Jun 21 2012

Earthquake Notifications on Your Mobile Phone

Here’s a tip for Australians out there after the 5.3 magnitude earthquake the struck Victoria yesterday.

I use a service called “If This Then That” or Ifttt for short which is a great way of getting the output of an online service and piping it into something else that may not be natively supported by the outputting platform. A great example of this is if you want to get an SMS on your mobile phone when a particular person tweets or something specific appears in an RSS feed somewhere.

Anyway, if you fancy receiving a notification of an earthquake occurring in or around Australia then check out my Ifttt recipe here. In a nutshell, it takes the RSS feed from the United States Geological Survey website and looks for the word “Australia”. Any matches will be transmitted via SMS to the mobile phone number you nominate. Bear in mind, you won’t get pre-warning of an earthquake but within about fifteen minutes of a quake you should be able to find out its magnitude and origin a lot faster than the online news outlets could muster yesterday!

Boydo

My name is Boyd and I’m a Service Management Specialist with a knack for operational data gathering, transformation, analysis and reporting.

In 2012, I obtained my Masters of Science in Information Technology through the University of New South Wales @ The Australia Defence Force Academy (UNSW@ADFA).

I was also part of an online community known as the Panasonic Insider Crew in the capacity of “Insider Guru” for Panasonic Australia where I interacted with other tech enthusiasts and find out more about Panasonic's latest gadgets.

I love technology, gadgets, and the Internet and maintain a keen interest in these areas locally, nationally, and globally. I hope by sharing my views on these topics that people will receive an honest point of view from someone with a genuine interest in these topics.

I have also written and edited articles for Neowin - you can check out my articles over @ https://www.neowin.net/news/poster/boyd_chan

I hope you enjoy reading my blog!

2 comments

1 ping

    • Patrick on April 9, 2013 at 10:51
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    • Reply

    Hi there,

    How did you get the SMS to work in Australia? Ifttt doesn’t push notification to my SMS service. I have Optus.

    1. I am on Amaysim (which is Optus) – under the SMS channel @ https://ifttt.com/sms did you put your phone number in as 00614xxxxxxxx (i.e. if you’re number is 0412 345 678 then you would put in 0061412345678) and activate that channel?

  1. […] year I wrote about a way to use Ifttt to get earthquake notifications on your mobile phone via SMS albeit after the fact. However, if you have a Wi-Fi tablet or a laptop this won’t be helpful […]

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