Episode: 628
Title: HPR0628: Tasker - Automation for Android Devices
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0628/hpr0628.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 00:08:14

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Music
Hello, this is Brother Mouse. I'm a first time poster here on Hacker Public Radio and
today I'll be talking about Tasker which is a piece of automation software for the Android
platform and allows you to automate some of your favorite functionality on your Android
device. I should tell you first of all I have no affiliation with Tasker or Google or HTC
or Android or any of those things so I'm just a satisfied customer so I figured this might be
a good topic for HPR because I showed Tasker on my phone to a few technical friends and they
immediately geeked out and bought the app and started hacking their own phones so I figured
that it might be interesting to you guys out there as well. I'll point out that this is a paid
and closed source app. It costs about five bucks. I am notoriously cheap and I prefer things that
are free and open source but I've made an exception because I think that Tasker is that good.
Let's look at a few examples of things that can be done with Tasker and I'll give you kind of a
35,000 foot view of these. The first one is something really simple and it's just something
is missing from Android as far as I know at this stage of the game and that is the ability to
silence your phone when you're even meeting. So this would be useful for anyone who has a scheduled
meeting in your Google Calendar which is of course synced to your phone so the pseudo code for it
is basically hey Tasker if I have something scheduled and I'm marked busy turn the ringer to vibrate.
When Tasker exits any given set of tasks it resets the settings back the way they were when it started.
So for example if I had started this particular task with my ringtone is Metallica or something
like that then I enter the scheduled appointment you know I'm marked busy on my appointment it turns
it to vibrate and then at the end of the appointment when it's done in an hour or 15 minutes or
whatever that is the Tasker profile exits and resets everything back to the way it was when it started
so you're back to normal. Okay let's look at something a little more complicated and the next one
I use to find my phone if I set it down in the house somewhere okay and I don't know where it is.
This one the pseudo code says if the phone gets an SMS from a given phone number in this case my
Google Voice account and it has a certain text in it let's say I've lost my phone let's say
that's the text it's looking for then what it does is it turns up the media volume all the way and
starts playing the music app so whatever music I've got queued up and my music app starts playing
at full blast in the house I can just walk around the house until I find it and there it is
stuck between the cushions or the dogs laying on it or or whatever. Now in my case I actually do
an extra step in there I also turn off Bluetooth just in case I have an earpiece or or Bluetooth
headphones paired up and connected at that moment it'll still you know it'll disconnect them and
then start playing out of the speakers so a little more complicated would be let's say that you
lost your phone somewhere out in the wild and you don't know where it is or someone walked away
with it at a coffee shop or whatever so a pseudo code looks similar to the other one let's say that
it gets a SMS from my Google Voice account and now the text is something different maybe it is
find my stolen phone or something okay then when that criteria is met it turns on the GPS
gets a fix and sends an SMS back to the Google Voice account with the latitude,
latitude, battery level anything else that you want to send to the SMS so I know where the phone is
at so it's basically telling you where it's at the reason I do it differently in the house is that
you know you know that your phone is in your house in the first scenario so GPS location won't
really help you but but I've tested this and it works I haven't had to use in real life although
I've had to use my phone finder in the house before so let's talk about another one and now use
this one probably more than anything else this one is used to turn on the Wi-Fi basically this would
be useful for anyone who either does not have a data plan and I don't have a data plan with my phone
it's just I just use Wi-Fi only or if you have a data plan but you've noticed for example that
3G kills your battery then if you are around a known Wi-Fi point maybe you prefer to use Wi-Fi
to 3G just to save battery so the pseudo code for this looks like if the Wi-Fi is off
every once in a while turn on Wi-Fi do a scan and see if I find a particular access point
by MAC address or by SSID if I find this AP turn on Wi-Fi fully and connect then maybe turn on
auto sync and whatever else that is that you want to do okay when I leave this access point turn
off Wi-Fi again mine is actually a little bit more complicated because I'm away from my house a
lot at work and things like that and it and it doesn't make a lot of sense for the phone to be
turning on Wi-Fi and looking around so I actually pair that up with another set of criteria which is
if these particular cell towers are visible and it's called cell near now there's another one
