Posts Tagged ‘mobile’

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My HackDay hack – see where your friends are

Friday, October 24th, 2008

Today was IBM HackDay 6 – an internal HackDay run across IBM‘s many labs – and I managed to spend a bit of today hacking something together.

PhotobucketIn a nutshell, it’s kinda like Plazes, brightkite, dodgeball and others… find out where your friends currently are. And see where they are from your mobile.

The twist is that it gives you quite precise locations for friends within a known indoor campus – such as Hursley Park.

Hursley, like many IBM locations, is a campus, with thousands of employees in a 100 acre site.

What if you’re trying to find someone? Say you’re in a meeting, and a colleague hasn’t turned up yet. Where are they? Are they on their way?

Or you’ve arranged to meet a colleague for lunch or a coffee, and you seem to keep missing each other.

The idea of this hack was to build on the Hursley Maps tool to come up with some way for you to be able to quickly check where your friends are while you’re at work.

Okay… so it’s a fairly flimsy scenario. 🙂

But I’ve enjoyed playing with location-based services ideas before, and thought this would be an interesting twist. Plus, it was an excuse to play with Django which I’ve wanted to try since hearing about it at BathCamp.

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GPS Intermediate Driver for Windows Mobile (and getting it to work!)

Monday, August 25th, 2008

My last two Windows Mobile phones have both had GPS, so I’ve played with code to get my location from the GPS a few times. These have generally been quick hacked-together bits and pieces. In all of them, I wrote my own GPS code. I knew that the GPS device would be accessible through a serial port, so I just connected to the relevant COM port and started reading. It’s easy to parse – NMEA sentences are written with an update on each line, in comma-separated strings.

After sharing my OpenCellId client last week, I was encouraged to try rewriting the GPS code for it using the Windows Mobile GPS Intermediate Driver. So I had a quick try. I was vaguely aware of it before, but hadn’t taken a proper look. In this post, I’ll describe briefly what it is, it’s benefits over home-grown hacks such as my own, and share a couple of things that I had to do to get it to work.

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OpenCellId for Windows Mobile

Tuesday, August 19th, 2008

I talked about this yesterday, but it’s ready for sharing now.

screenshotWhat is this?
It’s a OpenCellID client for Windows Mobile

What does that mean?
It uses the GPS device connected to a Windows Mobile device (either internal or connected over Bluetooth) to identify exact latitude / longitude coordinates.

It combines this with the cell id of the GSM tower that your phone is currently communicating with.

These two measurements are uploaded to the database at OpenCellId.org

Why?
Because if enough people do this, then we will be able to build up a picture of where each GSM cell is.

Then people without GPS (either because their mobile devices don’t have GPS, or because their indoors) can work out where they are by looking up their current GSM cell in the OpenCellId database.

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OpenCellId – collecting data for mobile location-based services

Monday, August 18th, 2008

It is great to see a revived buzz around mobile location based apps and services. There are lots of new services to try. I try loads of them, the most recent was Moot just a few days ago (I love their video which I’ve embedded here – very cute), but there are way more than I can keep up with.

One problem they all share before they get to offer you their variations on useful location-based services is how to figure out where you are in the first place.

GPS is an obvious response, but not everyone has it on their mobile, and even if you do, it has some big problems – it can take a while to get a fix, won’t work indoors, etc.

Good solutions supplement this with other sources of information. Skyhook is getting a lot of attention at the moment for their service – mainly due to it being used in the iPhone. It means that the iPhone (and other devices using Skyhook) can work out where it is using GPS, but if a GPS fix cannot be made (or in the interim time while waiting for one) it can give an approximate location almost instantly using cell-tower triangulation and/or known WiFi access points.

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Writing a Bluetooth-based location-based reminder app

Sunday, May 25th, 2008

My bad back means that I’ve not spent too much time writing code for the past week or two. Tonight, I’m in the mood to try and hack something together.

I should probably try and do some work on my CurrentCost setup – now that I’ve got the new home server connected to the CurrentCost meter, I could write a script to start collecting data and do something with it.

