Your office has no door. Your laptop is the office.

By Peter Theill · August 2026 · 5 min read

If you work remotely from cafés, coworking spaces and rented apartments, here's the uncomfortable framing: an office building has locks, badges, a receptionist and cameras. Your entire replacement for all of that is "I can see it from here." Usually.

I'm not a full-time nomad, but my laptop hasn't seen a desk it owns in years, and the security setup I've landed on is the nomad setup. It has two halves: making theft survivable, and making theft not happen. Most advice only covers the first half.

Half one: assume it gets stolen anyway

Do these once, in an afternoon, and a stolen laptop becomes an insurance claim instead of a life event:

• Full-disk encryption. FileVault on a Mac — on by default on recent machines; verify it. A thief gets a brick of aluminium, not your client contracts.
• Find My + Activation Lock. Makes the machine miserable to resell and occasionally gets one back. Turn it on before the trip, not after.
• Backups that don't live in the same bag. Cloud sync for work-in-progress, a real backup for everything. The test: if the bag vanishes, do you lose anything you can't re-download? The answer must be no.
• A password manager and a login password that isn't 0000. The hardware is the cheapest thing that gets stolen; the sessions logged in on it are not.
• Travel insurance that names the laptop. Read the unattended-property clause — many policies quietly exclude exactly the café scenario.

Half two: the part nobody solves — the gap

All of the above is after-the-fact. The actual moment of risk in a nomad's day is beautifully mundane: you're in a café in a city where you know nobody, you need the bathroom, and there is no colleague to nod at. The advice "ask someone to watch it" assumes a social fabric you left at home; "take it with you" means surrendering the table, the power socket and the half-written paragraph, five times a day.

The nomad problem isn't the eight-hour theft. It's the four-minute gap, several times a day, in a room where nobody knows you.

That gap is what deterrence is for. A thief in a café depends on being unremarkable, and remote-work cities are full of people who know an unattended MacBook when they see one. So make yours the wrong one to touch: armed with an alarm, it looks like a sleeping screensaver — but touch a key, close the lid, pull the charger or lift it, and it turns pulsing red and screams at forced full volume, in whatever language the room speaks. Embarrassment translates perfectly.

That's Don't Touch, the app I built for my own gaps. One click to arm, a 4-digit PIN to disarm, and — this matters when you live on hotel Wi-Fi — it never talks to the internet. No account, nothing recorded, nothing sent anywhere. It's a 0.5 MB grumpy guard dog.

The bag matters too

Quick physical notes that survive real travel: sit with your screen visible to you from the counter if you can (thieves check sightlines before they check laptops — more geometry in the café guide); skip the lock cable, since MacBooks have no slot for one and café furniture anchors nothing; and never, ever leave the laptop and the backup drive on the table together while you're at the counter. One or the other. Ideally neither.