Oct 9, 2008

Adeona - LoJack for laptop

BB told me a interesting free software: Adeona.
http://adeona.cs.washington.eduThis program is for the case that your laptop is stolen.
This software periodically run on background, gather network information and give you some hints where your laptop is.

The website recommend you do *not* try to catch the thief by yourself even when you find out where it is.

One interesting thing is the software can take a picture of the thief when your computer is MacBook series, which has a camera at top of the LCD.

The logic was simple, so that I made similar one by myself.Using my shell program will get some network information and picture file onto your email box every half hour; you may be able to use some "filters" for the spam-like emails.In order to use this, you need to set your email address on the script file, "email", and install two software: iSightCapture, mutt.
I don't know which way is easiest way to install mutt, but I used "Mac Port".

You can add a schedule onto your "crontab" like this:
0,30 * * * * /Users/wrice/Applications/sendPicture.sh
Enjoy your safer environment.

1 comment:

Jay said...

I found that it may not work if the computer is under Firewall. In that case you can install "msmtp" and set the ~/.msmtprc and ~/.muttrc file.

================
.muttrc file will be like this:
set sendmail="/opt/local/bin/msmtp"
set from=yourEmail@gmail.com

================
.msmtprc file will be like this:
account default
host smtp.gmail.com
port 587
from yourEmail@gmail.com
tls on
tls_starttls on
tls_trust_file /path/your/home/folder/Thawte_Premium_Server_CA.pem
auth on
user yourGamilAccountName
password yourGamilAccountPassword
#logfile ~/.msmtp.log

================
You also need to get the file, "Thawte_Premium_Server_CA.pem" from internet anywhere.

Hmmm it seems like getting complex.....