But that can wait for another night – for tonight, I want to get back to doing something mobile.

One idea that I’ve had kicking around since last month is a location-based reminder app based around people – using Bluetooth as a way to know who is near you.

The idea was to have an application which lets you assign tasks in your Tasks list to Bluetooth device IDs for mobile phones and laptops. Then, when your phone sees that Bluetooth Device, it could remind you about that task.

For example, I could know that I want to talk to Will about a particular project. I can put this in my To Do list, but unless I’m actually looking at my To Do list when Will is around, it’s not very helpful.

But with this app, I set my To Do list to remind me to talk to him about it the next time I am near him – the next time his phone and/or laptop is within Bluetooth range, my mobile can prompt me with an alarm.

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Using a 3 mobile broadband dongle with the EEE PC

Thursday, April 24th, 2008

I’ve been loaned a USB mobile broadband modem by 3 to try out for a few months. I’ll write a proper post about why I’ve got it and what I think of it later. First, I wanted to share how I got it working with my EEE PC.

What am I talking about?
The modem is a small USB dongle – not dissimilar in appearance from a USB memory stick. You put a SIM card in, and the small mobile phone radio inside gives an Internet connection to any computer that it’s plugged into.

The dongle is a Huawei E169G.

So what’s the problem?
The dongle is supported on Windows and Mac OS. Not Linux. My EEE PC still runs the original Xandros Linux.

Should it work on Linux?
Posts on the eeeuser forum suggested that it wouldn’t be possible.

Other dongles seem to have caused less trouble, but the E169 wouldn’t work.

The consensus seemed to be that:

Huawei 169 requires a patch to usb-storage driver to recognize the hardware similarly to 220… I think that ASUS is on a way to produce a small upgrade package to fix the issue for E169.

And a little Googling failed to turn up anyone who has got the Huawei E169 to work with an EEE PC on Linux.

Still… how hard could it really be, eh? 🙂

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But, I like transcoding!

Sunday, April 20th, 2008

screenshot - Image Hosted by ImageShack.usMobile transcoding – services which turn a webpage into something better suited for a mobile web browser – is an often contentious topic. It’s a topic which has come up several times recently, and at best people will begrudgingly describe it as a necessary temporary evil.

Don’t get me wrong – it hasn’t been without problems. It has been used in inappropriate ways, and I know web-developers whose sites have been broken by poor (and inflicted!) uses of mobile transcoding.

But as a practical, day-to-day tool – I kinda like it.

I started using Google’s transcoder (GWT) because when you use the mobile version of Google’s RSS reader, any links you click on are transcoded by GWT for you. And I find it very useful.

It creates efficient pages which render well in Pocket Internet Explorer. Plus it stops my phone trying to download some ridiculously large webpages over GPRS (argh… curse web-developers who have 1MB webpages on the front of your sites!).

It also adds a link to any RSS feeds it finds in a page at the top – clicking on which will take you to the feed in Google Reader (my RSS reader of choice at the moment), from where you can subscribe to the feed. (Slightly roundabout, but the only way I know to subscribe to new feeds from Google Reader Mobile).

I like.

But it’s a bit of a faff getting a page transcoded by GWT if you aren’t already given a link to a transcoded page. So (in the tiny window between tonight’s screaming fits… gah – when will the baby start sleeping through the night?!) I added a new tool to my set of Pocket Internet Explorer (PIE) extensions: one that will re-open the current page using Google mobile transcoder.

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Betavine

Wednesday, April 9th, 2008

I heard of Vodafone Betavine last September, at mobileCampLondon. I never got round to thinking of something to write using their API, so didn’t sign up in the end.

I met up with Owen from Betavine again last weekend at Over The Air which gave him another chance to ‘sell’ it to me. 🙂

Actually, both he and another Vodafone guy, Matt, spent time going through the idea behind Betavine and the benefits that it tries to bring – and it turned out that I’d missed some of the idea behind the site.

They convinced me to give the site another try, so last night I logged back on and started adding some content to see how it all works.

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Posted in web | 3 Comments »

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