I think Tasker stores the previous state and restores it automatically for state, time, and location contexts. In fact, I know it does - when I leave work, my phone goes back to whatever it was when I got to work (ring, vibrate, or silent).

ETA: I've never played with scenes. They seem possibly cool, but I haven't found a need yet.

My latest awesome tasker profile was for emergency calls - when my phone is on silent or vibrate or has a low volume, and the same person calls me twice within 10 minutes, the second call always rings. I did this because I was thinking about the fact that at night, my wife and I both completely silence our phone. I want to be reachable in emergencies.

It's not for all things, though. There's an indicator if it's going to restore to previous state.

Oh, that's brilliant, Gris. I leave my ringers on because it's not uncommon for me to get urgent (but not necessarily emergency) calls or texts through the night. I need to be able to respond to my students, but I don't need to know if I have a new facebook message or email, so I set it up that way.

Doesn't the reinstatement depend on what property you are talking about? They're indicated by icon in the app, so it is definitely not all of them.

How are you tracking "twice in ten minutes"?

I haven't worked out if Tasker works with Google Voice texts yet. My emergency plan was going to be a coded text that forces the phone out of silent mode. But I haven't gotten very far with that. And my face-down silence doesn't silence alarms or whitelisted callers.

Oh, and of course I plan on implementing the "answer me with your location" trick, but I'm assuming I can just copy that from a million places.

Hmm. I just remembered that my devices are set to upload pictures to Dropbox automatically. That would be the simplest way to collect stealth photos of the person that stole your shit.

I use Where's My Droid for the forcing out of silent mode. It's awesome. You text the name of my favorite hockey player, which is nearly unspellable, and then it lights up and yells and stuff.

It can also force GPS and has a beta mode camera dealio.

I thought you couldn't force GPS anymore without root... Hmm,

I don't want to force it from silent in a screechy "Here I am!" panties on fire sort of a way. Just if my family wanted to be sure they got my attention, they could bump themselves to the top of the line. Kinda like what Gris did, but without magical counting.

And I just remembered what else I wanted to add to the location (GPS & cell) response-- SSID if applicable. If I were totally hot shit, the coded SMS would take a pic if possible, and email that to me along with the location and networking info.

Wait--it would take time lapse shots. I don't need them emailed if they're ending up in Dropbox, so the key would be turn on every ten minutes when device is active photos using the front camera, maybe every ten of those one with the back.

And I can file that alongside the stories I never wrote, and pictures I haven't drawn...

I haven't worked out if Tasker works with Google Voice texts yet.

It can, if you enable Accessibility for Tasker. Basically, it can read notifications and check if they're from a particular app. I can send you my tasker script for it if you want (I've got a silent GPS email script that requires Python for android (not ideal, but works), and an announce script that plays Green Day really loud, both keyed by GV text)

What do you mean by "silent GPS"? Is that overriding the non-forceability? And is that the reason for the Python?

No, I just mean it doesn't announce anything. Just turns it on and sends a background email with no user input required. The GPS icon still comes on, but hopefully a potential thief wouldn't notice/think it was weird.

The python is necessary to automatically send an e-mail. Or at least it was. It may not be anymore, but I haven't checked.

My phone has been rooted since the third day I had it, so I don't actually know what requires rooting and what doesn't. I've had a rooted phone longer than I've had tasker.

I *think* you've needed to root Android since somewhere iin 2.x to remotely turn on GPS. But then Liese's app confuses me.

I'm pretty sure I've seen email scripts lying about, but I feel naked about the exposed password thingummy. Are your credentials in the python code, and therefore a little bit less obvious?

I'm trying to remember why I didn't root this phone--it wasn't bound to a carrier, and I was good with the functionality. and the instructions weren't clear yet (such was the problem of jumping in early, I guess)..and then I was off the deep end. I figured if I didn't want to load a ROM...

But, given the time the phone went into a stupid boot loop, I was surprised to see how much was in the cloud. Not iPhone level, but not a disaster either.

I know my app does it. And I know my phone isn't rooted. That's all I know.