Notices

I hope I didn't wear out the electrons in your GPS?

/Z

You obviously did. Either you send me some of your GPS elecrons or the mods will be hearing about this.

Board seems to be on its way out. First GSM modem, now GPS. I have scheduled it for Nokia care these days, they seem to really want to help. With luck, it'll be in shop tomorrow.

Man I feel naked without N900. Internet stinks without microb, and capacitive screen with no keyboard is a nightmare. No Series Finale, no hi-precision screen. OTOH, I get home with 75 percent battery left. This is new.

I just found this, and can't wait to try it out. I have one major question and a request for a feature:

Does this use the v2 API for Facebook? I know BarioSquare does not, and that's what I've been using up till now. The v1 interface is slated to go away very soon.

As for the request: Could you have the daemon check for the connected WIFI spot (and/or nearby spots) and just use that if it's something useful, avoiding the need for a GPS fire up?

I ask this because I would love to let this check me in to places, but many times the places I am at can't get a valid GPS lock, and AGPS is very inaccurate in my area. In most cases though, there are wifi hot spots that I'm either connected to or that are clearly visible that would indicate my location. It would be great for it to see my work wifi network and just check me in at work. Same with home, and/or a few other places I frequent. And since just checking which SSID I'm connected to takes almost no power (vs a GPS fire-up), it would drain the battery quiet a bit less.

I'd be even happier with adding an option to only check the currently connected wifi spot (no GPS check) while the app is not running. That would be the ideal method for me, since most places I go have some form of wifi, but are enclosed enough to make a GPS lock hard to get. And the few that aren't are places I could manually run the app at to check into.

Great app though, and thanks for all it does already! I really like the interface, and the ability to group spots from other services into one, and locally correct their GPS spots when they're off a bit on the service! All great features!

You mean FourSquare? Yes.

And it's a quite simple API, I don't know how the v1 looked, but I don't quite get what is holding BarrioSquare up in upgrading it?


Hah, that is a thought I had myself. In some future this may happen (but don't hold your breath).

The big issue is really how you would associate a GPS position with a WiFi network... since the nokia location layer doesn't use WiFi at all (as far as I know, anyway), it would mean that you yourself basically have to define "my wifi is over here". Which could be done. Maybe just allow you to associate a WiFi network with a ZapLoc? Could be done.

Good thought. May happen. Not guarantee it. And probably not terribly soon...

EDIT: Does anyone know how to get the current WLAN id from python?

/Z

Just been looking over my latitude history, and it seems to be off. They're all roughly in the right area (within 100-200m or so), but the accuracy radii shown are far too precise, so clearly something's amiss. It never used to look like this with other updaters.

Incidentally, do you think it'd be worthwhile to get together with the other devs and modularise the service bits of your software, so that we only have one latitude, etc daemon running but used by multiple GUIs? Or even just multiple deamons exporting compatible interfaces so they can all be used interchangeably - UNIX style. Seems like an awful duplication of effort, and it's a pain when I want to use a latitude client to view my friends (which then wants to update my location) whilst zaploc's also trying to update my location, etc....that's all.

I'm sure there must be an easier way (over DBus) than this, but there is a python-wifi package in the repo's which should do what you need?
Example usage here.

If you look back a little in the thread you'll see I just figured out that the code I use to read the GPS is actually misreporting the accuracy by a factor of 10.


Nice thought. While the code has some small level of modularity to it, it is really only on the level of adding an additional service to it shuold be "not super hard".

But the code isn't really made to be pretty, reusable, or shiny... just to work

/Z

Thanks - but I think this library is overkill. It seems to be much more low level than I need.

Instead, I found "conic" library which seems to help me a lot with this. It almost works too Build 50 has a first stab at implementing this; you'll find your WiFi network as a choice in the list of distances to autocheck in from. Lemme know if it explodes. (Note that also Latitude will be updated from the ZapLoc wifi locatoin in this case, keeping the GPS completely off all the time)

/Z

Hi Zap,

Any changes to get network access initiation when Zaploc needs to update information to Internet (earlier post)?
Time to time Zaploc updates info OK (set 30min), but sometimes there are several hour gaps. Both, in case you are in the same place longer time or locations are changed.

What about adding a place with ZapLoc? Is this possible?

Sorry if this is answered before, but I cannot find a hint in the first post.