“If your choice of Mac is one of the MacBooks Air, or Pro, then it is likely that you enjoy using your Mac for it’s [sic] portability … even if that portability is just so that you can work around your home or office,” Johnny Winter reports for Mactuts+.
“The disadvantage of that portability is that it opens up the chance of loss, when you are out and about,” Winter reports. “Combined with the desirability and high resale values, your Mac is also a prime target for thieves.”
Winter reports, “In this tutorial I will show you how to create a customised message, on the log in screen, that may help reunite you with a lost or stolen Mac… The technique that I will demonstrate, in this tutorial, will work with any Mac running OS X 10.7 Lion, 10.8 Mountain Lion and 10.9 Mavericks. Technically, it will even work on a Hackintosh running OS X 10.7 Lion or later.”
Read more in the full article here.
For years, mine has simply stated two words…
FûČK 0FF
Classy.
with a mom like yours.. how’d you learn about classy?
Won’t work.
Because the thief would rather throw it in the river rather than bother to take it to a police station.
Might as well display a message congratulating the thief for making an excellent choice in digital hardware.
What’s to prevent a thief from removing the message? What if they format the hard drive?
Dear Johnny Winter:
You’re a professional writer, correct? Words–and their correct usage–are the brick and mortar of your chosen career, right?
Then, for Gawd’s sakes, how can you screw up “its” and ‘it’s” in the opening sentence of your article? How complex a concept is represented in these two simple words? I acknowledge that most of humanity cannot distinguish between the two, given the current state of public education here and around the world,** but a mistake of this order from a professional scribe is unforgivable. Grow up and LEARN!
[Sorry for the Grammar-Nazism. Reached my breaking point here.]
** Notice the spelling of “customized” above? This guy is, apparently, British . . . from whom I USED to expect much higher communication skills.
So ….
I had to read 760 characters and 125 words to hear you bitch about somebody leaving out an apostrophe?
Its outrageous!
You didn’t have to read those 760 characters, nor did you even have to count them. You did so of your own accord.
He didn’t leave it out; he purposely put it in, out of ignorance. Leaving out gives room for an inadvertent error; putting it in where it shouldn’t be shows lack of basic language skills. English is not my mother tongue (didn’t learn it until my teens), but I cringe at these types of errors, especially when they come from native speakers, even more so when they write for a living.
Learning English as a second language gives you a distinct advantage when it comes to grammar and spelling, especially when it comes to homonymns.
Native English speakers learned to SPEAK long before they learned to spell and write. Sometimes we had to unlearn grammar and word patterns that our brain burnt in. It’s a habitual thing.
Non-native English speakers usually have a BETTER grasp of certain elements of the grammar as they usually learn the mechanics of the language at the same time as the spoken language.
Additionally, they have a better grasp of how languages in general work as knowing two or more languages further abstracts “language fundamentals” from that of the specific language. Or put another way, all the things that the languages have in common are divorced from the language itself.
So, don’t be too hard on native English speakers. Just because we didn’t have to try to learn English, doesn’t mean we’re stupid.
Oh no, we really are stupid.
I think you meant to put a quote in place of the apostrophe when referring to the word “it’s.” I suppose you may not understand the difference.
Or to put it bluntly.
It’s = contraction meaning it is
Its = possessive, belonging to it
Mine says-
NSA Peripheral Scan In Progress……
……Satellite Connection…..ENABLED
What smarty little _unt…… “Whilst the text is scrollable, up and down, the default behaviour of OS X is to hide visual indicators such as scrollbars. This is what happens when you let hipsters loose on a user interface; all the lessons of usability, over the years, are lost for the sake of an aesthetic.”
Just for you Smarmy….Go to Apple Logo…..click on SYSTEM PREFRENCES……click on GENERAL….under scroll bars, click ALWAYS.
I would rather see Apple make some security for the Macbook Pro as they did for the iOS or something that works, like take a picture of people trying to access your account and send automatically by email to the owner with the GPS coordinates.
For many years now, I have had a desktop background with my contact info on it. Simple to bypass? Sure, but anything you do can be. It won’t stop a thief, but makes it easy for an honest person to get back with you. 🙂
Great info. I just registered my MacBook Air with http://www.immobilize.net (for the US) and added the lock screen message.
For those who think it is a bad idea since it won’t work with thieves, what if you lose your Mac, how would someone return it?
I would put:
Equipped with LoJack, sucker.
I have to agree with this observation:
“Whilst the text is scrollable, up and down, the default behaviour of OS X is to hide visual indicators such as scrollbars. This is what happens when you let hipsters loose on a user interface; all the lessons of usability, over the years, are lost for the sake of an aesthetic.”
I did the same with my iphone. I burned my name and email into the lock screen image.