[Announce] ZapLoc - a Gowalla/Foursquare/Facebook places/Latitude aggregator - "All your location based services are belong to us" ;)
 

Added in extras/testing the app "ZapLoc"' a location-based-services aggregator. Looking for testers.... this is early stage, but I think we've at least gotten to the part where it installs properly. :)

Q: What is ZapLoc

Lots of people (including myself) are frustrated about the fact that there are multiple competing location services. Notably, I myself utilize Gowalla, FourSquare and Facebook Places and for my VERY close friends (my family) I keep me exact location updated on Google Latitude at all times.

The problem is if you arrive at some spot, and want to check in there, you have several services to check into, leading to check-in fatigue. Especially on Maemo, where the amount of clients have been low (they do exist, though) especially for Gowalla, which seems to not be used so much in the US, but is the most popular one on this side of the pond.

So for a while I've been tinkering with a little app that allows me to check in to more than one of them - at once. And I had really made it for myself, but decided now to make it available after it evolved into something - almost - useable.

Q: What services does it support?

For now, it is the aformentioned Gowalla, FourSquare, Facebook Places and Google Latitude. Hopefully soon you will also be able to check in to locations on Google, but that API isn't public yet.

Q: So what does it do?

It aggregates the aformentioned geolocation services, allowing you to consolidate spots from the different services that reffer to the same *place* to a "ZapLoc".

When you have created a "ZapLoc" from your service(s) spots, you can either check in with one (and a half) click to them all, or, if you are REALLY lazy... it can check you in automatically when you arrive there.

Q: So it can check me in AUTOMATICALLY?

Yes. But the settings for this are all OFF by default. You will have to turn it all on explicitly, if you want this to happen:

• You will have to make sure that the background update daemon is turned on (and set to REMAIN on after you close the main ZapLoc GUI)
• You have to create a "ZapLoc" out of a combination of Gowalla/Facebook/FourSquare spots
• You have to explicitly turn on "Auto-Check-In" for that ZapLoc
• ...et voilá!

Q: I start it and see nothing. This is stupid!

To make use of it, you must attach it to at least one of the services. Also note that as of now Google Latitude has no "spots" of any kind, so if you ONLY use it with Latitude, this is only a boring zero-feature map-app that happens to keep your Latitude location updated. The action is when you connect it to any of the other services that have locations you can "check in" to.

Q: I did that. I still see nothing. This IS stupid!

Notice there will be (after you properly authorized your services, if you havn't, you can do that with the setup-icon - the cogwheel) icons down the bottom with services. Notice how the default is the ZapLoc service?

Well, you hav'n't created any ZapLoc's yet!

Click on any of FourSquare, Gowalla or Facebook, and you will see spots.

Click on any of those spots, to get info, and the ability to create a "ZapLoc" out of them.

Once you've done that, you will see that spot on the ZapLoc display mode. Think of it as "location favourites on steroids".


Q: Won't having the GPS daemon running all the time kill my battery?

Well, you set up a "GPS poll interval" in settings. The software will start the GPS at this interval, try to figure out a location (falling back to cell tower location if no GPS can be found after a while), looks at the location, and then sleeps the GPS again (to conserve battery).

Now, for Latitude, it will send this update immediately IF your location has changed (more than 100m in the curren version and not settable). So it won't waste time sending the same position again and again and again.

However - since latitude calls your position "stale" when it hasn't moved for some hours, you have the option of updating it even though it HASN'T changed every few hours.


For the other services, every time it takes a GPS sample, it checks what the closest "ZapLoc" is. Note that this database is local to your phone (and private to you) so this no time, and doesn't require a network connection.

Only if it

• Finds a spot within the range defined in that spot
• If that spot is an "AutoCheck" spot
• If you aren't already checked in to that spot
• ...and you have been on the SAME SPOT for that last N number of GPS samples (settable in the configu how many N are)
• THEN and only then are you automatically checked in, with the Auto-check-in message attached to that spot, posting to facebook/twitter/etc as you have set to that spot .... which you would probably keep off to keep your friends sane ;)

Also please note that checking in to a facebook place by definition creates a little notice on facebook. There is technically no way to check into a facebook place without this happening. So even if you have "facebook" unchecked in your ZapLoc with Auto-checkin enabled, there WILL be a facebook places notice (tho they are very small) when you check in....

