Gone forever? It might be. But in case the thief does not immediately formats the hard-disk but instead uses the laptop or PC anywhere it’s connected to the internet, there’s a number of services that actually track and locate your stolen equipment, using IP addresses and more. There’s LocateMyLaptop, LocateLaptop, and so on (read the WikiPedia article on this). Trouble with all these, is that they are subscription (and European/US) based.

For some time though, there’s been a free alternative; giving you all the functionality of the above minus the dedicated detective and automatic notification of the police. Living in Tanzania though, these services are not available to us anyway, so why not try ‘Prey’, the free, Open Source application available to Windows, Mac and Linux users that installs once and then runs quietly in the background, until it’s needed.

The Prey website

If that day arrives, your laptop or desktop computer has gone missing, all you have to do is enter your Prey Control Panel and set it’s status to ‘Missing’. From then on, every time the PC or laptop has an active internet connection (and Prey will actively search for open WiFi connections so no user interaction is needed), it’ll gather evidence which will be available to you, most importantly:

• The computers IP address, leading you to the ISP and possible internet cafe in question
• If your computer has a web-cam built in, you’ll be able to actually see the thief!

The prey control panel, where you can mark your equipment as missing

All of this info, and more, available to you from your control panel, or sent to you by email. Armed with the (approximate) location of your pc and hopefully a nice clear mugshot (picture) of the thief, off to the polici!

NOTE: Almost left out the other free, Open Source solution, doing roughly the same as Prey but just a tad less polished: Adeona…

Fortunately, as with many technologies, full time camera surveillance is now something available to anyone, anywhere, using no more then standard PC equipment and easilly available camera hardware. Instead of using an expensive ‘time-lapse’ videorecorder, we can now digitally record any video source, from a web-cam to an wireless outside camera, straight onto a standard hard-disk using a technology called ‘DVR’, or ‘Digital Video Recording’.

Using no more then a standard personal computer, abeit one with a reasonably large hard-disk, a video capture card and one or more cameras, we can ensure 24×7 recording of your property. You can access your recordings from any workstation in your office, or even remotely, from the internet.

Our preferred software for the professional monitoring of your assets is made by ‘Argus’ (see their website here); their uniquely flexible and schaleable software allows support for almost all available camera’s, DVR cards (a card you plug into the central recording server, allowing connection of 4, 8 or 16 cameras), USB-webcams, wireless IP-cameras etc..

And what to think of:

• scheduled, motion detected or full-time recording of up to 32 simultaneous cameras,
• support for zooming & panning (moving the aim of your camera),
• automatic notification of activity on SMS (when supported by the cellular network), email and across your company network,
• access to any recorded materials by date, time and/or detected movement,
• etc..

Have a good look at the Argus DVR pages for a full overview of possibilities and if you are interested, why not visit our shop in town to see for yourself! We are using two cameras to record all movement in our shop to a central computer and will gladly give you a full demonstration of the possibilities of the system.

Using our own system to the full, combined with a number of installations in town, has given us ample experience in the setup of camera surveillance, bringing this specialised technology to the Arusha market at very affordable prices. Interested? Let us know and we’ll be in touch with more information!