Filed under: iPod Family, iPhone
Way back, one of our readers begged for an iPhone LoJack solution. He wanted his iPhone to "call home" regularly in case of loss or, let's be more realistic, theft. Over the past week, I finally had a chance to give this request some time, and I put together findme. It's a command-line program that returns the location of the cell phone tower nearest to your iPhone. When run, it tells you the tower id, plus its latitude and longitude courtesy of Google Maps.
Still, how to get the location report to a place you can get it... but nobody else can... and without receiving a zillion SMSes? For this part of the puzzle, enter Twitter. Twitter dev Britt Selvitelle helped walk me through the setup for a private account that allows your iPhone to phone home but keeps the location data relatively secure.
To do this, create a new Twitter account just for your iPhone (it will need its own unique email address, separate from your main account, so have one handy). Open the Settings panel, and look for the "Protect My Updates" checkbox. It's towards the bottom of the page, just above the Save button. Check this and click Save. With protected updates, only the Twitter users you approve will see the updates for this iPhone-only account (just you? you + spouse? spouse, kids, and "special friends?" Up to you).
Update: I've put an updated version of findme (findme-better) into the TUAW folder on my site. Please let me know if this works better for location for you. To use, just copy to your iPhone (you may have to use Firefox if you get errors after downloading with Safari), rename to "findme" and replace the original findme.
Filed under: iPhone
A spokesman for the iPhone Dev Team, the group that developed the iPhone unlock has issued a statement condemning Apple and promising a tool in the next week which will restore your iPhone to a factory-fresh state. The unlock, he writes, made the iPhone free and useful world-wide, not just in certain countries. The text of the statement, with modifications for grammar and spelling, follows after the break.Filed under: Rumors, Software, Hacks, Open Source, iPhone
So as you may have seen on some other sites, there was a little bit of drama today around the iPhone unlock program written (in part) by our own Erica Sadun. Lots of rumors are flying around, and lots of folks have it almost right. But none of them knows the real story. And since Sadun works for us, we have kind of an inside track on what really happened. So here it is.Continue reading “The real story behind the iPhone unlock GUI drama”
To get an instant map to any address, just go to your Address Book and right click on the address field of any one of your contacts and select "Map Of." The address will then be revealed in Google Maps on Safari. You can do the same if a data detector determines there is an address in an e-mail in Mail.
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| # | Blogger | Posts | Cmts |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Steven Sande | 45 | 3 |
| 2 | Dave Caolo | 35 | 4 |
| 3 | Mel Martin | 31 | 0 |
| 4 | Mike Schramm | 30 | 0 |
| 5 | Michael Rose | 19 | 23 |
| 6 | Josh Carr | 18 | 24 |
| 7 | Victor Agreda, Jr. | 15 | 6 |
| 8 | TJ Luoma | 14 | 25 |
| 9 | Erica Sadun | 12 | 1 |
| 10 | Ken Ray | 11 | 2 |
| 11 | Joachim Bean | 10 | 3 |
| 12 | Aron Trimble | 10 | 3 |
| 13 | Chris Rawson | 10 | 0 |
| 14 | David Winograd | 10 | 5 |
| 15 | Sang Tang | 9 | 0 |
| 16 | Brett Terpstra | 7 | 5 |
| 17 | John Burke | 6 | 3 |
| 18 | Megan Lavey | 6 | 9 |
| 19 | Lauren Hirsch | 4 | 0 |
| 20 | Kent Pribbernow | 3 | 0 |
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