We signed up for the Family Locator service from our cell provider (see link above for more info).
The map shown is where Brandy and I are right now. (I’m the one in Seattle, she’s the one in Bellevue.)
Kinda cool. It only works with my phone and Brandy’s phone though, not Amy’s. So I guess that means Amy will be getting the upgraded cellphone she has wanted for awhile now, even though she has yet to prove she can keep hers charged and with her for more than a week straight. :-)
Of course, it is all restricted and you explicitly have to log in and push a button to find the location of one of the phones on the plan (or set it automatic times for it to check, but in a limited fashion.) Of course what I would LIKE is a system where it would automatically check my location once every minute or two, would save all those data points (or the last 24 hours worth or whatever) and then put the resulting plot on a map that I could automatically expose on my website either live or refreshed every X minutes or whatever.
But it doesn’t quite do that. Now, might it be possible to use this along with some external automation to try to do something like that? Maybe. But it is probably beyond my current skill set, and would take me quite a while to figure out. Quite a while that I don’t really have.
Oh well.
But this will prove quite useful as Amy is rapidly approaching teenagerdom… :-)
So, does the interface supply the GPS coords to you in some way? If so, WWW::Mechanize can probably get you where you need to be, it’s dead simple to use (in perl).
No, it does not give actual coordinates. It gives a map. And in another location you can get a text description, but it is along the lines of “You have located Sam near 1534 West 5th St in Seattle, WA.” There are clearly things you could do with this, but it would take more than 5 minutes of work.