Hello folks,
I just had a ‘wake in the night’ sort of idea (which is something I’m sure the Fins have a word for) so now I’m wondering if enough Lemmings could put their heads together to find some other, hopefully much better, solutions for loss prevention.
My idea, which I think is only good enough to get the conversation going, is to disassemble an Airtag, rig the Deck to support its power needs (I don’t know how this would be achieved), and then embed the finished product somewhere (I don’t know that, either) inside the case.
A hardware-side solution, like this, would allow the Deck to be tracked regardless of software changes.
If the solution is internal it couldn’t be detected, and it could function regardless of power state —— but at the expense of the Deck’s battery capacity. If the solution is external it could have independent power —— but would be detectable, snagable, and removable.
A software-side solution might be achievable, especially with Linux, and it would likely use much-less power —— but it would require the device to be not-off and not-factory-reset (which can be achieved with a few keystrokes in the settings menu).
What ideas do y’all have?
I didn’t read the community name and thought this is about moderators preventing people spamming loss memes
Despite my best efforts I can’t seem to find the article or post now, but I have definitely come across someone in the old subreddit that did basically what you’re describing. They stripped an air tag down to bare minimum and hot glued it internally. They tried to use the decks internal battery for power, but it was throwing off battery draw enough to noticably impact the performance. I think they ultimately added a auxiliary button cell battery to power it, there was enough room in the case for this so it was still all internal.
Good to know about the power draw. I think Airtags use a button cell already, so in the end it’s just stripping down the Airtag, finding space, and then 6 screws for routine service.
I can’t talk to the hardware side, but from a software point of view it is unlikely to be possible to set up really any good tracking. The device doesn’t have a GPS, so you would have to rely on IP address location, which in turn would rely on the stealer setting up wifi on the deck without resetting it first.
It wouldn’t be hard to make the deck log the IP to an external server every time it connects to wifi, but it’s unlikely it would be very helpful. However, the deck could be set up to send more info, like nearby wifi networks, as well as a list of other devices on the wifi, which may help to locate it, but won’t be nearly as good as an airtag, or as if it had a GPS.
I recently read this article about AirTags, and this post made me think of it.
One of my main takeaways was that the anti-stalker features of AirTags are a bit of a liability for this use case. Imagine you successfully hide your AirTag inside the Deck, and a few days later it starts beeping. I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t stay hidden for long! Admittedly, you could potentially remove the speaker when installing it to prevent this.
The other thing I saw, which was a bit more worrying, was that the police were not really inclined to help, and took some prodding. They also got lucky that the stolen item was in a store they could just walk into. If someone steals a Deck and then takes it into their house, who knows if the police would even bother trying to get it back.
I feel like if the goal is to avoid the risk of theft, I would probably look into more physical security. Just keeping it on my person at all times when in high risk areas, potentially in a locking case?
I use a tile stuck inside my carry case, it’s not fool proof but it works for someone quickly stealing the case
Yeah, obviously that sort of stuff wins by merit of practicality. I’m just wondering if there’s anyone who wants to go crazy with the idea for the fun of it.
Honestly with the openness of the steam deck and the Bluetooth built in - I wonder if you could make a tracker built in to the operating system
I think that being able to wipe the tracker with a factory reset is a pretty big drawback for software-side, but —and I don’t think this is possible— if you could load it into the micro-SD and make that run the tracker, I (for some reason) see that being more robust or redundant.
I forget the thing has a micro-SD most of the time.
I don’t have one (yet) so maybe I’m speaking out of turn, but is there no option for password protecting a factory reset?
