Take Jesse McPherson, a 26-year-old engineer from Philadelphia. He had his Xbox, TV and laptop stolen while he was away on a conference, and using a combination of common sense, blogging and the aid of the popular community bookmarking service Digg.com, he was able to have the Xbox and laptop safely returned.

Pretty amazing, and it's not the first instance I’ve heard of where savvy geeks were able to track down stolen gadgets. A couple of years ago, a friend of mine that runs the popular English smartphone forums MoDaCo had a smartphone stolen from a charity event. The method Paul and his compatriots used for tracking the thief down is a lot techier and far less glamorous than Jesse's story, but I love how they were able to actually track down the guy's phone number, call him up, and firmly request that he return the mobile (which he did, express-posted no less).

I’ve never had a phone stolen, but I have lost more than a few in my day, and after an unpleasant experience where I had to pay a six hundred-dollar mobile bill because I didn’t cancel it the moment I knew it was missing (I was too hung over to report it… for three days), the first thing I do when I’ve lost a mobile is call my carrier to have the SIM cancelled. At your request, carriers can also bar the phone from connecting to any network, which should give you some small measure of if-I-can’t-have-you-nobody-will satisfaction.

But you don’t have to go to the lengths that Jesse and Paul did in tracking down stolen goods if you plan ahead. Some laptops from Lenovo and Dell come with Computrace preinstalled, which is a PC theft recovery service that can track your machine down. The company even works with local enforcement to get your laptop back. There’s also GadgetTrak, which is a subscription service that works for laptops, mobiles and gadgets by transmitting data like IP addresses and mobile phone numbers back to the GadgetTrak servers.