At least two or three times a week I find myself with my laptop in a very public place. Usually it’s a coffee shop or restaurant that has free wifi and I can get a little work done there. Coffee shops—being what they are—sell a lot of coffee. Me—being who I am—drink a lot of coffee and before you know it, it’s time to go make a sissy.

Yep. That’s an actual term.

I’m always a little apprehensive about leaving my laptop out, but what a pain it would be to pack it up every time I needed a bathroom break. The places I visit aren’t normally known for theft, but still—it’s a laptop. It’s worth a bit of money and it’s got all my stuff on there! I’d hate to lose it.

That’s when I got to thinking about camouflage. Sometimes it’s not a matter of a real threat as much as a perceived threat. It works in the animal kingdom and it can work with people to.

So one day I was fooling around and created this webpage: Guarddog.

Black screen with big nasty looking letters and red flashing lights that obviously do something, right? The point was to make it as visible and obnoxious as possible. I actually saved it to my desktop so it’s not dependent upon me being connected to the internet. When I need to step away from the laptop for a while I pull the page up, click the “Full screen” button on Firefox and go do my business.

One of these days I’d like to set it up and go sit somewhere else for a while—just to watch people’s reactions. I think it would be cool to see what they do when they walk by the laptop.

I made the page pretty wide (I have a 17” wide laptop), so it may not view well on yours, but give it a shot. I’m in no way saying this will prevent your laptop from being stolen but it might be an interesting deterrent…and an interesting social experiment!

Please let me know what you think!