I’m back from Over The Air 2011 – a mobile tech conference with an overnight hack-a-thon challenge.
This was the fourth year I’ve been to OTA, and I normally submit some random hack.
In fact, this is the first time I didn’t stay up all night, in a 15-hour non-stop coding splurge writing a massive, over-ambitious beast of a mobile app. I must be getting old… this time I wrote a couple of quick hacks, each of which under a couple of hundred lines long, and had eight hours sleep instead. Much more civilised.
This is what I managed to come up with:
hack 1: a crap husband helper
Sometimes I stop at the shop on the way home from work because I want something. Invariably, I don’t think to check with Amy if we need anything. I get home with a shopping bag, and get something along the lines of “Why didn’t you tell me you were going to the shops? We need nappies.” At which point, I feel like I should dutifully volunteer to go back out to the shop.
Going to a talk on the BlueVia API gave me an idea.
I wrote a bit of Python to run on my home server, that will keep an eye on where my phone is using the BlueVia Location API.
If I go near the shops, it will send a message to my wife using the BlueVia Send SMS API, to say “I’m near <insert shop name here>, do you need me to get you anything?”.
90 lines of Python is all it takes to make me look like a thoughtful and considerate husband. Huzzah.
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