This is good in a way, since we have instant access to almost everything we need wherever we go, but what happens if we loose, misplace, or God forbid, someone steals our precious cellphone? In that case my friends, we’re on a roller-coaster that has a stinky pond as a final stop, in other words, we’d be better off losing our wallet.

But fear not, not everything is lost. Thankfully there exist programs that’ll help you find your lost/stolen electronic property and possibly even bring the thieves to justice. How do they work? Most smart phones have GPS technology, which can be used in conjunctions with the retrieval software to send information about the device’s location. If that’s not the case, it’s possible to define the phone’s location through signal strength analysis from the few nearest stations. It’s less precise, but nonetheless very helpful. But what about flash drives, cameras or even laptops? It gets a bit harder with those, but essentially, you receive the IP address of the computer they’ve been connected to, with which you can (usually it’s the police who does that), if you get a permit, obtain the postal address of the person it was used by at that time.

Most of such services require an annual fee to use their software, but there are some other alternatives you might want to consider as well. For example, JustStolen is a service set up by a group of police officers, that offers you a place to store your gadget’s serial identification number, which makes the process of finding the owner of stolen property quicker and easier.

After almost half a year of preparations, tests and calculations, they finally assembled their probe and sent it towards the sky with great anticipation. The probe was equipped with a GPS module, a photo camera and instruments to measure air temperature, humidity and pressure.

They set themselves a goal, to reach at least 10,000 meters of altitude, which is the height where most commercial airlines fly. But the probe, with a 4 meters wide balloon filled with helium went even higher. It flew all the way up to almost 30,000 meters where it lost its inflation and returned back to Earth. Luckily enough, the “crash landing” didn’t do too much damage, so the probe was easily located through it’s GPS signal and retrieved, along with the pictures that were taken during the trip.

More pictures can be found at Meteotek’s Flickr photo page.