Mapping where your iPhone got lost or stolen

I am not a psychic, but I have a good idea where you and your iPhone parted ways.

If you’re desperately seeking it on Craigslist, chances are you lost your device – or had it stolen – over the weekend, especially at night. And probably at some fun destination – shopping, the beach, a bar – or heading there on your usual means of transportation (the car, a gas station or parking lot, or bus).

Although your entire work life might be on it, you are pleading with the person who found it (or swiped it) to return your iPhone because those photos of your dog or kid or grandma can never be replaced.

This is the most common tale to emerge from Cult of Mac’s recent analysis of hundreds of iPhone lost and found ads on Craigslist blanketing the entire United States. (Here’s the backstory on how I did it using Python, if you’re interested.)

Stealing iPhones (“Apple picking”) now accounts for about half the crimes in cities like San Francisco and New York; it’s hard to say how many absent-minded drinkers leave them at bars, but if you find a phone and don’t return it, in many places that becomes theft by finding.

Police and Apple diverge on what to do about it. The Cupertino company advises you to notify police, while some authorities are urging phone makers and service providers to add a kill switch to curb thefts.

Apple’s “Find my iPhone” can help, unless the savvy crook pops out the SIM card or wipes the contents of your phone and starts over. This gray area has inspired some derring-do recoveries, like outing the thief or the finder-who-wants-to-be-keeper by staging a diabolical seduction. Not recommended.

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In the meantime, if you’re hoping someone will return your lost iPhone or realize they’ve bought stolen goods and do the right thing, you’re probably heading to Craigslist.

Generally speaking, you’re more likely to offer heartfelt thanks than a reward for the return of your phone. Unless you live in a place such as Washington, D.C. or Michigan, then you’re ready to bust out the cash.

After combing through these ads for the project, I bought an ugly white case for my black iPhone 4S to make it easier to see in the pitch of all of my dark bags and on taxi seats, etc. As a result, I am having fewer of those “where’s my goddamn phone?” moments.

Have you lost your iPhone? How did you recover it? Let me know in the comments.

First published at Cult of Mac.

Painful lessons in data journalism: scraping with Python

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Lost in the woods. CC-licensed, Chris-Håvard Berge on Flickr.

Lost and found ads can be a good way to sniff out a story.

Take the ones on Craigslist about iPhones. There’s a woman who gained a husband in a quickie wedding at city hall but left her iPhone behind. Or a drunk college kid who dropped his phone on the passenger seat of a good samaritan who took him home.

Is there a bigger story about lost and stolen iPhones? To find out, I scraped all 50 states of Craigslist lost and found ads using Python and BeautifulSoup. If you want to check out or improve that code, it’s on GitHub. Here’s the full story, with charts and things!

The project required more fist clenching and eye straining than anticipated – even though writing a basic scraper for Craigslist is considered an easy-peasy programming project.

Let me just say it: as a novice Pythonista, I am challenged by nearly everything. I mean, command line interface, seriously? But I can get past that. I slogged through (and recommend) Learning Python the Hard Way, as well as finished some examples in Scraping for Journalists.
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Check out Soundtracker, like Pandora for Italian music


As someone who has a hard time remembering what it was like to listen to music before you could hit “shuffle” or curate a digital playlist, I’m a big fan of automated music recommendation and Internet radio service Pandora.

But that streaming service offers almost no Italian music, whether you want classic folk, pop power ballads or moody dubs in dialect.

Enter Soundtracker,  launched in 2010 by two Italian entrepreneurs. Best part: it offers a lot more than just Italian music and the interface is in English.

Register for the site (it’s free) and start listening to artists you know before stone-stepping to those you don’t.

Start with Pino Daniele and you’ll soon be listening to Quintorigo, Almamegretta, 99 Posse and Bandabardo’.

Not sure how the algorithm works, but  it seems a little more freewheeling than Pandora — starting with 70s melodic rocker with a social conscience Fabrizio De’ Andre station got me to an aggro hip-hop number from Caparezza in under four tracks.

You can also download it as an app for your iPhone, Windows Phone 7 and, if you’re so inclined, share your location and tracks with your friends.

Buon ascolto!