Comments on: HOWTO: Track your mac

By: Adam Whitney

Adam Whitney — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 20:43:23 +0000

Tom, thanks for the sweet writeup. It works great!

I did find one typo in the index.php file of the root 'locateme' directory. Line 21 should read "Content-type" instead of "Contet-type". Once I fixed that, the latest snapshot loaded just fine in my browser.

By: tompohl

tompohl — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 16:03:38 +0000

Great catch! I've updated the tgz file so anyone else who downloads it will benefit from your find!

By: tompohl

tompohl — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 19:39:34 +0000

Which part do you think isn't working? Does it take pictures and place them in /.locateme/images (either its send or taken subfolder)? You won't be able to browse to the /.locateme folder directly from Finder since it is a hidden folder, but you can get there by choosing "Go"->"Go to Folder …" from the menu in Finder.

By: me with SL

me with SL — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 17:49:17 +0000

i cannot get this to work on my SL?

By: Matthew Nuzum

Matthew Nuzum — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 19:44:10 +0000

Clever trick. There's no gps built into the computer but somehow my phone is able to grab remarkably accurate coordinates using wifi. Maybe tagging the image w/ current location would be a nice enhancement.

Of course when my wife's phone got stolen I was able to track it's location just fine and yet I still had to buy a new phone.

By: tompohl

tompohl — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 14:54:23 +0000

If you look through my server-side code, you'll see that I make a call out to api.hostip.info to get a rough idea of where the machine is based upon source ip. It is fairly accurate. I was debating about using a service that returned the gps coordinates, but didn't think it would be very accurate because it wasn't taking into consideration BSSIDs of networks physically near by like the iphone or ipod does!