The Erica Sadun?s findme application helps to find your iPhone.

The Unofficial Apple Weblog gives an interesting solution to a stolen or lost iPhone problem.

Thanks to Twitter and findme your iPhone will be calling home regularly in case of a theft or loss to help you locate it. findme returns the nearest to your iPhone tower's location ID, latitude and langitude on Google maps. Moreover, findme developed by Erica together with Twitter developer Britt Selvitelle keeps the reports secure without clogging your message box with too many messages.

First one needs to open a Twitter account using a separate unique for the iPhone email address. Tick off Protect my settings in the Settings panel and click on save.

Now only the chosen ones will be able to see the Twitter updates on the iPhone account.

To make the iPhone tweet the findme program has to be installed. To contact Twitt the iPhone will need Curl, which is part of the BSD distribution. Now one has to create a tweet shell script by copying the following text and pasting it into the binaries folder.

#! /bin/sh
curl --basic --user username:password
--data status="`/var/root/bin/findme`"
http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml#! /bin/sh

It is important to use the right path to findme and substitute the username and password. Then to make the file executable:

chmod 755 tweet

Now it is time to create a launch daemon by copying com.apple.daily.plist. from System/Library/LaunchDaemons to com.sadun.tweet.plist. That still has to be edited. First one has to updated the label to com.sadun.tweet.plist. It is advisable to delete the two lines relating to "nice" then. The program arguments need to be changed into /var/root/bin/tweet. It is possible to change the start interval from the default 86400, which is just once a day.

Label
com.sadun.tweet
ProgramArguments

/var/root/bin/tweet

StartInterval
600

The last thing to do in order for one's iPhone to tweet with findme reports is to reboot it with the new launch deamon.

For more detailed directions and tipps visit: www.tuaw.com