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 answered and denied having headphones that fit the description. Another police officer brought me around to the window and had me “play sound to locate” and sure enough you could hear the beep-boops through the window. The officer went back and said “listen, we know they are in your apartment, we can hear them, either go get them or we are getting a search warrant.” The guy said “ohhhh well I did have a party last week and there’s this backpack…”<p>Uh huh. Headphones returned.<p>Another officer returned to this scene and asked if we got the headphones back. I held them up and he says: “OH $&@# YEAH!”
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.<p>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?<p>Find My immediately found it 43 miles away. My wife looked at Google Earth, identified the likely turnout and high-tailed it. She found it about five minutes after stopping at that turnout.<p>There were enough passers-by with iOS devices that Find My worked as hoped. It amazed me that we got a little piece of our property back through operation of planetary-scale infrastructure.
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 out of the question. But I did have a landline phone that was powered by electricity and had a replaceable battery as a backup. I used the phone only to connect to the internet. So I just removed the batteries and when the power goes out, my phone wouldn't 't work. So before leaving work, all I had to do was call my landline. If it rings, it means there is power.
Back in the mid-90s my dad lost his car keys. Turns out they were in his dressing gown (we’re British) pocket, in the wardrobe.<p>So he bought one of those keyrings where you whistle and it beeps. This was a Saturday and we were visiting my grandparents, his parents. He told his dad, by now with a mild case of the Alzheimers, that he’d got this thing and that “you beep and it tells you where your keys are”.<p>Well my grandad, who never drove a car let alone used a computer, his mind was blown. He just had no idea how this thing could do that.<p>This went on for a few minutes.<p>Dad, increasingly frustrated: “you just beep and it tells you where your keys are!”<p>Grandad, increasingly confused: “... but ... how?!”<p>It turns out that my grandad was imagining that you whistled and that this little device shouted out, “they’re in your dressing-gown pocket!”
Ha, last winter I lost my phone while snowboarding in the last 300-500m before mountain base. I noticed because I was listening to music with my airpods when I got to the bottom the music had gone silent. Thankfully I had my Apple watch with me, so I immediately got off the board and start running uphill while incessantly spamming the "ping my phone" button. At some point I saw in the watch screen it briefly connected and then immediately disconnected again. I realized somebody had probably grabbed it and skied by me. I went back running to the chairlift while still spamming the button and finally found the person who had grabbed it, a few seconds before he got into the chairlift. I felt that day that the watch investment had been worth it hah.
not directly relevant, but was riding my motorcycle in the boonies, and lost the phone which was on the handlebar (bumpy rocky path).<p>Looked for it several times on the path with no luck. Then I remembered my old iPhone was in the backpack. Did a Find my phone on the backup phone and it showed exactly where it had lost touch with the primary phone. This is all without cell or Wi-Fi service. Saved me a $1000.
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.
I wonder how cheap and low power we could make tracking beacons if we didn't actually have to send any data and could accept some privacy risk.<p>Imagine like, an airtag, but the ID only needs to be 1 byte long, or even just a simple presence signal.<p>You'd put it on everything you own that's portable and easy to lose. When you want to find it you just search for signals. Maybe it could have an NFC silencing feature.
Perhaps it could only activate after 10 minutes of not detecting movement, while also not being near a base station (The base stations would mark a location as the "safe place you won't forget").<p>So you won't get any interference from anything people are carrying. You won't pick up anything safely stashed where it actually belongs.<p>But you can quickly sweep an area for any lost property (Which could be good or bad, depending on if it's a helpful security guard or someone who believes in finders keepers looking...).<p>You wouldn't ever have to receive any data, except to detect base stations, which would only need maybe a 2ft range.<p>But it wouldn't solve the big issue with losing stuff, detecting when you leave a location without a thing.
If you ever connected to a network with a hidden SSID (or one where the phone <i>thought</i> the SSID was hidden for some reason), the phone will actively beacon for that WiFi, including the "hidden" SSID.<p>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.
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 jamming situation: <a href="https://www.gpsworld.com/gps-jamming-in-israel/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.gpsworld.com/gps-jamming-in-israel/</a>.
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.<p>I was skeptical when I bought the airtag, I thought I'd just lose a bike _and_ an airtag, but now I can't recommend it enough!
Embedding a LoRa module in the phone could come handy in similar situations; it could trigger a timed transmission of the latest known position before a given event, say a big bump followed by no movement or usage for X time, too long exposition to temperature and humidity incompatible with a house, etc. LoRa allows transmission at impressive distances using very low power compared to WiFi and other systems; a phone configured to turn itself off and use just the LoRa module to repeat a very short <phone code>+<position> say every 10 minutes wouldn't tax the spectrum too much (RF in that context is a <i>very</i> scarce resource) and its battery would likely last weeks.
