! This means that the next time the UK loses this kind of data (which it most certainly will), it won’t just be UK citizens and armed forces and MI5/6 personell that are fucked, it’ll be the WHOLE EU!

How much of the EU’s data will the UK lose? • The Register.

Apple makes big fight with everyone!

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Hot on the now allready very old news about the Apple vs Microsoft TV ads (where Apple has just released it’s answer to Laptop Hunters) and the Apple vs Palm Pre Itunes Sync and the Apple vs Palm “let’s make an illegal agreement not to poach each others’ employees any more” comes the latest installment: In a fit of pique, Apple now no longer supports legacy Palm devices in its’ latest OS, Snow Leopard. Fortunately no-one really cares, as no-one really uses Apple Macs anyway, but still cute to see Apple stamping its’ tiny little foot so angrily. Yes, you look cute when you’re angry, Jobs!

Snow Leopard takes a bite out of support for legacy Palm OS devices.

Finally UK CCTV figures

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It turns out that CCTV cameras all over the place don’t really help much at all: for every 1000 camera’s, one crime is solved. That’s a very very expensive way to go about invading people’s privacy.

Instead of getting rid of the camera’s, the Metropolitan police is saying they need to figure out how to use the footage better. Hmmm.

BBC NEWS | UK | England | London | 1,000 cameras ‘solve one crime’.