Thread: Lost my N900
View Single Post
TomJ's Avatar
Posts: 505 | Thanked: 665 times | Joined on Oct 2009
#13
Originally Posted by greygoo View Post
Makes me wonder what the best way to track your phone would be. If the device is stolen and the thief connects to the internet, the N900 could be prepared to notify the original owner about its location and maybe send pictures of its surroundings, ideally triggered by entering the wrong unlock code (which of course requires it to be set by the user).

I personally have my phone configured to connect to my openvpn server at home by default and use sshfs to copy files to and from it, as this way i can access the phones memory wherever it gets connected to the internet as the ip adress of the tunnel device stays the same - amazingly one can even change from wlan to 3g while copying files using sshfs, just some short freeze while the tunnel reconnects. It's not as fast as usb but it's very very convenient.
I now realized that if my phone would get lost, I still could connect to it and would have shell access (i'm pretty sure there would be a way to retrieve gps coordinates from the shell), however setting up a openvpn server is not what everybody does in his spare time, so I wonder if there is another, more easy way to keep the phone accessible from remote, or at least let it connect home in periods.

A dyndns client for the n900 might do the trick, if there is also an ssh server running on the device. If there is interest and it's not yet existing, I'd try compiling some dynamic dns client. Not sure how the different interfaces get handled, but i think it should at least be possible to make the device remote accessible when it connects to wlan.
I have seen it suggested that one could have a daemon check a URL periodically and, should the URL return a flag that the device has been lost, start sending position updates by whatewver means appropriate (text, email, even uploading via ftp, pixelpipe or using the google latitude scripts that are beind discussed on other threads?)

I can't find the thread I'm thinking of, but a bit of google-fu turned up this, the principles of which should be fairly easy to adapt?

What I would I would like reported in this situation:
1) Best positon data available (from all means at the device's disposal), with time stamp.
2) Last solid GPS position.
3) Photos from fore and aft cameras (to ease locating it if it was simply dropped/mislaid somewhere).

Typing this it occurs to me that simply taking a geotagged photo and uploading it would give most of the gen I'd be after...
__________________
Want to know how to add public holidays to your device calendar? See the instructions wiki page.

Want to improve the location bar's search capabilities? there's a wiki page for that too...

Last edited by TomJ; 2010-01-20 at 07:19.