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A Pizza Box for Your Laptop
Dark Twonky writes "Human Beans is selling the perfect gift for the geek who has everything. It's the PowerPizza, a pizza box for transporting your precious laptop in. From the web site: Desirable laptops are desirable to thieves too. Disguise your laptop with a PowerPizza and reduce the risk of getting it nicked."
A full-swing marketing campaign was launched, so no one would be ignorant of what those "executive lunchboxes" looked like.
The result was predictable: EVERYONE knew when some white-collar worker was bringing his lunch to the office, thus triggering the same social stigma as if he were carrying a blue-collar lunchbox, as blue-collar workers would laugh with a big "THERE GOES ANOTHER EXECUTIVE LUNCHBOX!!!" whenever they saw one.
The phrase eventually became a Madison Avenue monicker to designate a marketing failure...
I saw a guy on the plane the other day who I thought had the right idea: He didn't have a case - just stuck the notebook in the seat-back pocket.
I got a big anti-static bag from one of the lab techs that should be sufficient to protect it from such "weather" as it might encounter, and I figure to keep the power brick in my purse/pocket/whatever...
Laptop cases are an anachronism.
"The Internet is made of cats."
I had a machine stolen about three months ago, and notified the local police. It was running the GMail notifier (that checks mail on bootup), so I emailed Google from my gmail account and told them: "The only machine running the GMail notifier keyed to *account name* was recently stolen. From now on, if someone logs into this gmail account, they're doing it from a stolen machine; could you give the IP address to the local police so they can track it down?
GMail wouldn't do it, even though there's no threat to user privacy here: the police are the only ones getting information, and that information was requested by the owner of the account.
That got me thinking: someone (laptop manufacturers) should run a phone-home service, that keeps a log of the IP addresses that send in requests (with an authentication string specific to the user or computer). That way, using that same string and a password, you could get a list of all the IP addresses your machine has connected to the Internet from... which could be turned over to the police if necessary. If you trust the site explicitly, you could even run an applet that will respond to remote instructions (including flashing the BIOS with a "THIS IS STOLEN PROPERTY" message on bootup) when the site's notified that it is stolen. Once laptops start including onboard GPS, this would make recovery a snap.
This won't do anything to deter sophisticated thieves, who will start formatting drives, but it would be cheap to implement and would provide another layer of protection from theft.
This is really old news now, I saw it a long time ago and decided to make my own, with a twist. Instead of a pizza box I took a box file (for holding documents), lined it with furniture foam and my 12" iBook, mouse and power brick fit snigly inside. What's more the whole thing can also fit in a rucksack.
I have blue masking tape wrapped around the edge of the screen housing.
It looks like that's what's holding it together.
Plus it looks different from all of the other laptops going through security, making it easy for me to keep my eye on it.
If someone's going to lift laptops, they'll move along to one that looks less like a piece of s...junk.
Oh, and I also keep my bag with me everywhere except the security checkpoint.
Why take two boxes into the lab? At a computer show a few years ago, I saw a Risc PC with a built in pizza oven...
Picture here: http://www.worldofwibble.com/aboutriscpc.html
I tried dominos *once*. Never again.
Ordered 8pm.
Pizza arrived 8.45pm. Almost cold.
Delivery boy had to go back to the shop to authorize the credit card as he couldn't do it. 20 minutes later, sign slip.
Pizza (one of the new ones with the cheese layer in the middle) tasted like cardboard, was now cold, and cost about 50% more than the pizza hut a mile away...
If all you're looking for is a way to keep tabs on a machine's IP#, there's a very simple way of doing it that comes w/ some other benefits as well:
use a dynamic DNS service.
Like http://www.cjb.net/ and http://www.dyndns.com/
You go to their site, create a DNS entry for your machine with your current IP#.
Then you make a small script to connect to those sites and update that IP# and set that script to run at startup.
The result is if your machine is on DHCP or moves around a lot (or gets stolen), you'll know its current IP# (or at least it's most recent IP#).
--Clayto
What a coincidence. Mac OS X Hints is just this morning running a hint on protecting your Mac by using an Open Firmware password, and setting a banner that pops up a warning and/or ownership message when booting is attempted. There are also interesting comments as to why this might not be a good solution.