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Geocron lets Latitude automate your life, or at least your wife
Our pockets and camera bags are stuffed with locationally aware devices, yet for some reason we find ourselves still having to do stuff manually when we get somewhere. Shouldn't our thermostat click on the AC when we head home? Shouldn't our house lock itself when we embark on our morning commute? Shouldn't our car come and rescue us, even if it entails turbo boosting through a brick wall? We tend to think so, and Sunlight Foundation's geocron is a simple way to start that kind of automation. Born out of a desire for one of the app's developers to avoid having to manually send his wife a text to pick him up at the train station, geocron tracks your location in Google Latitude and automatically e-mails, text messages, or pings a web page when you reach a certain location. You can set up windows of time for each activity and, while using this service does have the somewhat disconcerting requirement of perpetual access to your current location, the source code is available so you can run your own, private instance. Or, you could just give your wife a call -- regular conversation is generally considered an important part of a healthy relationship.
Linksys router turned into smartphone-controlled doorman (video)
Working for a large company comes with a lot of baggage, the least of which is an RFID security badge. For those small companies who can't afford such extravagantly wireless door key solutions there's another option: this DIY project completed by a team of developers at Sunlight Labs. It all centers around a Linksys WRT54GL, a Linux-based wireless router that, with a little firmware hackery and a bit of wiring, was tethered into the office's door release buzzer. The team then went about allowing SSH access to the router and created Android and iPhone apps that instantly connect to the device and open the door, authenticated by a PIN and a unique ID assigned to each device. Users can also deliver their PIN via SMS or a simple phone call to open the door. Elegant, impressive, open source, and one less thing to forget on a Monday morning when groggily heading to the office.