...so set up your ZapLoc's accordingly!

Q: I still think this is stupid.

Well, then I can't help you. Install Solitaire instead :)


Q: But I need SCREENSHOTS!!!

Okay, THAT we can do...

When you first start the program, you need to attach it to (at least one of - but ideally more than one) the service(s):
http://zaptronic.net/zaploc/zaploc-0.jpg

Once you've done this, you can see, for example, GoWalla spots of an area:
http://zaptronic.net/zaploc/zaploc-6.jpg

But this can be quite a mess! And what if the place you want to check in to exists in multiple services? Like here is an example of the same spot in facebook, foursquare, gowalla (This is 3 screenshots side by side, you can't actually display it like this in the software, btw):

http://zaptronic.net/zaploc/zaploc-4.jpg

Now if we want to avoid checking in to these three separately (and note how sloppily placed they are?), we can click one of them and tell it to turn them into a "ZapLoc". We get a dialog to consolidate them:

http://zaptronic.net/zaploc/zaploc-1.jpg

We can also defin the settings for the auto-checkins, if we want them to happen:
http://zaptronic.net/zaploc/zaploc-2.jpg

...and we now have created a "ZapLoc" of the spot (you can choose to use the icon from Gowalla, Foursquare or Facebook if you don't like the "ZapLoc" one):
http://zaptronic.net/zaploc/zaploc-3.jpg

Since the location was off, we can adjust it:
http://zaptronic.net/zaploc/zaploc-5.jpg

After creating a few "ZapLoc" spots of our favourite hangouts, our map is much clearer (and loads instantly).

Isn't this much nicer to look at than the mess above?

http://zaptronic.net/zaploc/zaploc-7.jpg

Now we can check in to the spot manually if we want (if we are close enought, that is)
http://zaptronic.net/zaploc/zaploc-8.jpg
http://zaptronic.net/zaploc/zaploc-9.jpg

And if we want to turn on the background daemon, that lets us do this AUTOMATICALLY any time we are at that spot for some length of time, well, hit the "Setup":
http://zaptronic.net/zaploc/zaploc-10.jpg

Not how the DEFAULTS is to only run the daemon while the APP IS ACTIVE. You will yourself actively have to turn on the mode to start the daemon at boot and keep it running, like so:
http://zaptronic.net/zaploc/zaploc-11.jpg


That's about it.


BTW: ZapLoc's are stored locally on your device (in a file named consolidated.db :D) and is never sent anywhere to anyone. We are Not tracking You. Coz we don't Care. And if we Wanted to we would Friend you on Gowalla/Facebook/Foursquare instead ;)



KNOWN ISSUES IN THE CURRENT VERSION

1. You have to explicitly turn on background updates yourself. This is by design, so I don't get people complain that my software did something they didn't know about. YOU are now the one turning on "auto-"anything
2. There is an issue that if the authorization step (OAuth) fails with any of the services, well, the app will hang forever waiting for a callback reply from the service's website. I'll fix that soon.
3. Gowalla authorization tokens are supposed to be RENEWED every two weeks. My program doesn't do that correctly yet, so after two weeks, Gowalla will STOP WORKING. To fix that you actually have to un-authorize the app completely for GoWalla and then re-authorize. Sorry about this - I will try to fix that ASAP.

/Z

Re: Testers wanted of ZapLoc - Gowalla/Foursquare/Facebook places/Latitude aggregator - "All yor location based services are belong to us" ;)
 

No icon for me :D

i installed authorised with lattitude and its updating my position in the background..
set it to load at boot, check position change every 10min and at least every hour..
seems to work...

one question, what does it do when there is no gps signal?

Re: Testers wanted of ZapLoc - Gowalla/Foursquare/Facebook places/Latitude aggregator - "All yor location based services are belong to us" ;)
 

Installed successfully! Looks quite nice :)

EDIT:
As icon there is only the default blue one.

When authorizing Facebook the progress indicator after Facebook confirmation seemed to run forever, but after closing and restarting I was successfully authorized (Without entering my credentials:confused:).

Location and map are shown, but searching for a place gives me an error

Re: Testers wanted of ZapLoc - Gowalla/Foursquare/Facebook places/Latitude aggregator - "All yor location based services are belong to us" ;)
 

It is poorly tested, but in THEORY, it should try for a few seconds to get GPS, but if not it will settle for a cell tower location, and then sleep the gps.

