Tomorrow, the world ∞

Oct 16, 2013

I now have a smart keyring that can make my iPhone beep, and an iPhone that can make my keyring beep. This may be the best thing that’s ever happened to me. I could have built empires in the time I’ve spent looking for my keys or my phones. Empires.

In general, I’m about 100 times less likely to lose my iPhone than my keys. But iPhone searches happen. This product would have saved me about an hour of searching in an incident sometime last year. An hour doesn’t sound like a lot, but for a productivity nut like me, an hour of thrashing around the house trying to find a phone is like torture. It’s a loooong time.

I knew the phone was there. I mean, I really, really knew, because I could trigger a wireless sync from my Mac. It was within wifi range! But with the ringer off, it didn’t help to call it.

I checked between the couch cushions, of course, an obvious sneaky possibility, and it had happened before. But it turned out, in the end, that it had not just gone between the cushion, but … deeper. It was stuck in an obscure upholstery crevasse, and I could only confirm that was in there with an awkward, groping reach. It was quite the feeling of satisfaction when, grunting and contorted, the tips of my fingers grazed that familiar metal bevel …

Oh, to have had hipkey that day! HipKey’s alarm can over-ride the iPhone’s sound settings. The search would have been over in seconds.

Update: false alarms!

I really, really want to love this product, but … the false alarms, OMFG! It worked great for about a week, and then the false alarms started, warning me that hipKey has lost its connection … when it was 3 feet away … in a so-called “safe zone,” where no alarms are supposed to be able to happen. All of this behaviour persisted after basic troubleshooting like resets of the pairing.

Even a few false alarms would basically be a disaster for this product. Obviously I can’t trust it anywhere that it simply has to shut the fuck up, like a movie theatre. Or 2am in my bedroom.