iPhone Home - teach your iphone to call you when stolen
Picture the following
- you happily flung away $400 or so for a brand new shiny iPhone (wheeee!).
What on earth will you do if it gets stolen? Hmmmmm?
Why, you want to prepare for that by…..the iPhone Lojack! To wit:
…Way back, one of our readers begged for an iPhone LoJack solution. He wanted his iPhone to “call home” regularly in case of loss or, let’s be more realistic, theft. Over the past week, I finally had a chance to give this request some time, and I put together findme. It’s a command-line program that returns the location of the cell phone tower nearest to your iPhone. 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 SMSes? For this part of the puzzle, enter Twitter. Twitter dev Britt Selvitelle helped walk me through the setup for a private account that allows your iPhone to phone home but keeps the location data relatively secure.
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 you approve will see the updates for this iPhone-only account (just you? you + spouse? spouse, kids, and “special friends?” 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.….MORE…..
What a brilliant idea! And it uses shell script! My life is complete! 
But if you don’t worship and adore shell scripting and unix yourself, here are some resources to help you learn:
ThankYouVeryMuch!
Owlbert
ps - nifty iphone goodies you crave?
NEW BLACK Apple iPhone Unlocked 3G 8gb Phone GPS WiFi iPod mp3 Camera Touch
NEW WHITE Apple iPhone Unlocked 3GS 32gb Phone GPS WiFi iPod mp3 Video Camera
NEW BLACK Apple iPhone Unlocked 3G 16gb Phone GPS WiFi iPod mp3 Camera Touch
Always On: How the iPhone Unlocked the Anything-Anytime-Anywhere Future–and Loc
Always on: How the iPhone Unlocked the Anything-Anytime
NEW WHITE Apple iPhone Unlocked 3G 16gb Phone GPS WiFi
Always On: How the iPhone Unlocked the Anything-Anytime
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