Phone

So over the last few months I’ve had this really annoying phone problem – it has this glitch with sending and receiving sms graphic attachments. Essentially you have to re-start the thing to receive or send pics! It’s most annoying !!!!

One way to trouble shoot this behaviour, is to do a total reset of the device. (I’ve tried all sorts of things to sort this… it’s a near last resort).

Anyway I nearly locked my self out of not only my phone, but my personal section of the google walled garden. It’s scary when you read that it make take 3-5 working days for google to re enable your account! But some how I fudged it and managed to get my life and this small device that I have trouble bonding with, to access my digital existence.

It was an interesting problem – google wants to send you and an sms but the phone is not set up yet with your google account so it can’t receive the sms – a lovley chicken and egg sort of issue. The work around was to not allow an initial google re-install of my data. Just set the phone up and start – enable it so it can start to send and receive sms. Once I had that working it was just a matter of logging in and then using the sms data that they sent me to confirm that I am in-fact me! Gee thanks big computer in the sky, for the anxiety, the minor panic attack and the final approval of my humble human existence.

I know younger people absolutely love their phones (I understand – it’s tied up with freedom, acceptance as an individual, communication, privacy, a social life and lots of other stuff) but I’ve never really felt like that.

Even with things like the assisted speech function, for me it all just slows my ability to get stuff done! That and I’m fairly fumble fingered with an object like a phone – also I have a theory that I sort of collect a lot of static electricity (if your a cat person and have ever zapped your cat you know what I mean) I hit the wrong button with my face, I was brought up analoug I suppose.

My preferred weapon of choice is a laptop, I can touch type and move about with it and take all my digital stuff and well… for me it just works. Which is what we want isin’t it? Technology that just works.

Install howmanypeoplearearound on mac os X

howmanypeoplearearound  “calculates the number of people in the vicinity using the approximate number of smartphones as a proxy”

To do this on Mac os X first make sure that you have “brew” installed.

See the simple instructions / site hear
https://brew.sh/

Your also going to need tshark the cli version of wireshark installed

brew install tshark

Also I found using python3 important as I was having dependency problems with the standard python install

Download and install python3 from hear

https://www.python.org/downloads/mac-osx/

Then

sudo pip3 install howmanypeoplearearound

now you can observe howmanypeoplearearound !

Typical usage

sudo howmanypeoplearearound -s 300 -o scan_big2.json -a en1

(Listens to network traffic for 5 minutes writes to the file scan_big2.json in json format using interface en1 (wireless card use ifconfig -a to check that yours is named in the same manner)