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. it’s during times like these that you want your iphone to “call home” regularly in case of such a loss, or let’s be more realistic theft. That’s 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. it’s 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?” it’s up to you).

after creating your phone’s Twitter account, you’re ready to set up your iphone to tweet in on a regular basis. here’s 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, you’ll 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 don’t 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 you’re 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 iphone’s location and discreetly control it

if you want to know where your phone is, have a selection of tools to help get it back, don’t want to mess with the command line, and don’t mind passing your location data through his server, antonio calatrava’s 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 iphone’s 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 they’ve 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, there’s 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.