A Pizza Box for Your Laptop 526
Dark Twonky writes "Human Beans is selling the perfect gift for the geek who has everything. It's the PowerPizza, a pizza box for transporting your precious laptop in. From the web site: Desirable laptops are desirable to thieves too. Disguise your laptop with a PowerPizza and reduce the risk of getting it nicked."
"There goes another executive lunchbox"!!! (Score:3, Interesting)
A full-swing marketing campaign was launched, so no one would be ignorant of what those "executive lunchboxes" looked like.
The result was predictable: EVERYONE knew when some white-collar worker was bringing his lunch to the office, thus triggering the same social stigma as if he were carrying a blue-collar lunchbox, as blue-collar workers would laugh with a big "THERE GOES ANOTHER EXECUTIVE LUNCHBOX!!!" whenever they saw one.
The phrase eventually became a Madison Avenue monicker to designate a marketing failure...
Don't need no steenking case... (Score:3, Interesting)
I saw a guy on the plane the other day who I thought had the right idea: He didn't have a case - just stuck the notebook in the seat-back pocket.
I got a big anti-static bag from one of the lab techs that should be sufficient to protect it from such "weather" as it might encounter, and I figure to keep the power brick in my purse/pocket/whatever...
Laptop cases are an anachronism.
On recovery from theft... (Score:3, Interesting)
GMail wouldn't do it, even though there's no threat to user privacy here: the police are the only ones getting information, and that information was requested by the owner of the account.
That got me thinking: someone (laptop manufacturers) should run a phone-home service, that keeps a log of the IP addresses that send in requests (with an authentication string specific to the user or computer). That way, using that same string and a password, you could get a list of all the IP addresses your machine has connected to the Internet from... which could be turned over to the police if necessary. If you trust the site explicitly, you could even run an applet that will respond to remote instructions (including flashing the BIOS with a "THIS IS STOLEN PROPERTY" message on bootup) when the site's notified that it is stolen. Once laptops start including onboard GPS, this would make recovery a snap.
This won't do anything to deter sophisticated thieves, who will start formatting drives, but it would be cheap to implement and would provide another layer of protection from theft.
Other Solutions (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:On recovery from theft... (Score:5, Interesting)
Without a court order, Google has no way of knowing that the laptop was actually stolen. You (and your buddy in the PD), may be running a scam, or trying to stalk someone.
That got me thinking: someone (laptop manufacturers) should run a phone-home service,
Some do [inspice.com]
Once laptops start including onboard GPS,
/.ers will scream that the EvilGummint(tm) is trying to track everyone.
Less stealth, more deterrent (Score:3, Interesting)
It looks like that's what's holding it together.
Plus it looks different from all of the other laptops going through security, making it easy for me to keep my eye on it.
If someone's going to lift laptops, they'll move along to one that looks less like a piece of s...junk.
Oh, and I also keep my bag with me everywhere except the security checkpoint.
PC? Pizza? (Score:1, Interesting)
Picture here: http://www.worldofwibble.com/aboutriscpc.html
Re:On recovery from theft... (Score:3, Interesting)
-Lucas
Re:On recovery from theft... (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Domino's (Score:3, Interesting)
Ordered 8pm.
Pizza arrived 8.45pm. Almost cold.
Delivery boy had to go back to the shop to authorize the credit card as he couldn't do it. 20 minutes later, sign slip.
Pizza (one of the new ones with the cheese layer in the middle) tasted like cardboard, was now cold, and cost about 50% more than the pizza hut a mile away...
Another way to do "phone home" style security (Score:1, Interesting)
use a dynamic DNS service.
Like http://www.cjb.net/ [cjb.net] and http://www.dyndns.com/ [dyndns.com]
You go to their site, create a DNS entry for your machine with your current IP#.
Then you make a small script to connect to those sites and update that IP# and set that script to run at startup.
The result is if your machine is on DHCP or moves around a lot (or gets stolen), you'll know its current IP# (or at least it's most recent IP#).
--Clayto
Open Firmware password for Macs (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:On recovery from theft... (Score:2, Interesting)