How-to
How to find things
Methods rather than product pitches. What actually works, in what order, and where each approach stops.
The silent phone problem
How to find your phone when it’s on silent
Every method for finding a lost phone assumes the phone can make a noise. On silent, that assumption is the whole problem.…
Ring it
How to make your phone ring loudly on demand
The volume slider and the ringer switch both stand between you and hearing your phone. Here is what gets past them.…
When it is off
How to find a phone with a dead battery
Once the battery is gone, every live method is gone with it. What is left is a record of where it was, and a proper search.…
Method
How to find a phone lost in the house
A phone lost in your own house is a search problem, not a technology problem. Doing it in the right order takes minutes instead …
Method
How to find something lost in a car
A car is a small space with a surprisingly good hiding capacity. Almost everything ends up in one of six places.…
Method
How to find something you left at the gym
The gym is the highest-loss environment most people pass through weekly: things come off, go into bags, and get left in a locker…
Method
How to find something in a hotel room before you check out
Hotel rooms are engineered to hide exactly the objects you are most likely to leave behind: chargers, earbuds, and anything dark…
Troubleshooting
Bluetooth scan is not finding a device
In order of frequency: the device is off, the device is too far, the device is inside something, or the app does not have permis…
Privacy
How to find a device without creating an account
Locating a device around you is a local radio operation. It does not require an account, and an app that insists on one should h…
Checklist
What to do in the first hour after losing your phone
The first hour is about two things at once: finding the phone, and limiting what happens if you do not.…
Prevention
How to stop losing the same things
People who rarely lose things are not more attentive. They have fewer places where an object can legitimately be.…
Method
How to search a room systematically
Searching the same room three times is not searching it three times. It is looking at the same surfaces three times.…
Method
How to find something in the dark
Most night-time searches fail for the same reason: people turn on the main light, which is the worst possible tool for finding a…
Setup
Why naming your devices makes them findable
An unnamed device in a list of twenty is not information. It is noise with a signal strength attached.…
Method
How to find something lost in a garden
A garden is the friendliest radio environment you will search in, and the least friendly visual one.…
Guidance
What to do if you find someone else’s device
There is a right answer for a lost phone and a very different right answer for a tracker, and confusing the two causes real harm…
Prevention
What to set up before you travel
Travel concentrates every risk: unfamiliar places, more transitions, and no idea where the local lost property office is.…
Method
How to help someone else find their phone
The hard part is usually not the search. It is that nobody remembers the account password, and the phone that would receive the …
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