Contributing Advent 11: Mozilla's geolocation services
About a months and a half ago Mozilla announced its Location Services. It is "an experimental pilot project to provide geolocation lookups based on publicly observable cell tower and WiFi access point information". In other words, it is going to provide a similar service as Google's location service that Firefox currently uses for its location aware browsing.
In order to provide this service, they need geolocated data so that they know where WiFi access points and cell towers are. They have released a tool, MozStumbler, that allows everybody to collect this data and provide it to Mozilla. I believe that there should be open alternatives for important services like this, and I think that Mozilla seems like a good caretaker of this data, respecting privacy. So I have installed MozStumbler and turn it on whenever I go on a new route through town.
The application isn't the prettiest as you can see, but it does work well. There is also a "Test Mozilla Location Services" which uses their API to lookup the location—without using the GPS. Ichnaea is the public API that you can use to do lookups yourself. The Geolocate API implements the same interface as the Google Maps Geolocation API endpoint. But there is a more extensive Search API as well. I will soon be upgrading Haunt to use this new API as the one it currently uses is discontinued.
Life Line
Updated 3 restaurants
I walked 3.1km in 29m25s
I walked 4.4km in 45m01s
I walked 5.4km in 55m28s
Updated a restaurant; Confirmed a hotel
I walked 6.3km in 1h12m59s
Paraphrasing opening keynote speaker at ConFoo: "Should we go back to the waterfall method of writing massive specs upfront to feed to AI coding agents?"
I walked 1.6km in 17m29s
I walked 2.1km in 17m44s
Updated a pub
I walked 2.6km in 26m41s
Merged pull request #1065
Comparison whether class is userland or internal used the wrong macro
PHP 8.6: zend_enum.h now mixes code with declarations
PHP 8.6: Argument names are now stored as zend_strings
Updated a bench and a waste_basket
I walked 8.3km in 1h25m37s
Created a recycling
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An interesting journey in story form, showing how English changed over time.
https://www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/how-far-back-in-time-understand-english
A much better writer than I is summing up perfectly why I have such disdain for Generative AI/LLMs.
https://jonn.substack.com/p/so-why-do-i-feel-so-angry-about-this
Created a waste_basket; Updated a waste_basket; Deleted a bench
Created a bench; Updated 7 benches and a gate; Deleted 2 benches and a gate
Created 10 benches and 2 waste_baskets; Updated an information
Shortlink
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