If all else fails, build your own Stingray.<p><a href="https://www.hackers-arise.com/post/software-defined-radio-part-6-building-a-imsi-catcher-stingray" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.hackers-arise.com/post/software-defined-radio-pa...</a>
I use this sometimes when I can't find my daughter in a large shop - just turn on my wifi tethering and when I have a device connected, I know she's nearby.
What's the difference in signal strength between bluetooth and wifi? I had assumed since they use the same frequency, and usually the same chip and antenna, they would be much the same (perhaps there are regulatory differences between them?) If anything, I'd guess that BLE would be more useful in this case as there is less handshaking, which means on a very poor connection you've got more of a chance of getting some data through.
If I had 2 wifi access points a meter apart would that me enough to be able to locate the device either behind or in front of the two antennas?<p>I assume I would need two wifi USB dongles for my PC and some sort of way to determine the time a beacon packet arrived but I don't know if the time difference is granular enough to be able to tell a difference in time between the two.<p>Has anyone tried something like this with wifi?
I've had this exact same problem last week while going to Mount Roraima <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Roraima" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Roraima</a><p>If I had just read this message before. This is an ingenious solution. He created a thetering wifi network with the same name and password of a network the phone would recognize. When there's a connection, it means the phone is near:<p>"I’ve used my own phone’s tethering feature to create a wifi network with the same name & password as my cousin’s home network - and we started walking around the place. We made sure the other guy helping us with the search had his own wifi off, to avoid false positives, and waited to find a new connection to the hotspot. And it worked! The connection was made when walking nearby the parked truck, but it turns out that the phone wasn’t in the truck - it was lying on one of the ATVs that was parked by its side."
In my job I regularly wonder how to get a found phone laptop or notebook back to their owner. The notebook is the easiest. The apple laptop the most stupid. I have the locked laptop i have my iphone you would think, with the closed eco-system, there to be some magic ritual i can perform for the laptop to register on the owners "find my device"???? Or at least let me type a number for them to call?<p>Sometimes, (if i charge the phone) eventually contacts real names appear on the home screen. This seems just the information one shouldn't be sharing?<p>It is really odd how garbage the tech is here.
I did something very similar to connect my Amazon Fire-stick with my new TV at a different place when I had lost the remote (of Fire-stick). The TV remote was helpful, but only after I could connect the Fire-stick with a working Internet connection.<p>I remembered my old home's wifi SSID and password, so created a hotspot on my phone with the same SSID and password, and the Fire-stick got connected. All went good after that.
>Largely beautiful as this country is, as you get into more rural areas, there's a high chance you won't have cell phone coverage there - I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to choose if that's a feature or a bug.<p>>We'd already called and sent some WhatsApp messages, so we knew the phone wasn't reachable.<p>How did they do that without coverage?
Nice! Now does anyone know a way to find my wireless earphones? Presumably in their charging box.<p>I expect not, because they don't have bluetooth on in their charger, and I don't think the charger itself has bluetooth. But just in case someone knows a miracle for me: Sony WF-1000XM4.
Before reading, I thought it would be about a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonlinear_junction_detector" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonlinear_junction_detector</a> ; but then again, that can find not just lost phones but other electronics too.
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.<p>My daughter was perfectly fine, but that is another story: fingers crossed, she has some special powers.
I thought he was going to find it by its local oscillator emissions like the TV detector vans <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_detector_van" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_detector_van</a>
If you have an Apple Watch, there is a nifty trick of pressing and holding the "Locate Phone" button in the Control Center. Doing so also engages the phone's flashlight so you can find it at night.
My brother dropped his iPhone during a powder snow traversal down the back of the mountain to a hut.<p>We found it accidentally during a hike in the summer, when the snow was gone.<p>Always be prepared to lose everything.
this is pretty smart, i didn't realize the hotspot tells you how many connections there are although i don't really use mine. my mind went straight to bluetooth pairing.
TL;DR: created a wifi-network on another phone with same SSID and password as the one that the lost phone usually connects to, walked around waiting for the phone to connect, receive the "Find my phone" notification and send out a sound.<p>Cool :)
>I’ve learnt to save battery by switching my phone’s wifi off whenever I go into the woods or mountain<p>I feel like this is not true.<p>Walking in a city it'd be even worse since there would be 100's networks to check to see if it can connect too. Which I don't think matters much.<p>Bad cellular reception which you'll hit if you are coming and going out of coverage would matter.<p>Similarly a wifi you can connect to will drain the battery with background apps and if reception sucks also bad.<p>But zero wifi you can connect to, I can't see mattering.