called net location which basically means you know triangulate with cell towers and then look up
on an online database about where you probably are you know kind of like the assisted GPS thing
but this one is no data required it just says you know certain cell towers are visible okay
and that really helps keep the battery used down because it's only checking for my Wi-Fi when I get
near my house the last example I'll share with you is highly specific to me but it gives you an
idea of how generic and wide-ranging the abilities a tasker are twice a week I tutor junior high
kids and given topics at their school and we have to stop 10 minutes before the end of every period
and do other activities that basically summarize what we've done you know the problem is that if
you're not watching your watch the whole time or the clock it can be difficult to remember exactly
where the 10 minute mark is and it's disruptive to keep looking at the clock so I've told
tasker that on those two days a week at this time this time this time and this time during the day
pulse the vibrate function on the phone in a certain pattern you know this
or whatever it is that you define so that I know that it's 10 minutes to the end of class
but no one else knows that I've been alerted so basically I'm working with the kids and I can
I get the signal from my phone which is in my belt and I can feel that that distinctive vibrate
function and then when a natural break occurs there in the classroom I can say okay kiddos now it's
time to yada yada yada so it's kind of trivial but it is absolutely improve my quality of life
they're in the classroom so let me share with you a couple of things that I think that tasker
is very clever about that may peak your interest the first one is that in an example like my multiple
criteria turn on wi-fi job earlier where it looks both at the cell towers and at wi-fi it if it has
multiple location criteria like that it starts with the lowest power consumption first in other words
it looks at the cell towers first to see if it can see them because those are effectively free
the radio in your phone has already looked at the cell tower so you don't actually have to pay
any battery power for that right if that's met then it starts looking for the nearby wi-fi okay
so in an AND situation it picks the lowest power consumption first I just think that that's a
bright way to do it it's maybe an obvious thing to do but I think that that is it illustrates how
this author thinks in addition these sets of tasks that you can do they can be named and reused
and in fact you're making your own named functions that you can call from other profiles so
let's say that I want to do the same trick with turning on my wi-fi not just at my house but at
other locations around town where I know I have a wi-fi feed so I might have a separate
check for that wi-fi AP and for those specific cell towers but when it triggers it actually calls
the stored or this named procedure this named function called you know turn wi-fi on or whatever
and it goes through the whole checklist of you know turn it on set my sleep policy to this turn
on auto sync do this that the other thing whatever you want to do so so I think that's clever
another clever thing is that not only does it have built-in variables that you can query
and use for criteria but you can also name your own variables so this particular thing happens I
set this variable called this and basically send some of force back and forth between different
profiles on the phone so you can get you know it's complicated as you can stand another
neat thing about the application is that in each one of these you know 100 functions there's a
little question a little help dialogue and you can punch it and it will actually pull up fully
documented usage instructions about each one of these context tasks and everything like that so
you're never forced to go to the website and hold the phone in your hand and look at the website
and do your documentation it actually pushes the documentation down it used to be stored in the
application but now it's stored on the SD card so that even frees up more of your internal memory
I just I just think if that's a really great move by this author so the author's name is Pent PNT
and I think he's somewhere in England because the the pricing of the app is in pounds for example
if you buy directly from the author off his website is three pounds 49 which is something like
$5.40 there's also a market version three pounds 99 I use the direct version from the author he
says he gets more of the he gets all the money from that so I do it that way and you use ADB to
install it you know ADB install the name of the APK or use the dash R switch if you're reinstalling
that causes it to force reinstalls so if any of this sounds interesting you can Google Android
Tasker TASKER and you'll see what comes up I mean you'll see his homepage and he has a very
active mailing list that he is in every day there's probably 25 messages or more a day and he's
always in there you know give and take and updating the the application and it's just really
good stuff and I think you should check it out there's a free trial so no harm and no foul
well I hope this wasn't too painful for a first effort if you have feedback please leave it
for me there on the site I appreciate you listening bye bye
thank you for listening to Haftler Public Radio
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