Camera Hack: How to find a lost camera
andrewmcdonald.net.au
andrewmcdonald.net.au
In the days of chemical film cameras I always made sure the first shot was of a card with my name and a contact address. I recovered three films that way which had been delivered or given to the wrong people by the people developing the film. For the cost of one photo per film, it was definitely worth it.
I need to go do this again, although if I lost the camera, I doubt I'd get it back. If a reward is offered, returning someone's photos is clearly a win for the person who has them, whereas the camera might be of greater value than the (reward plus warm fuzzies minus effort).
Then again, maybe not. I'm off to take a photo ...
For phones, I generally include my email in the greeting/home screen message.
For my iPod, I select the engraving option and use '$100 Reward. Contact: my_email'
More specifically, when they plug in the camera, it would likely offer to import the photos; it would do nothing with the text file.
"If this bike has not been brought into your shop by [insert your name] then it is stolen, please call me immediately on [insert your number]".
These little pieces of paper are in places like the stem, the bars, under the bar tape, in the bottom bracket, under the inner tubes, under the rim tape, in the hubs. Literally anywhere I can put them where they are likely to survive undetected by a casual user of the bike but that is likely to be discovered the first time the bike is taken into a shop for servicing. Obviously I use little bits of plastic and a permanent CD marker for the places likely to get wet (the ones under the innertubes).
I don't expect to get the bike back days after a theft, but weeks or months later I think it would work well.
Down Brick Lane market on a Sunday morning there is literally a fence... a chicken wire one from which stolen bikes are sold. Lord knows what the buyers are thinking, and the police are well aware of what is happening too (but are doing very little about it).
We are now tracking (within the community) where bikes are stolen from, the measures used to protect them and evidence of how they were circumvented as well as where and when the bikes are turning up. With a large enough community (over 12,000 users in the same city) we're able to recover a fair amount of our own property after the event... not to say we're lax about protecting it but that by taking as many precautions and steps that you can you stand some chance of being re-united should the worst happen.
Opportunist crime wherein someone just steals something because it's easy to and then they keep the item now seems rare.
Oh, and if you're interested in bike security these guides on my site are good places to start:
Guide to which locks to use (which are primary security, which should be considered secondary): http://www.londonfgss.com/thread17938.html
Review of a motion alarm: http://www.londonfgss.com/thread24813.html
We also have private areas of the site for tracking stolen bikes, and have worked with companies like Kryptonite to help make their locks better, local police to try and get them to do stuff about the 'fence' and the local cycling associations to try and raise awareness. We're collectively writing guides on bike security too which we hope will be released under creative commons on a wiki and then from there we can encourage bike shops to distribute copies with every new bike sold.
Anyhow... I am more than wandering off the point, which is that most stolen bikes in London are stolen to be sold and that the buyers tend to be regular people who do take them into bike shops after a while, from where some bikes have been recovered. More successfully though, we've recovered bikes from Gumtree and eBay classifieds.
Perhaps people could register their noise profiles with a service like Flickr and, if their camera is stolen, this noise profile could be detected in pictures found on the web.
Disclaimer- portfolio company
I'm shocked that there isn't a way to wirelessly send pictures to a tablet PC for instant studio proofing with a DSLR that saves to CompactFlash, but there doesn't seem to be.
I've talked to the EyeFi guys about this but it seems to fall onto deaf ears.
I also agree that there should be an open platform option for these -- you could sell a ton of these if people could use them for their own uses that go beyond the original concept of uploading to the internet.
There's often cheap alternatives too.. e.g. http://petetek.blogspot.com/2009/05/50-wireless-tethering-so...
Except that I can't read the email address.
Maybe just put a sticker on the outside of the camera?
It wont work agaisnt a hardened thief but it will on someone who just found the camera and is thinking of just keeping it.