Roark Masbad
WACKY TECH
IN this digital age that we all live in, we are continually faced with the challenge of keeping up with our gadgets. We have our laptops where most of our schoolwork are stored. For the corporate types, you probably have in your laptops your spreadsheets, password protected legal documents, digital journals, digital music collection and all that photos you take of yourself when the boss is not looking.
That’s just your laptop. What about your smartphones and your tablets? I’m sure you have copies of some or all of those files synced as well. And surely that was one heck of a feat for you to keep all those synced up and updated.
Even with all that syncing up, there will always be that one device that you always go back to. Your “one ring”. Your Coruscant. Your Enterprise.
What if, in some evil twist of fate, you lost that one device? Oh the horror!
And that brings me to this week’s app recommendation. Prey.
It’s open source. It’s good for OS X, Windows, Linux, Android and iOS. Sadly it doesn’t support Symbian. But who’s still on Symbian today? I hope you already moved on.
Anyway, Prey works through a tiny agent in your computer or mobile device that you install yourself. This agent silently waits in the background for a specific “remote signal to wake up and work its magic.” Activating the agent can be done either via the Internet or through an SMS message (if you lost your phone with Prey in it).
First of all, you’ll have to register at the website first – www.preyproject.com. The free account is more than enough for most of us.
It will let you track down three devices. If you have a tablet, a laptop and a smartphone, that should cover it all. If you have more devices to track down, you can upgrade to a Pro account and get the ability to track to as much as 500 devices. But that’s overkill.
Once you’re registered, and have your account setup, just go to the download page, download the appropriate version for you, install and configure.
Once everything is all set, you can try if everything works by setting a device to missing in your web-based control panel.
You have different options available for you in the control panel – how often the reports come in from your “missing” devices or whether it will also include photo of whoever “stole” your device or you can also set to include a geo-location tag of where your device is or you can just activate them all.
I set up mine an all my devices– my Macbook Pro, my iPad and my iPhone. It’s working perfectly well for me. It has even helped me find my iPad when I thought I lost it. As it turns out, I left it in my friend’s house.
It’s a nifty application. It’s light, unobstrusive and won’t eat much of computing resources (if you’re worried about that).
You should get it if you still don’t have it so you don’t have to just pray again.
*****
“Roark, or Wacky, is a photographer, a radio DJ, a club DJ, and a self-confessed tech geek. He’s been into the world of computing since the x86 days when computer screens were green or white. He’s a self-confessed Apple fan but is still open-source at heart. He’s wacky and he’s crazy about tech and can’t wait to be a part of your weekly tech life.”
