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Useful Tool for Boaters


Jess--

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I have the free app wheresmydroid on my phone. If anyone senda a text with my own chosen keyword it will find the gps location and text a map link to the number the keyword SMS was sent from. Not sure if it sends the postcode but it does give nearest street address.

 

Can also be used to remotely lock the phone or turn the ringer on full volume via SMS from another phone if you have misplaced the phone nearby like down the back of sofa. Will ring full volume until phone is located. And you can switch on the camera remotely too.

 

A tracker app. Works great:)

 

 

Eta I get an error on the op link :(

 

Edit to sense make

Edited by magnetman
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I have the free app wheresmydroid on my phone. If anyone senda a text with my own chosen keyword it will find the gps location and text a map link to the number the keyword SMS was sent from. Not sure if it sends the postcode but it does give nearest street address.

 

Can also be used to remotely lock the phone or turn the ringer on full volume via SMS from another phone if you have misplaced the phone nearby like down the back of sofa. Will ring full volume until phone is located. And you can switch on the camera remotely too.

 

A tracker app. Works great:)

 

 

Eta I get an error on the op link sad.png

 

Edit to sense make

the app you mention has a totally different purpose, mine (although not an app) is designed to display the nearest postcode to the user of the phone.

 

I have had a look through error logs and so far the only errors that are showing up are where there has been no gps data supplied

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Yes you are right thanks for pointing that out I tried it while sitting down in a metal box :) so no gps as you say

 

Not dissing your program it just reminded me a bit of the phone finding app but it is a different thing I can see that. In fact I looked back at previous texts from my phone tracker and it doesn't always provide a full postcode so your program is probably rather better :cheers:

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http://gb7dl.co.uk/getpostcode

 

Last time I was out on the boat I had a call from a friend wanting to come out and meet my by car, after a lot of messing around he finally found where we were but commented that it would have been a lot easier to have a postcode to enter into his satnav

 

I have now made a tool that when you access it via a smartphone with GPS can work out the nearest postcode to you.

 

it's searching through a list of just under 1.7 million uk postcodes with known Latitude and Longitude coordinates to find the closest match.

 

Well it gives the wrong post code for my home address!!

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I have made a couple of small changes to the logic behind the lookup, it should now be more accurate.

It also now displays a second marker showing the centre point of the postcode it found (as recorded by OS)

 

Hopefully it now get's Nigels postcode right

 

tech details for anyone that is interested

 

the original code ordered the results by the closest latitude and then by closest longitude, this was mostly accurate but seems to have produced some odd results for some people.

The new code orders the results by the sum of the difference in latitude and longitude

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is it showing the right position for you on the map?

 

Exactly correct.

I don't even know where the quoted post code is!

 

EDIT

Still wrong, but at least it now shows a known neighbouring one.

Edited by Graham Davis
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Hopefully it now get's Nigels postcode right

 

Strange - now exactly identifies my position, as before, but when I click for nearest postcode, it additionally flags up an address 6 houses to the west, with the same wrong postcode as before [but which is correct for the second flag]. In most instances that would probably not matter, but where I am at the moment, you would not be able to find me by that postcode, because down a private road that loops behind the main road - I am still only half a dozen houses away in distance, in other words, but on a parallel dead-end street.

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Strange - now exactly identifies my position, as before, but when I click for nearest postcode, it additionally flags up an address 6 houses to the west, with the same wrong postcode as before [but which is correct for the second flag]. In most instances that would probably not matter, but where I am at the moment, you would not be able to find me by that postcode, because down a private road that loops behind the main road - I am still only half a dozen houses away in distance, in other words, but on a parallel dead-end street.

 

Mine is exactly the same.

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So does that come as an app you can put on your phone ?

It's not an app on the phone, the dataset is too big for a phone to be able to search it in any sort of reasonable time, the lookup is actually being done on a server I run here (4 x quad core cpu's), the functionality will be added into another project I am currently working on (which will have an app and web based interface), that project will be announced on here when it is complete and fully usable.

Nigel and Graham, I suspect that your exact location is nearer to the centre of a neighbouring postcode than the centre of your own, since I have no way of knowing the exact boundaries of each postcode (only the centre point) there is no way of narrowing it down further at the present

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http://gb7dl.co.uk/getpostcode

 

Last time I was out on the boat I had a call from a friend wanting to come out and meet my by car, after a lot of messing around he finally found where we were but commented that it would have been a lot easier to have a postcode to enter into his satnav

 

I have now made a tool that when you access it via a smartphone with GPS can work out the nearest postcode to you.

 

it's searching through a list of just under 1.7 million uk postcodes with known Latitude and Longitude coordinates to find the closest match.

Nice try but Street Map et-al already does this. In isolated areas, even in the South of England, a Post-Code can be centered a few miles from your desired destination. Much better to enter the Lat/Long coordinates. Text your location coordinates to your visitors and they should be able to copy/paste into their navigation software.

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