Provo doesn’t know where its fiber is, Google makes city spend $500,000 to find it.

[Ars Tech­nica]

One part of this story in par­tic­u­lar grabbed my atten­tion because of Google’s recently announced plans to bring fiber to Austin:

As we reported pre­vi­ously, Provo tax­pay­ers are still on the hook to pay off the city’s $39 mil­lion bond that was used to fund the network’s construction—the city still col­lec­tively owes $3.3 mil­lion in pay­ments in the next 12 years.

If Google wants to be an hon­est busi­ness and make an invest­ment in fiber infra­struc­ture here in Austin, fol­lowed by charg­ing peo­ple money to use it, great! But if they’re expect­ing the city gov­ern­ment to steal money to pay them to do busi­ness here, then thanks but no thanks.

It’s offi­cial: Google Fiber is com­ing to Austin “by mid-2014”.

[Ars Tech­nica]

There’s no men­tion of where, exactly, they’re going to be installing it. If it comes to my neigh­bor­hood I’ll cer­tainly pay for the $70 package.

I came across this amus­ing para­graph in the Dia­blo II entry on Wikipedia:

The “Secret Cow Level” is the result of a run­ning joke from the orig­i­nal Dia­blo that spawned from an Inter­net rumor about the cows that appear in the game, seem­ingly with­out pur­pose. Sup­pos­edly, if the cow was clicked a cer­tain num­ber of times, a por­tal to a secret level would open. The rumor turned out to be a hoax, but the leg­end was born, and player after player asked Bliz­zard about how to access the level.

Long ago I worked for Bliz­zard Enter­tain­ment doing QA, and the prod­uct I spent the most time test­ing was the Mac port of Dia­blo. At one point I found a bug where the ter­rain tiles would be miss­ing, leav­ing a pat­tern of white lines on a black back­ground where the tiles should have been. I’ve long since for­got­ten exactly how I made it hap­pen, but as I recall it was easy to repro­duce and did involve a por­tal. By the time I found this bug the PC ver­sion of Dia­blo had already been out for months and the Inter­net rumors about a “secret cow level” were a source of much amuse­ment (because we knew there wasn’t one).

When I found this bug, the black and white pat­tern reminded me a bit of a cow’s fur, so I wrote the bug up with the descrip­tion “secret cow level” as a nod to the rumor. Of course it was fixed before the game shipped, and I’m pretty sure that only four peo­ple ever saw it (includ­ing me). So there you have it–the true story of Mac Diablo’s secret cow level.

Fin­ger­print Pur­chas­ing Tech­nol­ogy Ensures Buyer Has a Pulse. An anony­mous reader writes “A small U.S. uni­ver­sity has come up with a novel solu­tion to reduce the pos­si­bil­ity of using a dead person’s hand to get past a fin­ger­print scan­ner through the use of hemo­glo­bin detec­tion. The device quickly checks the fin­ger­print and hemo­glo­bin ‘non-intrusively’ to ver­ify the iden­tity and whether the indi­vid­ual is alive. This field of research is called Biocryp­tol­ogy and seeks to ensure that bio­met­ric secu­rity devices can’t be eas­ily bypassed.“[Search Slash­dot]

This is a good idea. Some years ago I had a Win­dows lap­top I used for work which had a fin­ger­print reader that could be used in place of the stan­dard pass­word login, but I never used it. I fig­ured that if some­one man­aged to steal my lap­top, I didn’t want to give them a rea­son to steal my fin­ger as well.

Since I bought my first iPad I’ve tried a num­ber of dif­fer­ent sim­ple writ­ing apps,but none of them have lasted as they were all too lim­ited in what you could do with what you’d written.I finally came across an app called Drafts, which lets you export what you’ve writ­ten to any­thing. There are even dozens of export options for apps I don’t even have (turned off by default to avoid clut­ter). Now I can write a blog post using Mark­down, send it as HTML to the clipboard,and paste it into the Word­Press app, which is how I wrote this post.

I’ve been read­ing many good things about an iPad app called Paper, so I decided to give it a try using my iPad 3 and a pres­sure sen­si­tive sty­lus. It’s a very well thought out draw­ing app, and while I’m totally lack­ing in artis­tic abil­ity I do some­times need to make dia­grams and other sim­ple draw­ings for work. Paper comes with a “foun­tain pen” tool, which emu­lates the flex­i­ble nibs that foun­tain pens used to have before the wide­spread use of copy paper. I found it to be very dif­fi­cult to use:

Paper’s foun­tain pen tool

I don’t have a real foun­tain pen with a flex­i­ble nib for com­par­i­son, so I used one with an italic nib instead:

Actual foun­tain pen

I’ve gone back to the pre­vi­ous Word­Press theme, which is called Ahimsa.

Recently I’ve been see­ing a lot of talk about a new game Google is devel­op­ing for Android, called Ingress. I’ve noticed that so far nobody seems to have noticed an unin­tended (pre­sum­ably) con­se­quence of the game: peo­ple play­ing it will be trav­el­ing around to libraries, post offices, cour­t­houses, fire sta­tions, mon­u­ments, and the like, stand­ing around for sev­eral min­utes, and then mov­ing on to another loca­tion in a seem­ingly ran­dom pattern.

What the peo­ple writ­ing about Ingress as a game seem to have missed is that it’s fairly well known by peo­ple who pay atten­tion that the gov­ern­ment tracks everyone’s move­ments using the loca­tion data from their cell phone ser­vices. The strange and erratic move­ments of Ingress play­ers are bound to drive the secret police­men respon­si­ble for such spy­ing berserk, which I con­sider to be a huge ben­e­fit. I’m con­sid­er­ing get­ting a Nexus 7 just so I can help con­fuse Big Brother.

I’m try­ing out the Twenty Twelve theme that came with the Word­Press 3.5 update.

Side note: “If you don’t, I’ll poi­son your din­ner” is a com­pelling argu­ment for a fea­ture request, but can typ­i­cally only be used once.

BBE­dit 10.5 Release Notes