Mujtaba Hussain

I just realised that simply using Prey would probably put you within some walkable distance of your stolen/lost laptop, but if the place was say a shopping centre, then you would be screwed. Then I remembered this xkcd comic, and decided to do something similar.

SSH into the system using the IP address generated by Prey. Raise the volume to maximum.

[damascus:~] sudo osascript -e “set Volume 10″

And then play some music file.

[damascus:~] afplay ~/Desktop/Symphony_IX_IV.mp3

Hopefully, the music should be loud enough for you to locate the laptop, even if through people’s reaction to a sudden loud orchestra amongst them.

But if you are not satisfied with this, then just use the say to speech synthesise words from the command line after you have raised the volume.

[damascus:~] say “This laptop is stolen! Help! Call the Cops!”

Noticed yesterday that playing Wagner (specifically the Die Walkure suite) consumes the battery of my Apple Macbook much more rapidly than playing Beethoven (specifically the 6th).

Both these mp3′s are the same bit rate, same compression, and nothing changed on the laptop between playing the two suites. I played the suites for the same length of time twice and did not even move the laptop thinking that perhaps the temperature might be a factor.

Next step is to run different suites of both composers and see if the effect can be reproduced.