no cell phone owner wants their phone stolen or lost, but sometimes even with all the precautions
in the world, you may still manage to lose track of it. its during times like these that you want your
iphone to call home regularly in case of such a loss, or lets be more realistic theft. Thats what
findme addresses. When run, it tells you the tower iD, plus its latitude and longitude courtesy of
Google Maps.

Still, how to get the location report to a place you can get it, but nobody else can…and without
receiving a zillion sMs messages? For this part of the puzzle, enter Twitter. You can set up a private
account that allows your iphone to phone home but keeps the location data relatively private.

To do this, create a new Twitter account just for your iphone (it will need its own unique email
address, separate from your main account, so have one handy). open the settings panel, and look
for the protect My Updates checkbox. its towards the bottom of the page, just above the save
button. check this and click save. With protected updates, only the Twitter users that you approve
will see the updates for this iphone-only account (is it just you? You and a spouse? You, a spouse,
kids, and special friends? its up to you).

after creating your phones Twitter account, youre ready to set up your iphone to tweet in on a
regular basis. heres how:

1. Install findme.

You can download findme as part of the erica Utilities package available on cydia.
findme will be installed to /usr/bin.

2. Make sure you have curl and sed.

Curl is a command-line utility that can be used to GeT and posT URLs, and sed helps edit text
streams, such as trimming the XML that findme produces. Both can be installed
via cydia.

3. Create a tweet shell script.

Copy the following text into a new text ile called tweet, and add it to your binaries folder:

curl --basic --user username:password --data status=`/usr/bin/findme \
   | sed "s/.*<Latitude>/<Latitude>/" \
   | sed "s/<\/Longitude>.*/<\/Longitude>/"` \
 http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml

Use the proper path to findme and substitute your actual username and password. Make the file
executable with the command chmod 755 tweet.

4. create a launch daemon. (You can ind more extensive explanation of recurring launch
daemon tasks in.) in /System/Library/LaunchDaemons, youll ind a simple
daemon that runs once a day, called com.apple.daily.plist. copy this to com.sadun.tweet.plist,
and edit it as follows:

Update the Label to com.sadun.tweet.

Delete the two lines that relate to nice. You dont want your script to be usurped by other
processes.

change the program arguments to /var/root/bin/tweet/.

change the start interval from 86400, according to your needs. 86400 is once a day (60
seconds x 60 minutes x 24 hours). You can set it to launch every 10 minutes (600) while
you check whether the launch daemon is functioning properly.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST
   1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>Label</key>
<string>com.sadun.tweet</string>
<key>ProgramArguments</key>
<array>
<string>/var/root/bin/tweet</string>
</array>
<key>StartInterval</key>
<integer>600</integer>
</dict>
</plist>

5. Reboot. This allows the iphone to restart, loading your new launch daemon. Your actual tweets
should look like this:

<Latitude>39.711611</Latitude><Longitude>-104.902137</Longitude>"

If youre traveling across the country, and want to share, change your start interval to 15 minutes d
or half an hour and use a public Twitter account. (Remember to reboot after making changes to the
launch daemon.)

Enjoy your new found location awareness!

iLocalis lets you monitor your iphones location and discreetly control it

if you want to know where your phone is, have a selection of tools to help get it back, dont want to
mess with the command line, and dont mind passing your location data through his
server, antonio calatravas iLocalis service (http://ilocalis.com) is the thing for you.

You can download iLocalis from cydia. When you irst run the application, it will ask you
to create a username and password for your new account. after your account is created, you can
access it online by logging in to http://ilocalis.com, which allows you to view your iphones location
and control it to some extent, through the easy-to-use website interface.

You can customize how often your iphone will post updates, the default being every 15 minutes.
also, you can see a number of other options along the side. You can set commands for your phone
to carry out the next time it synchronizes. You can make it discreetly call a number, so that you
can listen to the ambient noise and play detective.

You can set a message to pop up, either as
a note to yourself or to startle and confuse the new owner of your phone. You can make your
phone send an sMs that can let you know whether theyve swapped siM cards, and provide you
with the new number.

You can also track nearby friends who use iLocalis and send them messages through the service.

There are a few other commands that you can set from the iphone only. You can
have it update your location status to a Twitter account, similar to use of findme in. You
can also configure keywords that you can send in sMs form to trigger responses (they are casesensitive).
The locate command results in a text back with latitude and longitude information. The
callback command forces the phone to send a call to the number you tested it from.

If your phone is simply misplaced, theres a call forwarding feature: you can forward all your calls to
a new number until you get your phone back.

iLocalis is easy to use and affordable. after the 10-day trial, a small donation extends your account
for a whole year. You could of course donate more, if you really enjoy this app.

There is another service for jailbroken phones called Findmyi (www.indmyi.org) that can also help
with tracking and retrieval and certainly more to come.