Personal Route Logging with MobileMe’s Find My iPhone

richard — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 15:16:13 +0000

Although I’m struggling to achieve a happy co-existence between Google’s Calendars and Contacts and my MobileMe subscription (still fighting dupes and funny syncs with the wrong numbers being associated with the wrong contacts etc… but that’s for another blog post!), one part of MobileMe I was keen to do something with was their “Locate My iPhone” feature. Regular apps aren’t allowed to run in the background on the iPhone, making any form of auto-updating tracking application all a bit “manual” (e.g. Google Latitude on the iPhone), Apple have provided the ability to get the location of your iPhone automatically, but as it’s officially being touted as a feature to use when you’ve lost your iPhone it’s tucked away within the “Account Settings” section of the MobileMe web page.

This was screaming out to be screen-scraped and developer Tyler Hall has stepped up to the plate with Sosumi – A MobileMe Scraper. Using Sosumi is literally a case of including the class in your PHP, instantiating it with your MobileMe username and password and calling its locate method which returns an object containing the current latitude, longitude and result accuracy, it’s as simple as that!

At the moment I’ve got a cron job on my server hitting this every five minutes and logging to a database. If the data hasn’t changed since the last logged entry, a counter is incremented and timestamp_last is set. A very simple Google Map displays these locations as points on a map but I’ve got loads of ideas of stuff to play about with, such as:

Plot the reported accuracy of each location as a circle on the map, more Google Maps fiddling.
Modify which points are mapped based on time and date ranges through the webpage, some PHP + AJAX experience.
Store locations of common places I visit, then for each point logged (taking into account the accuracy range) I can programatically work out where I am. Could then auto-generate “Richard is at work”, “Richard is at home”, etc… reports for my blog/twitter/facebook etc… =).

Bit sad I know, but it seemed too good for a total sync-monkey like myself and I’ll never pass up an opportunity, however contrived, for a PHP mash-up!

O2 iPhone SMS Delivery Reports

richard — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 07:42:03 +0000

Apple’s release of the iPhone 3GS finally convinced me to leave my 10+ year long T-Mobile and Nokia loyalty for the unchartered territories of O2. I’ve not been disappointed at all with the jump, but one feature I didn’t realise I’d miss until it was gone was SMS delivery reports. O2 claim on their website;

The ‘delivery report’ function is not supported on our network. If you’d like to receive delivery reports, you can enter *0# followed by your text message and then send the message as you usually would.

Which I must admit is pretty clunky to have to remember each time but it does the job I suppose.

After a bit of digging around I’ve found a list of codes for other networks and countries which I’ve posted after the jump…

If you have any updates please let me know in the comments and I’ll add them to the list:

Belgium
Proximus *R*
Base *N#

Brazil
Claro *N#

Croatia
T-Mobile *r*

Germany
T-Mobile *T#
Vodafone D2 *N#
O2 *N#
e-plus *N#

Greece
Vodafone *#
Wind *0#

Hungary
T-Mobile *A#

India
Voodafone *NOT#

Israel
Orange *NM#

Poland
PlusGSM (Polkomtel) XYZ

Portugal
Vodafone *NOT#

Qatar
Qtel *N#

Romania
Orange *NM#

Serbia
MTS *!#
Telenor *!#

Sweden
Telia *KV#
Comviq KV#
Telenor ##

Switzerland
SWISSCOM *N#

Turkey
TURKCELL *N#

UK
O2 *0#
Orange RCT
T Mobile *0#
Orange RCT
Vodafone – No code exists for Vodafone
Virgin *0#

US
T–Mobile *noti#

Richard Dutton » iPhone

Personal Route Logging with MobileMe’s Find My iPhone

O2 iPhone SMS Delivery Reports