[You brought your shiny new gaming laptop to Starbucks to play a few rounds of Fortnite, but someone approached you, took your computer and left. Your laptop was unlocked, which means your passwords, private messages, and other personal information could be accessed. Michael Altfield offers an interesting solution on his personal blog.

Altfield built the BusKill for about $20 using an inexpensive USB drive (which he carries under his skin), a keychain, a magnetic USB separation adapter, and a one-meter USB extension cable. He then used udev, a Linux application that manages connected devices, to lock the screen each time the USB drive was removed. The end result is a laptop that locks itself every time the magnetic link to the owner is severed.

This specific solution relies on the use of Linux-based software, but with a little more work, it would be possible to adapt BusKill to work with Windows and other operating systems.

The intended audience for this solution is people working on extremely sensitive information in public, but it still remains an interesting hardware project that does not require much time (or money) to reproduce. No soldering iron required.

The full tutorial can be checked out on Michael Altfield's blog.