84: How not to use in-flight Wi-Fi

You probably already know the first rule of using in-flight Wi-Fi: buy the pass before you get on the plane. The second rule is to make sure that you have everything you need to cash in the pre-purchased pass. That's the rule I forgot.

A week ago, I was traveling to San Francisco and had some podcast work that needed to get done along the way. Four hours in the air would be enough to do my work, and also enough to justify a $16 Gogo plan. I'd never crossed that value threshold before, so I didn't have a Gogo account. No problem, right? As I was packing, I grabbed the closest computer (my iMac), created an account, and made my purchase, all with the help of 1Password. I got on the flight, opened up my MacBook, and realized that my Gogo credentials were…nowhere.

This was a combination of user error on my part and some recent changes to how 1Password does syncing. A few months ago, I realized that when syncing 1Password vaults with Dropbox, a lot of information is stored in the clear — no passwords, of course, but the titles of all your accounts. It's a small chance that my vault would be compromised this way, but confirmation that I have an account on a certain site could make it a greater target. As a result, I switched to iCloud syncing, which makes all that data opaque. iCloud syncing Just Works™, so there's no control over exactly when it syncs. If I'd still been using Dropbox, my vault would've synced over as soon as I logged onto the ground-based airport Wi-Fi prior to boarding. iCloud didn't think the sync was urgent — the 1Password app wasn't open, after all — so it just didn't perform it.

All that aside, I would've been fine if I could have reset my Gogo account password. There's an option for that, even on the plane, but it requires answering a security question. And what is my mother's maiden name? It's…a randomly generated string saved in 1Password. (I used to use all lowercase strings with no spaces; a recent 1Password update seems to have removed that option in the password generator, favoring diceware instead. That was even more frustrating, because I could remember two of the words but not the third!) That left me completely sunk. I could buy another pass, at the increased in-flight rate of $27, or disconnect for four hours. I opted for the latter, and still managed to squeeze in my work. At least the first rule of plane Wi-Fi did some good: those pre-paid passes are valid for a year, so I got to use it on the way home — after I triple-checked that 1Password had synced.

83: A drought in the App Store

Since I last mentioned weather apps when I did some spring cleaning on my iPhone, I've settled on a single solution that works best for me: Storm by Weather Underground. (It replaced their other, slightly less geeky "Wunderground" app.) But the fact of the matter is that, unlike a few years ago, I haven't tried many new weather apps recently. Patrick Dean summed this up on twitter, pointing out that just about any competently made app reaches the threshold to be featured, as weather is still a top-level category in the App Store.

I think there's one clear reason for this: homogenization of weather data. In the early days of the App Store, weather apps could differentiate themselves based on the source and accuracy of their data; attractive presentation came second. That all changed three years ago with the introduction of forecast.io. If you don't know the history, forecast.io is the open API by the creators of Dark Sky.

When Dark Sky came onto the scene in 2011, it was head and shoulders above other weather apps, with groundbreaking features like predictive radar maps and push notifications for impending precipitation. But even in version 1.0, it was clear to me that some things were amiss. It was less accurate on the iPad than on the iPhone because it made its weather predictions client-side, using the GPU. In fact, Dark Sky is a classic example of "machine learning applied to a problem we (and the machine) know nothing about". Its algorithm doesn't analyze weather data, it analyzes images, specifically radar map frames. This is what gives its future maps an unearthly, unrealistic quality; storms that have been developing or diminishing suddenly turn into zombie clouds drifting in straight lines across the map. In fact, if you click the play button on the map in the latest version of Dark Sky, it stops at the present time, as if it's ashamed of how bad those future maps look.

In serious contrast, Storm offers a 5-hour future radar map underpinned by meteorological data. Storms can appear out of nowhere along front lines, or die down before reaching your location. It's this one feature, plus its excellent daily and hourly graph views, that make it my top weather app. Almost everything else in the App Store is just the same forecast.io data — a computer's idea of weather — dressed up in new skins. The greatest innovation has been to make the interface super-snarky; an advance in entertainment, but not in utility. There may never be another great iOS weather app, because the hard part is gathering the data. Weather Underground operated stations for years, and is now (regrettably) under the weather.com umbrella. There is free weather data out there, but you get what you pay for: a slick interface for a couple of bucks.