For more info on this you can start the daemon manually in verbose mode,

First make sure the background daemon is dead:

python /opt/zaploc/zaploc-daemon.py -t

then start it in verbose mode

python /opt/zaploc/zaploc-daemon.py -v

It'll spew crap at ya ;)

/Z

Re: Testers wanted of ZapLoc - Gowalla/Foursquare/Facebook places/Latitude aggregator - "All your location based services are belong to us" ;)
 

...and if some guru can figure out why I don't get no icon, I'd be Teh Happy ;)


/Z

Re: Testers wanted of ZapLoc - Gowalla/Foursquare/Facebook places/Latitude aggregator - "All your location based services are belong to us" ;)
 

Had a quick look and looks ok.
It would be proper if the icons were placed under:
/usr/share/icons/hicolor/..

The icon doesn't appear after a reboot?

BTW, is there a special reason for providing the compiled versions of the code only?

Re: Testers wanted of ZapLoc - Gowalla/Foursquare/Facebook places/Latitude aggregator - "All your location based services are belong to us" ;)
 

THANK YOU. Gosh I'm so blind! I've been staring at that path for hours, and my eyes (knowing what I'm supposed to read) read it right. Of course, the computer - reading what is actually THERE - disagrees :)

By gosh I think it works now!!!


'tis a choice I made. It may change. We'll see.....

/Z

Re: Testers wanted of ZapLoc - Gowalla/Foursquare/Facebook places/Latitude aggregator - "All your location based services are belong to us" ;)
 

It's your choice and you have every right to do as you feel.
Notice though the licence you have already attached in the code. You might need to change it depending on your final decision..

Re: *ZapLoc* - Gowalla/Foursquare/Facebook places/Latitude aggregator - "All your location based services are belong to us" ;) - testers wanted
 

installed this early this morning, and wih google latitude at least it seems to be working well.

maybe a coincidence, but my battery and cpu usage seems to be quite a bit better as wel, compared with running the old script hourly via alermd and cron.

Re: Testers wanted of ZapLoc - Gowalla/Foursquare/Facebook places/Latitude aggregator - "All your location based services are belong to us" ;)
 

Right. Honestly, this was partially a *test* to see if distributing object-only even *worked*. There are some modules I need to keep closed for back-end reasons. There will be prominent credits etc. in the (as of yet nonexistent) documentation for any outside source I used. For example I had *excellent* help by Aketzu, and yes, my daemon is was originally based on his code (see the "Latitude" thread) although very little of that is left in the final version.

/Z

Re: *ZapLoc* - Gowalla/Foursquare/Facebook places/Latitude aggregator - "All your location based services are belong to us" ;) - testers wanted
 

No quite a lot of thought was put into that, not to waste power (see updated 1st post).

If you ONLY need it for Latitude, this program is a bit overkill. If you want I can post the latitude-only daemon, but with the same "power saving" tricks, over in the Latitude thread. It would save you disk space at least :)

/Z

Re: *ZapLoc* - Gowalla/Foursquare/Facebook places/Latitude aggregator - "All your location based services are belong to us" ;) - testers wanted
 

Thanks for your hard work. May I suggest some features:
- option to only use cell
- option to use gps only when moving (cell loc changing)
- option to do faster updates when moving

option 1 is what interests me most - looking for a cell-only latitude updater ;)

Re: *ZapLoc* - Gowalla/Foursquare/Facebook places/Latitude aggregator - "All your location based services are belong to us" ;) - testers wanted
 

Option for adding photos is another good feature...
Great app, thanks for the hard word...

Re: *ZapLoc* - Gowalla/Foursquare/Facebook places/Latitude aggregator - "All your location based services are belong to us" ;) - testers wanted
 

If the #1 is what you want, there is already one in the Latitude thread. Use Azteku's original "latitude-updater.py", since it only does cell tower mode.

Personally, I find "cell tower only" COMPLETELY useless. This is probably because I'm in the coutry, and "cell towers" are things between 2 and 8 miles away from me, and, honestly, locating me with that "accuracy" (if that's the word) is more than meaningless, it's just plain misleading and wrong.

Also, I don't know how you would ever do auto-checkin to spots with accuracy of less-than-100-m with cell towers.

