Month: November 2010

Every holiday, between the food and family, I always seem to find time for a quick project. Last year I built the first version of Nottingham over the Thanksgiving break. This year was no exception, and I found myself putting the final touches on Sosumi for Mac after an eighteen hour coding streak this weekend.

Sosumi for Mac builds on the original Sosumi project I started last Summer — a PHP script that returned the location of your iPhone by scraping MobileMe’s website and that eventually evolved to use Apple’s “official” API once that was released.

Last week, Apple pushed a rather large update to the Find My iPhone service and made it free to all users. Along with that came some API changes, which broke Sosumi. With help from Andy Blyler and Michael Greb, we managed to get it working again. I took the opportunity to go all out and write a native Cocoa implementation of Sosumi as well. And, with that done, I went one step further and built a full-fledged desktop app for tracking all of your iDevices.

Now that it’s complete, it’s much easier to simply open up Sosumi for Mac, rather than having to re-login to Apple’s website or iPhone client each time. The desktop app also opens up some fun possibilities. A future version could notify you when your spouse leaves work in the afternoon so you know when to begin preparing dinner. Or alert you if your child strays from their normal route on the way home from school. Or, since Sosumi provides your device’s battery level, you could even send alerts if your phone needs to be charged soon.

Admittedly, this kind of always-on location tracking can certainly be creepy. But that’s almost always the case with these types of applications. Whether Fire Eagle, Foursquare, or Google Latitude — it’s always a matter of striking a reasonable balance between convenience and privacy. I trust you’ll use Sosumi for good rather than evil.

Download Sosumi, read more about it, or grab the source on Github and build something even cooler.

Back in June I wrote a detailed post describing how I backup my data. One of the key components of my backup strategy was using Backblaze for continuous, offsite recovery in the event of a disaster.

Well, disaster struck.

Last week, the hard drive in my father’s MacBook died. In the past, I’d setup a networked Time Machine drive to backup my parents’ laptops, but for whatever reason it never worked reliably. OS X would often become unable to mount the drive — even when connected to an Apple Airport. Fortunately, I gave up on Time Machine a few months ago and installed Backblaze on everybody’s Mac. Ponying up the $50/year per machine seemed like a great deal. Definitely worth the peace of mind it brings me knowing I don’t have to waste time fighting with Time Machine or manually backing up their data whenever I visit.

This past week, with my father’s hard drive verifiably dead, I’m happy to report that Backblaze performed flawlessly.

My father isn’t a heavy computer user, but he still had 20GB of data stored in Backblaze’s cloud. Once we verified that his data really was lost, I signed into Backblaze’s website and requested a full zip file backup of all his files. Twenty minutes later they emailed to say a 20GB zip file (!!!) was ready to download. Over my 30mbit Comcast connection it only took about an hour to download, another ten minutes to unzip, and bam! All of his music, photos, documents, everything right back as it was just hours earlier.

It’s so, so, so important to keep good backups of your data. In my father’s case, he had fifteen years worth of genealogy research on his Mac. I can’t even imagine that data being lost. And while I’ve done a few small restore tests with Backblaze, this was the first time I’ve truly needed it for a full recovery. And, like I said above, it worked just as advertised. Kudos to the Backblaze team on an outstanding product.