Marco Polo Makes your Laptop Smarter

June 19th, 2008

I have this problem. When I bring my laptop from home to work or to any other location, my computing needs change. At home, I have an unrestrictive wireless connection that I can do anything I want on. At work, I have an 802.11x protected connection which runs through a proxy and doesn’t let me do things like download IMAP mail freely or run a multi-protocol IM client. Additionally, I have a different printer at home than at work. And on and on and on.

It’s really not that big of a deal to manually “change locations” via the Apple Menu, but I’ve always wanted a way for my laptop to just sense where I’m at and do the right thing automatically. A few days ago, a colleague at work, Paul Oremland, told me about a utility called Marco Polo which does just that. It’s really great. Now when I walk into the office and open my laptop, my location is switched automatically, certain applications are magically launched, and my printer is set to the correct device.

The application is great in that you can have it trigger off a whole host of conditions, such as wireless networks in the area, USB devices that may be attached, and even ambient light! You can even use fuzzy logic to combine these conditions and take action when they are all present.

The folks that developed Marco Polo call it “context aware computing”. I like it.

You can download Marco Polo for free here (oh and it’s open source). Happy location switching!

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14 Responses:

Tiffehr says:

I was just grumping about this on the MSFT geek bus. Awesome. Thanks, Mike D!

#1 - June 20th, 2008 at 12:54 am
Andy Hume says:

Same problem here at the latest London MSFT office. Good tip.

#2 - June 20th, 2008 at 1:23 am
PanMan says:

Sounds like a great tool, and one that should exist for windows.
But, why don’t you have full internet access at your workplace?
I thought having not-full internet is more something for old telco places, than new startup places? And you can’t blame someone else, being the CEO, right? :)
Just interested why a startup wouldn’t have full access.

#3 - June 20th, 2008 at 4:22 am
Brian Stucki says:

Thanks for the highlight. I’ve been searching for something like this for a while now.

(I’m interested to see if it will automatically create an SSH tunnel to my colocated Mac when I’m on a new network for security in surfing. )

#4 - June 20th, 2008 at 5:32 am
David Szymakowski says:

I second the motion for a tool like that for windows.

#5 - June 20th, 2008 at 5:47 am
Mike D. says:

PanMan: I’m the CEO of Newsvine, but not the CEO of MSNBC. :) Our office is wired with their network now. It’s not quite the same at the Microsoft network since the two companies are separate, but it’s close. But yeah, I’m not a big fan of port-blocking and proxies in general. Can’t do anything about it, unfortunately.

With regard to Windows, Marco Polo *is* open source so maybe some enterprising person wants to try porting it?

#6 - June 20th, 2008 at 8:19 am
Andy Borgmann says:

Iâ€™m the CEO of Newsvine, but not the CEO of MSNBC. :) Our office is wired with their network now. Itâ€™s not quite the same at the Microsoft network since the two companies are separate, but itâ€™s close. But yeah, Iâ€™m not a big fan of port-blocking and proxies in general. Canâ€™t do anything about it, unfortunately.

This is very sad.

I was thinking the same thing as PanMan, but then it hit me that I bet you were under MSNBC policy now. Which brings up an interesting question: since being a part of MSNBC, do you feel it has limited the creativity and the capability of the office? You probably can’t answer, but I figured I would ask.

P.S. I love this Marco Polo thing. My laptop has a dynamic IP address assigned at home, but at work I have it on a public, static IP address to act as a development server. This will come in handy.

#7 - June 20th, 2008 at 9:17 am
Jonathan E says:

Hey Mike, about port blocking – if you use Adium as your “multi-protocol IM client” just go into the account settings for your accounts and set the ports to 80. Have you tried this already?

Usually this will work with AIM, MSN, GTalk, Yahoo and probably anything else as it just uses the same (default) port as your browser would to access any website.

#8 - June 20th, 2008 at 9:30 am
Mike D. says:

Andy: MSNBC has actually managed to stay pretty hands-off with regard to our creative execution, so that’s good. It’s tough have to deal with another set of objectives on top of our own (MSNBC community plus Newsvine community), but aside from that, it’s been just fine. WIth regard to the network thing, it’s a bit of a pain but it’s not atypical for companies with more than about 50 employees. As soon as you have a lot of people to worry about and a lot of source code repositories to safeguard and all that stuff, Corporate IT becomes more than just “let’s hook up a Qwest DSL line and a wireless router” (which is all we did before). :)

#9 - June 20th, 2008 at 9:33 am
Mike D. says:

Jonathan: Yeah, that’s how I’m currently managing it, but there’s an unfortunate bug somewhere (either in Adium, MSN Messenger’s servers, or our corporate proxy) which kicks you off as soon as someone else in the office opens Adium. I’ve been trying to self-diagnose it as much as I can and I’ve posted debug logs and packet traces to the Adium bug reporting area, but no resolution yet. :(

#10 - June 20th, 2008 at 9:35 am
Mike G. says:

I had used a trial version of ‘LocationX’ which I had liked but couldn’t justify the cost (post trial period) over the convenience. I, for some reason, couldn’t find a free equivalent (with all the features) that I had liked… until now. Thanks for the link Mike.

#11 - June 22nd, 2008 at 10:58 pm
lrwro says:

sounds great, have to try it asap. Thanks for sharing.

#12 - July 16th, 2008 at 11:56 pm
Keri Henare says:

I found Marco Polo recently and I think that it’s just great.

We have an internal subversion and testing server in the office which is also accessible externally.

I have Marco Polo execute a bash script that toggles the IP for the various host names in my hosts file.

It has worked flawlessly.

#13 - August 2nd, 2008 at 5:41 am
Dan Rubin says:

Holy hell, I’ve been looking for something that does this for ages. Guess I should re-subscribe to your blog now that I’ve found something useful on it, huh…

Of course I’m kidding – I read feeds about as often as I blog, which is almost never :)

#14 - August 20th, 2008 at 2:44 am

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