HOWEVER: The other two features are planned
- photos
- and ONLY update the GPS position when cell tower changes

The latter even has a spot in the UI already, but it doesn't actually work right yet.

The idea is to be a "best of both worlds"; i.e. not turn the GPS on *at all* unless the cell tower changes. When it DOES change, it turns on the GPS for a little while to at least *try* get get a better estimate of location than the crappy cell tower location.

Wouldn't that be BETTER than "cell tower only", y'think?


Also, "faster updates while moving" is actually already there. I said the GPS sleeps for X minutes between "takes"? Well, actually, it only "sleeps" if your speed is below a certain number. There is a different (built in, not currently configurable) time limit between these samples of 2 minutes. So if you take a drive you should actually be able to track that drive on your Latitude history.


/Z

Re: *ZapLoc* - Gowalla/Foursquare/Facebook places/Latitude aggregator - "All your location based services are belong to us" ;) - testers wanted
 

You should enter the MeeGo Coding Competition with that app! ;)

Re: *ZapLoc* - Gowalla/Foursquare/Facebook places/Latitude aggregator - "All your location based services are belong to us" ;) - testers wanted
 

First of all, great idea and wonderful implementation so far!

A few comments/questions:
- There seems to be a problem when phone is in offline mode, it keeps trying to get a location and quickly drains the entire battery. Updating location should be disabled in offline mode
- There seem to be some problems with changing the update frequency, at least when background updates are enabled. I had the frequency at 5 minutes for a time and then changed it back to 1 hour, but the updates kept coming frequently every 5 minutes for a long time afterwards
- Would it be possible to get a command line command for changing some options, especially the update frequency? Depending on the situation (at home, at work, on the go) I like to have different update frequencies, and starting the ZapLoc is a bit too cumbersome to do every time. Furthermore, I anyway use a script for changing my "state", so adding one more command there would be very convenient

Thanks again for your efforts!

Re: *ZapLoc* - Gowalla/Foursquare/Facebook places/Latitude aggregator - "All your location based services are belong to us" ;) - testers wanted
 

Well... different circumstances and different usecases :)
- Over here, the place is littered with towers, and the plan is to even consider smaller cells to handle the increasing amount of users.
- I only share/use latitude location on city level, so the accuracy of cell-tower here (<500m) is more than enough for me.

Main reason is: GPS off -> more battery time :)

btw, ZapLoc failed to install here. This is what faster application manager said:

Re: *ZapLoc* - Gowalla/Foursquare/Facebook places/Latitude aggregator - "All your location based services are belong to us" ;) - testers wanted
 

Well, for the use case of ZapLoc (wherein latitude is just a little side-effect I added recently), even <500m is somewhat less than useable. If all you want is latitude at "city level", I really suggest Azketu's script from the latitude thread.... ZapLoc is aimed at way better accuracy than that.

Let me put it this way: Sure, in theory, I could add "cell-tower-only location". But since that is useless for spot-checkins I would have to disable that feature, most likely... then... why would you be using ZapLoc in the first place? Then I would need to add larger fudge radius for checkins, and you'll be checkin in to the coffee shop down the street ALL THE TIME even though you are home :)

Is that useful? :/

But I'll consider adding it anyway... simply because it's probably quite easy to do. It will come with a warning that it'll probably make parts of the program unusable tho.

What the ¤/(##.... we just had this working. I didn't touch anything (except attemp to promote the package to extras). What's the problem!?!? *argh*

EDIT: Oh I know what happened. ZapLoc got promoted to extras/testing, but the google package it depends on didn't..... ODD. You need to grab google-api-python-client from extras/devel then.

*facepalm*

/Z

Re: *ZapLoc* - Gowalla/Foursquare/Facebook places/Latitude aggregator - "All your location based services are belong to us" ;) - testers wanted
 

if only I had the time I'd write my own smart updater :/

Re: *ZapLoc* - Gowalla/Foursquare/Facebook places/Latitude aggregator - "All your location based services are belong to us" ;) - testers wanted
 

But what needs to be smart about it with only city accuracy? Azketu's updater will be fine.... It will only detect cell tower changes. And only update on change. And won't suck battery (cell tower location detection takes no extra battery, even though the GPS icon is lit up)

As an alternative, you can take mine just posted to the Latitude thread, but change it back to use cell towers (it's a single line change) and be done with it. :)

/Z

Re: *ZapLoc* - Gowalla/Foursquare/Facebook places/Latitude aggregator - "All your location based services are belong to us" ;) - testers wanted
 

Great idea .... but I don't have a CLUE how to actually detect this from python!?

