Snakes on a Phone
Today the mail server is down so I started tinkering with (i.e. breaking) my phone. I’d been thinking about modding my phone so that I could forward texts from my inbox to a twitter account. This has obvious applications e.g. use mobiles as powerful classroom SMS voting devices. I managed to programatically send SMS from my phone to different numbers. Now I just need to monitor the inbox and forward any SMSes to a Twitter account. I hope to have a prototype of this working soon. If anyone would like to help me test it please let me know.
I used psy60 to do this. It allows a powerful but easy-to-use programming language called Python to be used on modern Nokia phones (such as my N95). The amazing thing is that Python gives you access to all the features of the handset. Just browsing the APIs (i.e the documentation) I can see how you could have a lot of fun with it. Your phone could access your GPS and update your twitter or facebook status whenever you were in a specific location for instance. You could have a “honey I’m on the way” SMS be triggered when you leave the office in the direction of home. You could create a shopping list reminder trigger when you are near the shop. You could have an alarm go off when you are stray too near the fridge or the wine wrack during detox January.
import messaging, appuifw
nbr = “1234″ # the mobile number
sms_text =u“hello world” # your message
messaging.sms_send(nbr, sms_text)
#How Simple is Python!
One interesting way of looking at your phone with this capability is as computer you can remote control via SMS. You could send an SMS to your phone (from a second phone obviously or a PC) and have your phone do something - take a photo, record audio, take a GPS reading, connect to the web etc.
I predict that phones will soon come equipped with more sensors i.e. light, temperature, distance (lasers) etc. A GPS is a sensor and has spawned massive applications in recent electronics and computing so it may be worth exploring sensors more - all the technology exists cheaply.
Came across a program today someone wrote to track your phone if it gets stolen. You can SMS it and it will tell you its GPS co-ordinates
http://lc-cartrack.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/lc-cartrack/LcCarTrack.py
A classic line from the license text:
### ****** WARNNG:Using this program to track others than yourself, or things
### ****** you don’t own, is forbidden in most countries and legally
### ****** persecuted (privacy law).
Actually the real value of this is by thinkning of your phone as an SMS gateway.
[...] polls: I mentioned these previously and I wrote some software for Nokia NSeries phones that effectively turns your phone into a router and would allow you to run Twitter-style [...]