Monday, December 8, 2008

GPS Tracking at last....

So, I finally got real-time GPS tracking up and working... It took a little bit of effort, and some interesting tweaks to get my iphone to update things, but now you can see it:



If it's working correctly you should see a little google map insert with my current position (and my recent previous positions.

Soon-ish this url should work: https://where.benjaminbernard.com (DNS servers have to be updated first)

So how does this work? 4 things combine to make this a functioning system.


  1. GPS Tracker - a free app store iphone app that uploads your data to instamapper.com. They also provide the actual map display.
  2. FastMac iV - Extended battery - Though it looks like a tumor on my phone and makes things awkward, I really enjoy the extra battery life, and you need it if your gps is going to be on all the time.
  3. Insomnia - an app that keeps your phone from suspending, which allows apps in the background to keep running and using things like the network (this is a jailbroken app only)
  4. Backgrounder - a jailbroken app that lets you background programs individually


This all this lets me run GPS Tracker in the background with enough battery power (hopefully) to get me through the day.

I've been wanting to do this for quite some time, and was the main reason I bought my first GPS-enabled smart phone. I always meant to write this system myself, but never got around to it... I'm actually pretty excited about doing the whole lifehacker thing... If there were a good way to do it I would wear a webcam and have it upload picture feeds all the time, I think that would be pretty cool (if extremely geeky. Maybe me and a few other cyclops can get this thing going!