Help, anyone??!!

Well there is an issue that starting the app ALWAYS restars the daemon (to reload it's config) but this also resets the daemons clock, so it will post something pretty much immediately.

I will probably change this.

Somehow.


Great idea, I could add command line options to the daemon. The daemon already kills any running copies of itself when you start it (or at least is supposed to) but it always reverts to the configuration file values.

/Z

Re: *ZapLoc* - Gowalla/Foursquare/Facebook places/Latitude aggregator - "All your location based services are belong to us" ;) - testers wanted
 

I'm with an error in zaploc-daemon.py:

Any idea?

Thanks.

Re: *ZapLoc* - Gowalla/Foursquare/Facebook places/Latitude aggregator - "All your location based services are belong to us" ;) - testers wanted
 

Yep, you are missing python-location library.

Become root and do

I had forgotten to add that as a dependency - will be fixed in the next version.

/Z

Re: *ZapLoc* - Gowalla/Foursquare/Facebook places/Latitude aggregator - "All your location based services are belong to us" ;) - testers wanted
 

Thank you! ZapLoc now get the GPS location, but maps does not update correctly. In Brazil, only the top half of the map is loaded. The other half (below Tocantins State) remains as "Loading". I tried with all the maps available on ZapLoc.

Thanks!

Re: *ZapLoc* - Gowalla/Foursquare/Facebook places/Latitude aggregator - "All your location based services are belong to us" ;) - testers wanted
 

Hmm, that is odd. I had something similar occur to me once, and rebooting the phone helped. It could be some file is locked by an earlier (killed?) version of the program, or somesuch.....

I frankly do not know how it can happen, but it has indeed happened to me as well (a particular set of tiles refuse to load, regardless of which map service I choose).

/Z

Re: *ZapLoc* - Gowalla/Foursquare/Facebook places/Latitude aggregator - "All your location based services are belong to us" ;) - testers wanted
 

Exactly. If I can help.

EDIT: If needed, I can post screenshots with the bug. The problem occour with South America, South Africa, Australia... on the same zoom level.

Tnx.

Re: *ZapLoc* - Gowalla/Foursquare/Facebook places/Latitude aggregator - "All your location based services are belong to us" ;) - testers wanted
 

I have authorized ZapLoc with my Facebook account successfully.
But whenever I hit the Facebook places button after searching for a second or two (showing the moving 110101 signs) it gives me an error, in XTerm it tells me
" Unexpected error: <class ´urllib2.HTTPError´> "

Anyone knows what the problem is here?

Re: *ZapLoc* - Gowalla/Foursquare/Facebook places/Latitude aggregator - "All your location based services are belong to us" ;) - testers wanted
 

Ok, this was a bug. I was missing a whole hemisphere :)

Sorry to anyone south of the equator! It wasn't my intent to cut you off

/Z

Re: *ZapLoc* - Gowalla/Foursquare/Facebook places/Latitude aggregator - "All your location based services are belong to us" ;) - testers wanted
 

YOu don't need to, I just added cell-tower-locations only in ZapLoc (it's trivial, after all). I just don't know how actually useful it is, so any report back would be appreciated.

For instance, if you use auto-checkin you'll probably check in to the wrong place all the time (the one closest to the tower, not to you)

However, I just had an idea: If you know you are always at tower X when you are "home", you can then MOVE the zaploc of "home" to the tower. Then you'll be checked in as "home" when you are there. Might work. :)

Since I'm fairly rural, actually testing tower changes would involve a high fuel consumption and would be expensive to do well, so... yeah, I won't be able to test that much.

/Z

Re: [Announce] ZapLoc - a Gowalla/Foursquare/Facebook places/Latitude aggregator - "All your location based services are belong to us" ;)
 

I'm still failing horribly at installing your tool....

the google-api-python-client doesn't install correctly. I went commandline and found out it is complaining about a simplejson package not being there (but it doesn't exist as separate package)

Any missing dependency?

