291–300 of 349 posts
On a somewhat related note, due to the ongoing war in Israel, GPS is being heavily jammed to deter terrorist drone attacks. An intriguing side effect of this is that services like "Find My Phone" and AirTag are experiencing disruptions. This interference sometimes results in devices appearing to be located in neighboring countries, hundreds of miles away from their actual location. Here's an article detailing the jam…
Walk around shouting Hey Siri
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Just do a chargeback then
That charge back might ask for tracking number, which will also says delivered. So they will ask you to call your insurance instead if your stuff got stolen on your porch. It's a very tricky situation.
Find My is great. I hid an AirTag in my bike, which got promptly stolen (as bikes tend to be in London): I had near-zero hope but police _actually_ was keen to retrieve it, it evolved into a multi-week adventure where they tried to retrieve it several times but the thief just rode away. Ended up finding it in a shady bike shop, with a fresh new coat of bright silver paint. I was skeptical when I bought the airtag, I…
I recommend removing the speaker from the airtag for this use case. Plenty of youtube videos showing you how.
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Did you go buy a bunch of lottery tickets afterwards? Cops doing their job when you give them the entire breadcrumb trail is incredibly rare. I have many stories from friends and that I’ve seen online of the cops refusing to do anything even when you can guide them directly to the location of your stolen property. I’ve personally experienced their lack of competency when they refused to follow up on stalking/harassme…
TBH having a few police officers drive to the place then spend that time probably costs more than the price of the device.
So to translate, there may be a high up front cost but the return on invest will outweigh in the long run (for higher value products, admittedly). Even if that's not the case, you're not valuing the societal cost at all!
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Ok we have opposite situation than stolen headphones. We found some on a trail in the woods. They are "Alan's Airpods". We connected to them from our nearby house, hoping he would come by using Find My. There is no other way to contact them that I can see?
You could take them to a police station and hand them in.
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Okay let’s say there wasn’t any. Why would passer-bys have coverage?
Maybe a different carrier with different coverage? I'm also wondering if Find My will save the "find", including GPS coordinates at the time, and report it out when it has connection?
A few years ago I also found my mobile phone in Mar del Plata, Argentina, after a young horse passed over my daughter... it was using the find me option in a Fitbit watch linked to a Samsung mobile phone. My daughter was perfectly fine, but that is another story: fingers crossed, she has some special powers.
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> Imagine like, an airtag, but the ID only needs to be 1 byte long, Well, then you could only ever track 255 different tags :) AirTags are already pretty minimal. Their battery lasts about a year, and I imagine an open source equivalent should be possible to build for under $5. This is purely guesstimated based on the fact that I have a couple of Bluetooth LE thermometer/hygrometers that cost me about $3 a piece that…
You'd just have to have IDs repeat, and software that could tell the difference based on signal strength. If you have two on the same ID that have different RSSI, show them as two tags. You'd have to do some guesswork though to figure out what's going on but it would be better than nothing, and you might be able to get the size down below what CR2032 allows.
If you want it to be compatible with most smartphones, you'll need Bluetooth LE anyway, and that already uses at least 10 bytes on header fields for broadcast packets.
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Ok I just read on a delivery company website that they have in fact started taking photos of the moment of delivery. Wow. That is incredible. Here I always opt for delivery at a pick up location and use my electronic ID to pick it up so I had never expected delivery drivers to take, and store, photos of people.
Had a delivery yesterday where the driver (Evri) had to wave his handheld around for a bit, as it wouldnt let him confim delivery as it thought he was 100m down the road!