Notices

Do let us know what you need, we can always try to help... Can we get the daemon part first and get it running?

Right, I should have been clearer in my description that "link above" reffered to the google api download posted a few posts above mine. Duh. I edited my post to reflect this (which will make this thread poshumusly hard to follow, but hey )

I wonder if some Smart Person could turn the google python api's into a package.... assuming the google api distribution rules allow this....(?)

As for GPS, all the changes I did were the following:

#1: Change the mode from METHOD_ACWP to METHOD_AGNSS (See documentation of python location API at http://wiki.maemo.org/PyMaemo/Using_Location_API ). Another choice would be METHOD_USER_SELECTED which seems to take it from some configuration.

#2: Tell it to ignore any gps point with an accuracy worse than 150 meters (actually, variable "acclimit" in the code is set to this, I was actually planning to make it an option, but never did, you could change "acclimit" to whatever accuracy you think is appropriate by just editing line 112 in the code)

Frankly, I don't know the GPS api well enough to know exactly what happens and if it will try endlessly to find satellites or not. Probably. There is, most certainly, no clever code in this snippet to try to do anything intelligent here, for sure.

For me, I have a low wooden house so I have quite OK GPS signal also indoors, and since I deem non-GPS coordinates to be useless, for me it is a "feature" that it never uses cell tower locations at all (then "last known good" GPS coord is better, IMHO).

But you are quite right about that if you are in a bunker, it will quite probably try for way too long. Especially since my extremely simplictic implementation of the "once" option, is that it stops after the first successful fix (with successful being "better than 150 meter accuracy").

So I'm guessing it will never actually exit properly for a cell tower location.

All these are things that could be fixed, but, hey, this was just a hack for my own use, and I'm just poking at this thing with a stick with very little understanding anway, so.....

((For example, does anyone know, that if I set the longest interval for getting GPS point - unfortunately 120 seconds seems the max - the GPS icon is still on all the time. Does this mean the GPS radio is actually on consuming battery... OR.... does it mean that it is only on in bursts every two minutes? This is completely unknown to me, unfortunately, but would be helpful to know. Also how to set longer durations than 120 seconds, because then all this AlarmeD nonsense would be unnecessary))

/Z

Oh, right, they broke the mobile one somehow. Crap.

/Z

One question:

Why the recommendation to use alarmed for automatic execution instead of just making it a cron job?

Uhm, AlarmeD is just a user-friendly frontend to cron jobs anyway, right? So... no particular reason other than that it is more user-friendly?

/Z

Ah, so that's what AlarmeD is. Got it.

What's the point in an app that allows people to check up on you?

You choose what people you share your location with, generally those who also share with you. It's fun to see where your friends are. You also can let google record your location history and look back at where you were last November 11th at 3pm, for example.

And if you don't want anyone to know, turn the app off or just disable sharing.

Some trust in Google's good faith is of course necessary

What's the point of not?

/Z

It's fun. And in case something happened to me, my friends would know where my location was at least 15 minutes before that thing happened to me. Just in case.

And it's fun

Thanks again MasterZap. Your explanation was very clarifying. I'll try to read the code and see if I can get what I want exactly (if my people stop bothering me ). In case of getting something useful and different I'll post it here (don't wait for me or maybe you will have to wait all your life).