Hello folks,

I just had a ‘wake in the night’ sort of idea (which is something I’m sure the Fins have a word for) so now I’m wondering if enough Lemmings could put their heads together to find some other, hopefully much better, solutions for loss prevention.

My idea, which I think is only good enough to get the conversation going, is to disassemble an Airtag, rig the Deck to support its power needs (I don’t know how this would be achieved), and then embed the finished product somewhere (I don’t know that, either) inside the case.

A hardware-side solution, like this, would allow the Deck to be tracked regardless of software changes.

If the solution is internal it couldn’t be detected, and it could function regardless of power state —— but at the expense of the Deck’s battery capacity. If the solution is external it could have independent power —— but would be detectable, snagable, and removable.

A software-side solution might be achievable, especially with Linux, and it would likely use much-less power —— but it would require the device to be not-off and not-factory-reset (which can be achieved with a few keystrokes in the settings menu).

What ideas do y’all have?

  • @Daydream8714
    2•9 months ago

    I recently read this article about AirTags, and this post made me think of it.

    One of my main takeaways was that the anti-stalker features of AirTags are a bit of a liability for this use case. Imagine you successfully hide your AirTag inside the Deck, and a few days later it starts beeping. I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t stay hidden for long! Admittedly, you could potentially remove the speaker when installing it to prevent this.

    The other thing I saw, which was a bit more worrying, was that the police were not really inclined to help, and took some prodding. They also got lucky that the stolen item was in a store they could just walk into. If someone steals a Deck and then takes it into their house, who knows if the police would even bother trying to get it back.

    I feel like if the goal is to avoid the risk of theft, I would probably look into more physical security. Just keeping it on my person at all times when in high risk areas, potentially in a locking case?