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How to find a lost phone in a no-cell-coverage camping site?

manas.tech

141–150 of 349 posts

Re: How to find a lost phone in a no-cell-coverage camping site?

#141
post #139

I had AirPods Max stolen from our car a few months ago. A week later they popped up on Find My a block away. I hopped on my bike and tracked to a small apartment building. Using Find My will show you a “warmer … warmer … colder” kind of UI and whenever I lifted my phone to a particular window (shades drawn) Find My would say “Nearby.” I called the police and they were genuinely excited to knock on the door. A guy ans…

Lucky there. UK here. A couple of years back I had a macbook pro delivered to me. It was delivered to the correct number on a different road. The POD had a photo of the front door and the person. I recognised the front door as it was on a local estate. Phoned delivery company up (DPD) and they said that they delivered it to the correct location and wouldn't do anything about it. Went round there and the guy said "um,…

You did a cryptographically secure deletion of that hard drive, right? Even odds there were bad things in that drive.

Re: How to find a lost phone in a no-cell-coverage camping site?

#143

Find My came to the rescue when my wife unknowingly dropped her phone during a pullover to take some pix. The turnout was on New Priest Grade, the best way to Yosemite from our home. Next morning, after the frenzied "Where's my phone" search petered out, we remembered Find My. No way, I thought. Rural road, many miles away, etc. Which new phone would you like, Dear? Find My immediately found it 43 miles away. My wife…

> infrastructure Imagine if anyone, not just Apple, could build on that, creating an automatic sneakernet. Populous areas without cell towers would come online, with ultra high latency. Throughput would also need to be throttled by the owner of each device to accommodate battery consumption preferences.

Apple let's you build products for the Find My network.

Re: How to find a lost phone in a no-cell-coverage camping site?

#144
post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lucky there. UK here. A couple of years back I had a macbook pro delivered to me. It was delivered to the correct number on a different road. The POD had a photo of the front door and the person. I recognised the front door as it was on a local estate. Phoned delivery company up (DPD) and they said that they delivered it to the correct location and wouldn't do anything about it. Went round there and the guy said "um,…

You did a cryptographically secure deletion of that hard drive, right? Even odds there were bad things in that drive.

It was still sealed. It was probably on Facebook marketplace.

Re: How to find a lost phone in a no-cell-coverage camping site?

#145

Find My came to the rescue when my wife unknowingly dropped her phone during a pullover to take some pix. The turnout was on New Priest Grade, the best way to Yosemite from our home. Next morning, after the frenzied "Where's my phone" search petered out, we remembered Find My. No way, I thought. Rural road, many miles away, etc. Which new phone would you like, Dear? Find My immediately found it 43 miles away. My wife…

> There were enough passers-by with iOS devices that Find My worked as hoped

I'm not sure I understand why you would need nearby devices to locate your phone. The phone itself already had GPS and a network connection, right?

Re: How to find a lost phone in a no-cell-coverage camping site?

#146

This reminds me of the kind of hack I came up with, almost 20 years back. I used to work in Bangalore, and now and then, we would have a power outage in the evening that lasts for a few hours. I was single and used to live alone. I did not want to go home from the office and find myself without power. So how do I find out there is power at home? During those days, there were no IOT devices so checking them is that's…

How long was the commute from office to home? Depending on this you still had risks of phone working while at the office, power out when back home, no?

Re: How to find a lost phone in a no-cell-coverage camping site?

#147
post #139

I had AirPods Max stolen from our car a few months ago. A week later they popped up on Find My a block away. I hopped on my bike and tracked to a small apartment building. Using Find My will show you a “warmer … warmer … colder” kind of UI and whenever I lifted my phone to a particular window (shades drawn) Find My would say “Nearby.” I called the police and they were genuinely excited to knock on the door. A guy ans…

Lucky there. UK here. A couple of years back I had a macbook pro delivered to me. It was delivered to the correct number on a different road. The POD had a photo of the front door and the person. I recognised the front door as it was on a local estate. Phoned delivery company up (DPD) and they said that they delivered it to the correct location and wouldn't do anything about it. Went round there and the guy said "um,…

This is like an episode of Shameless. Sounds a lot like when I grew up. Except we didn't have macbooks or online shopping.

Re: How to find a lost phone in a no-cell-coverage camping site?

#148
post #31

I once found my phone buried in the sand on a beach with no coverage. I had a year worth of pictures on it, so I stewed in anguish for almost a day until we thought about installing a Bluetooth signal monitor on a friend’s phone . Given the sluggish update frequency, we resorted to triangulating the phone’s position. As we were pulling it from its sandy grave, I swear it felt like we were cheating fate itself.

Not to nitpick but I think you mean trilaterate ;)

[deleted]

Re: How to find a lost phone in a no-cell-coverage camping site?

#149
post #145

Find My came to the rescue when my wife unknowingly dropped her phone during a pullover to take some pix. The turnout was on New Priest Grade, the best way to Yosemite from our home. Next morning, after the frenzied "Where's my phone" search petered out, we remembered Find My. No way, I thought. Rural road, many miles away, etc. Which new phone would you like, Dear? Find My immediately found it 43 miles away. My wife…

> There were enough passers-by with iOS devices that Find My worked as hoped I'm not sure I understand why you would need nearby devices to locate your phone. The phone itself already had GPS and a network connection, right?

Find my works without a network connection. So if the phone is lost without signal and another iOS device comes in range it will remember seeing it, and then upload the location to apple for the devices owner to see when it has internet again.

Re: How to find a lost phone in a no-cell-coverage camping site?

#150
If you ever connected to a network with a hidden SSID (or one where the phone thought the SSID was hidden for some reason), the phone will actively beacon for that WiFi, including the "hidden" SSID.

This is obviously harder to use for searching for the phone than the method they used, but it's a privacy nightmare you should be aware of. Hiding SSIDs is almost always a really bad idea for this reason.

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