Edit: the missing package is python-simplejson

Re: [Announce] ZapLoc - a Gowalla/Foursquare/Facebook places/Latitude aggregator - "All your location based services are belong to us" ;)
 

Hi MasterZap,

Could I request a feature to back off on the frequency of location updates as the battery life decreases and perhaps even turn it off completely if it drops below 15% charge (this is what google maps on Symbian does, I believe -- update only if cell tower changes, slowly falling back on update frequency as charge drops)

Having all those values use configurable would be even better :)

Thanks for your work so far. Much appreciated.

Re: [Announce] ZapLoc - a Gowalla/Foursquare/Facebook places/Latitude aggregator - "All your location based services are belong to us" ;)
 

this is so cool mate.......tq....

Re: [Announce] ZapLoc - a Gowalla/Foursquare/Facebook places/Latitude aggregator - "All your location based services are belong to us" ;)
 

I now have ZapLoc running fine, and updating my latitude location using cell only. Works great :)

I had one weird update for a completely wrong location. It seems to be some kind of default location that is set before the cell tower location is found - I've seen this flash by shortly in map apps.

Could it be ZapLoc is not correctly waiting for the cell position?

Re: [Announce] ZapLoc - a Gowalla/Foursquare/Facebook places/Latitude aggregator - "All your location based services are belong to us" ;)
 

Correct, I'll add this as a dependency.

It's suprisingly hard (unless there is a bleeding obvious method I am unaware of) to figure out what *debian level* packages are dependencies on a python app... :/

/Z

Re: [Announce] ZapLoc - a Gowalla/Foursquare/Facebook places/Latitude aggregator - "All your location based services are belong to us" ;)
 

how to move and add new location on foursquare or fb?

Re: [Announce] ZapLoc - a Gowalla/Foursquare/Facebook places/Latitude aggregator - "All your location based services are belong to us" ;)
 

You can't create spots for the other services, you can only create ZapLoc's from existing spots.

At least... not yet (and I'm not sure I plan to do that - don't hold your breath for that feature any time soon)

For now:

• For gowalla, use http://m.gowalla.com
• For foursquare, use http://www.cotchin.com/m/
• I don't know about facebook, sadly, touch.facebook.com used to sort-of work, but now they broke it :(

/Z

Re: [Announce] ZapLoc - a Gowalla/Foursquare/Facebook places/Latitude aggregator - "All your location based services are belong to us" ;)
 

Glad you like it. I think there may be room for improvement on the cell-mode, though.

Now, it polls the cell just like it was previously polling the GPS. However, you don't NEED to poll the cell at intervals, because it doesnt' take any new power to keep that on. So the idea is to simply turn the "cell mode" location on, keep it on, and only change when it changes. I havn't figured out the details of that yet, but I think I will do that eventually.

Also for GPS mode, I want to have a mode where it instead of stopping completely, switches to cell tower, then waits for cell-tower switch, and THEN does a new try on the GPS (this is what I had planned for the UI option "only when cell tower changes" for interval, but this isn't implemented yet)

ZapLoc itself ineed DOESN'T wait, but defaults to "last position used", but it's not ZapLoc that posts to latitude, it's the ZapLoc-Daemon, and that *DOES* wait for a mode=2 (celltower) fix (run it with verbose to see it spew stupid amounts of details about what it is doing)

That will shut down the old daemon and start a new one in XTerm, spewing crap.

When you are done reading it, you can CTRL-C it and restart the background daemon with:

Could be fun if you are bored :)

/Z

Re: [Announce] ZapLoc - a Gowalla/Foursquare/Facebook places/Latitude aggregator - "All your location based services are belong to us" ;)
 

I used this bit of python code (uses dbus) for listening to CellID changes when I threw together "Rest in Peace": http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php...628#post428628

It could be modified for your needs to only ask location updates when the CellID changes

Re: [Announce] ZapLoc - a Gowalla/Foursquare/Facebook places/Latitude aggregator - "All your location based services are belong to us" ;)
 

(from http://wiki.maemo.org/Documentation/...cation_methods)

so for a short time it may give the center of the country as position... *sigh*

Re: [Announce] ZapLoc - a Gowalla/Foursquare/Facebook places/Latitude aggregator - "All your location based services are belong to us" ;)
 

Right, but that comes in with "mode=0" which I ignore (each fix comes in with a "mode", where 0 is "crappy guess like center of coutry", 1 is... donno what... 2 is a celltower fix and 3 is a gps fix)

I only bother about mode 2 and 3 in GPS mode, and only mode 2 in cell mode.

/Z