82: Trapped Flickr geotag data

I joined Flickr in 2005, when it was young enough that, like many fledgling internet services, you could refresh the global timeline and keep tabs on everyone's activity. In the past 11 years, I've uploaded over 9000 photos to Flickr and geotagged 7500 of them. And now I have a problem.

Flickr was the first piece of software, native or on the web, that let me add location data to my photos. It was all done by hand, as this was before my first iPhone or any other device that added geolocation automatically. I painstakingly dragged and dropped photos onto the map, often — because of Yahoo's crummy map data — with Google Earth side by side, especially for places that a street map considers the middle of nowhere, like archaeological sites in Sicily. Later, apps like iPhoto added geotagging capabilities (and removed them, and added them back), but I kept on with Flickr because it was my central photo hub.

Some of my fine-grained Flickr geotags in the Forum Romanum.

Some of my fine-grained Flickr geotags in the Forum Romanum.

Flickr is still alive and kicking despite several apparent death knells in the past. But this week's news that Verizon is buying Yahoo gave me another push to liberate my geodata and keep it stored in my local Lightroom photo library. There's only one problem: I don't know how to do it. Flickr allows bulk downloads of photos, but it doesn't alter the original EXIF data, so that means the geotags aren't baked in. And the native map view on the Flickr site has barely changed since its introduction almost 10 years ago, including limiting you to viewing less than 100 geotagged photos at a time.

Perhaps I'm missing something, but there is no direct or even indirect conduit for my 7500 pairs of latitudes and longitudes to get matched to photos in the Finder or Lightroom. The closest answer I've gotten is "use the API to write something yourself", but that's far from a simple or complete solution. But unless an alternative presents itself, that's likely the route I'll take. Hopefully it won't be a race against the clock, facing an API shutdown date. (None has been announced, but it's hard to be optimistic about Flickr's bright future.)

When I get my geolocation data out, I'll know better than to lock it into a new proprietary system — especially one that I don't control. I was way more lax about my data in 2007 or 2008, when I started geotagging. I didn't even have regular backups, so Flickr actually saved my bacon when I had a catastrophic hard drive failure and would have otherwise lost about 2500 photos for good. I treat my data much more carefully today, or at least I will once I can get my hands on it.

81: Hot and cold on HomeKit

HomeKit launched in iOS 8 and has operated as a stealth feature for the past two years. It's powerful enough to have Siri control your lights but so invisible that you need to download a third-party app to get it working (some app, any app, not necessarily the app that goes with your HomeKit accessories). This is changing in iOS 10 with a first-party Home app and something I think is far more useful: access to HomeKit scenes and accessories in Control Center.

In fact, the entire third pane of Control Center is dedicated to HomeKit. (I'm not sure what people with no HomeKit devices see there. Blank space?) Devices can be switched on or off with a tap, and further controlled after a hard press or long press. For lights, that means a big sliding dimmer switch, and a button to access another screen for setting color. There you can set up six presets or dig even deeper to access color wheels. One wheel is a standard RGB rainbow, and the other controls color temperature.

If you're familiar with color temperature at all, it's probably from the desktop utility f.lux, which automatically adjusts temperature based on time of day — cooler and bluer during the day, warmer and orangier at night. Color temperature is measured in Kelvin, just like heat temperature, because there's supposed to be a direct correspondence to physical properties of ideal objects at those heats.

In reality, color matching is a mess and 5000K here may not be 5000K there. My Philips Hue bulbs, although boasting their color range on the packaging, never let me directly set a K value; I always have to choose from an onscreen color palette. Their idea of white light temperature goes from yellowy to mildly blue. Apple's, on the other hand, goes all the way to deep orange and deep blue, more Florida Gators than f.lux.

In practice, this means that what I see is not what I get in my HomeKit apps. The same bulb set to the same moderately warm tone can appear onscreen as everything from beige to green!

And I still haven't managed to set a pleasing color that feels white with Apple's wheel. Fortunately, the workaround is to set a good color in another app, then activate Control Center and set the current color to one of the presets. Having done that, HomeKit is now more useful than ever before, especially for things like quietly turning out the lights at night. But even two years in, it still requires a hodgepodge of apps to set things just right.