Laptop recovery with Twitter? Scratching another itch...

One morning last week a curious idea popped into my head:



... and that afternoon I had accomplished this:



The premise is simple:

1. I set up a private Twitter for just my laptop status, and subscribe to it from my personal Twitter account.

2. I set up a cron job on my laptop to run ever hour, tweeting the geographical location of my laptop to the private account.

The theory is that if my laptop were ever stolen and the crook for some reason didn't format it before connecting it to the 'net again, I might have a fart's chance in a whirlwind of recovering it. Yeah, probably not, but it was fun to build, and on the coolness factor I'll have an automated journal of my travels.

As an added bonus, Twitter automatically rejects duplicate tweets, so the account doesn't get spammed every hour if the laptop hasn't moved (since the updates would be identical).

So how did I do it? Well the first thing I did was realize that I couldn't get my public IP address from the laptop when it was behind a NAT router, so I had to reach out to find a service that could provide me that information. My initial Google attempts came up dry and I was about to resort to scraping the IP Chicken page (blech) when a helpful Twitter follower came to my rescue:



That service is exactly what the doctor ordered (thanks @nu2rails). I used HTTParty to parse the response and Jeweler to turn my little library into a gem and tossed it up on my GitHub account for the world to enjoy.

So please check it out, try it, fork it, improve it, and let me know how you like it. Oh, and extra brownie points if you get the name of the gem!