Archive: October, 2011

TaskThere: a location-based to do list HTML5 app

There are thousands of task management apps and websites available. Each one promises to be special and better than all the rest. TaskThere is special.

TaskThere lets you quickly assign tasks to your favourite GPS locations. Add “buy cheese” at “Supermarket” or “mow lawn” to “Garden”. When you add a new place, TaskThere looks up your geolocation from either your mobile’s GPS, nearby cell phone towers or WiFi hotspots. As you add more places, TaskThere will automatically switch to your nearest one to show you what tasks you have near. You can manually switch locations or disable the GPS if you want to save battery life.

TaskThere is a web app, built using HTML5 JavaScript APIs such as Geolocation and Local Storage. It runs on any modern web browser, including mobile browsers. All your data is stored locally so there’s no privacy issues. TaskThere is lightweight so it works fine on 2G and once you’ve loaded the app your network connection isn’t required any more.

All the code to TaskThere is on GitHub. It works great but it’s a bit rough round the edges. It needs some design work and there’s a few features I’d like to implement. If you’d like to get involved, contact me on GitHub or just submit a pull request.

Please let me know Iif you’ve used TasktThere and have any feedback.

Getting Administrator access from a logged-in unprivileged user account on Windows

To get Administrator access on Windows (theoretically) you could plug in a USB hub with a virtual keyboard, USB mass storage and a random unknown device. The USB mass storage would have the payload you wanted to run in the form of a driver for the unknown device and the virtual keyboard would replay the keys needed to accept the warning messages about installing unsigned drivers.

More thoughts and comments about this over on the Hacker News discussion.