my favorite story about quincy is that at as a 22 year old he was selected as the music arranger for dizzy gillespie’s band, and they all went to iran and gave a series of concerts. around 1954. RIP.
not directly relevant, but was riding my motorcycle in the boonies, and lost the phone which was on the handlebar (bumpy rocky path).
Looked for it several times on the path with no luck. Then I remembered my old iPhone was in the backpack. Did a Find my phone on the backup phone and it showed exactly where it had lost touch with the primary phone. This is all without cell or Wi-Fi service. Saved me a $1000.
Back when I rode, I made a little arrangement of LEDs around the speedometer in 3 concentric rings of ~32 lights. The blue LED closest to pointing North would light, the green LED would always point towards my home, and the red LED would point towards my destination (programmable before the trip). That's all I really needed. Basically a small version of a navigation arrow above video game characters. It meant that one glance at the speedometer gave me all critical information in one instant. The brain is really good at intuitively figuring out parallax, so if I was moving, two glances gave me a good idea of distance as well, though I experimented with lighting 1,3,5,7,9 LEDs as the destination got closer.
Not really. The phone only appears "off" but is in-fact in a low power mode providing beacons. It won't work if the battery were removed.
Also, modern iPhones use tower-assisted GNSS (GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, QZSS, BeiDou, and NavIC) so the satellite isn't necessarily Navistar. With fewer or no towers, and positioned in an odd orientation on the ground, a good fix becomes much less likely, and the range can increase from <1m to 10's-100's of m.
Internet access is not necessary for Find My to work. Your devices all broadcast their public key over Bluetooth and NFC, and your devices all also have your own private key, and so are identifiable / visible in Find My.
Even if they hadn't had the local map, they can still get some useful signals from Find My (and they can still push Ring requests). However, in their case, their old phone still had the log of the last seen location. Again, no Internet required.
He said no service at all. When traveling, and you have an old phone with eSIM support, carrying it with you in a backpack (with eSIM information ready to go) is a good idea. Especially when traveling alone, you never know what will happen. Your primary phone can be stolen, you drop it, or it simply dies and you need rescue.
speaking of monetization, i’d happily pay a $10 monthly fee for these features as a biker:
- weather along route
Google knows the weather, it knows the route… Just add a layer! better yet suggest a reroute. i pay for a separate app for this currently.
- motorcycle friendly features
bigger buttons for usage with gloves; selection of straight, curvy, unpaved etc roads; right now it’s just Highway or non Highway
- ability to create a group and show their live locations on the map.
Something better than WhatsApp live location. The current approach that Google maps uses is cumbersome and non-intuitive. also if a route is updated, an option to update everyone else’s shared route.
- local info, POI, etc
you know my location and interests, tell me some interesting stuff over Bluetooth about the city or POI’s i’m passing by.
definitely. i used to run the visual studio / vs code teams for python, R, nodejs, jupyter etc at microsoft. working closely with and hiring from the os community was both delightful and a priority for me. several key employees were hired that way.
