Comments on: Geosense: The first ‘really really cool’ Windows Sensor

By: Arif Diwan

Arif Diwan — Wed, 18 May 2011 22:04:00 +0000

Great work guys! You do not need hardware for cell tower triangulation – a lowly cheap cell phone communicating with a regular (Linux is good) backend server will do. The algorithms are well known – called reverse location but I cannot divulge since those are company trade secrets but you guys figure this out I am sure.

Also, I am getting a wrong location on one laptop – I can do a grep on the network trace and locate my position very accurately so I think you should look into an algorithm.

I am getting my location as Lakewood TX and this is dead accurate if I invert the grep results from the traceroute.

Other feedback later.

By: Uday Kiran

Uday Kiran — Tue, 11 May 2010 08:22:04 +0000

Guys… its a wonderful tool but it is killing my boot time as it wants to load proir to any other startup items.. I have seen issues with internet connectivity with the Geosense drivers installed.. My system does not connect to internet immediately. It is first searching for the WiFi and since its turned off, it makes the system boot slow. I dont know if you anyone has this problem but i have been facing this after i installed the Geosense… I am not sure if you can reproduce the error… let me know if u need any data.. and steps to collect it..

By: Alexey

Alexey — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 13:31:25 +0000

Doesn’t work on my HP laptop. Tried 3 times to install-reboot-uninstall, it does not appear in my Control Panel. (Win7 Enterprise)

By: Jay

Jay — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 17:49:00 +0000

Nice program!

Could the data from Geosense be accessed by a program like InSSIDer (http://www.metageek.net/products/inssider)? Would be cool to see the WLAN Networks that I find on InSSIDer on Google maps.

By: John Lee

John Lee — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 09:30:15 +0000

Geosense works awsome, but GoogleMapsDemo_1.0 don’t works well, street view don’t works beacause say ” Flash Player not installed” My system:

Windows 7 Ultimate 64-Bit
Flash Player 32-Bit Installed
Geosense for windows 1.1

Greetings and congratulations for the Windows Sensor :)

By: Dan

Dan — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 02:15:11 +0000

1.1 appears in my Control Panel now, but Weather gadget complains it can’t get my location. :( Oh well. Like I said before, desktop PC, I don’t use gadgets anyways…hehe…

By: MaRSHALL

MaRSHALL — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 00:10:17 +0000

What an amazingly cool program. Kudos!

I thought you might like a suggestion for a very useful utility that would probably be pretty easy to make, considering that you already made a demo that is more complicated than it. ;)

It would be awesome to have a program that you can put in your startup menu that silently emails the current location to a given email address and then exits.

That way, if a laptop is ever stolen it gives away it’s location whenever it’s started. Even if the thief found the program and deleted it, it wouldn’t be until after they’ve booted at least once.

Just a thought.

Thanks for a great sensor.
Marshall

By: Dan

Dan — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 04:17:58 +0000

@PortalCake Microsoft Support docs say that’s caused by driver bugs :(

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/943104/

By: Dan

Dan — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 12:12:07 +0000

Oh hey, found it, I guess I needed a reboot. Is the installer not starting the driver when it finishes? Well whatever…

By: PortalCake

PortalCake — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 11:35:29 +0000

Okay, tried on a different system.
Dell D620, with Win7 Pro. Installed Geosense fine, but the device manager says that “Device cannot be started, Code 10.”

By: Dan

Dan — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 04:43:16 +0000

Because Windows 7 already has that feature built-in.

By: Ian

Ian — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 18:09:17 +0000

My location is off by a few hundred miles. Why not allow the user to specify their location?

By: Dan

Dan — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 21:09:27 +0000

Hmm installed the sensor but it didn’t show up in the control panel… :( Ah well not like it’s useful for me anyway since I have a desktop PC… :P

By: pizzaboy192

pizzaboy192 — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 19:39:16 +0000

IT WORKS! (It’s about 3 houses off, but it’s freaking close!)
I’ll have to test this at school too…
I’m impressed with how close to accurate it is… just using my Host family’s wifi…

By: Chris Dube

Chris Dube — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 12:03:57 +0000

This is a really cool piece of software.

I was wondering if you had any ideas how a plugged in iPhone GPS could be used to send location data to windows?

By: Rafael Rivera

Rafael Rivera — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 07:31:25 +0000

@Daniel: This is a bug, we’re working on an updated driver.

By: Michael Chourdakis

Michael Chourdakis — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 05:38:53 +0000

The problem with geosense is that it relies on information based on IP, which may be unreliable or not existant at all.

If you have an actual GPS hardware, my driver makes things easier.

By: Daniel

Daniel — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 18:53:33 +0000

When I took the laptop to work today the weather gadget didn’t show the new location. I had to restart the gadget for it to recognize the location change. Kindof defeats the purpose.

By: Brandon

Brandon — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 15:44:20 +0000

I had to disable the sensor and reenable it after waking the computer up from hibernation. The weather gadget got confused.

By: Daniel

Daniel — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 08:10:40 +0000

Update, I got it working on the laptop and it works pretty good. Weird that the desktop and laptop are on the same network and get entirely different results. It’s my personal home wifi network, Google wouldn’t have info on that would it!?!?!:scared:

I wonder if Windows 7 can automatically change timezones based on your location. like your cell phone does when you get off the airplane.

By: Daniel

Daniel — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 07:52:32 +0000

I tried on two machines both on my home network one on wifi and the other ethernet. The ethernet told me I was in Sarasota which was off by about 100 miles and I couldn’t get the weather gadget to find a location with the wifi one. I had an icon in the taskbar saying that my PC was recently located but still nothing in the weather gadget.

By: Amitai Rosenberg

Amitai Rosenberg — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 21:21:59 +0000

Awesome sensor! Very cool…

By: PortalCake

PortalCake — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 10:54:09 +0000

This is awesome.
One problem: it works on my Win7 VM(x86), but the installer is b0rked on my Server2008R2 host machine.
Any ideas, Raf?

By: Artiom

Artiom — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 09:33:50 +0000

That’s a great idea! I wanted to do something like this since I heard of Windows 7 location sensors (I mean if Google Gears can find your location, even if remotely accurate, why not have a softwave version of a location sensor?!)

Thanks a lot for this, and please don’t drop it! :)

By: Louis

Louis — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 20:05:34 +0000

Great idea! Unfortunately Geosense thinks I’m in Chicago though I’m near San Antonio. How about adding a link or dialog to the database(s) Geosense is polling so we can correct, update or add the proper information? I used this one: https://services.google.com/fb/forms/wifibugs/