Blue Proximity

A friend of mine pointed me in the direction of a piece of software called BlueProximity. Basically it looks for your cellphone via bluetooth and if it can find it it checks to see how close you are. You can define a range that it accepts you as being at your computer and then it locks/unlocks your computer accordingly. The overall idea is that most people have their cellphone with them at all times so if your computer can see it then it should be able to tell if you are really there.

What should happen is that when you walk away from your computer it locks shortly after you left your desk. When you come back it unlocks before you sit down at your desk and you are ready to work again. After some playing around with the ranges this is pretty much what happens. I have two big problems: 1. My desk is right next to the door so I wind up triggering it if I walk by the door sometimes. 2. When sitting down at the disk my “range” varies anywhere from 10ft – 20ft.

I think the issue I have with the range may very well be the sensor I bluetooth adapter I choose. I wanted to have the smallest one I possibly could so I was less likely to break it off in the USB slot. In the end I can live with the range issue since I just added about 15 feet and the ranges seem reasonable. At this point I’m pretty happy with how it works… it seems to lock itself within a minute or so of my leaving and it will lock even if someone sits down at my computer that isn’t me. This means that if someone does sit down at my computer as soon as I leave they only have a few seconds to cause any damage… and having my computer come back to life when I sit down is just plain cool.

Thanks Henry and John for pointing this software out to me.