I have decided to use my webcam again to amuse myself. This partly came about because a friend of mine told me he was using his netbook and a webcam for security purposes. I thought that was a good idea since I now own a place and I also have the necessary equipment around.
I first tried this about seven years ago when I lived at SJC. I didn’t have anything interesting to point my webcam towards back then. To be honest, I’m not sure how interesting it will be now.
Just to let you know, the software I’m using is free and as such, it can be a bit wonky. It may not connect to the cam properly. Also, depending on when you’re reading this, the webcam might not be up. For example, if you’re reading this from the archives and it’s 2012 and the zombie apocalypse has started, the webcam probably isn’t up (and how to do you have a connection after Z-Day?).
My webcam comes into two flavours: streaming and updating web page. The streaming looks the best but unfortunately times out for some reason quite quickly. If you reload the page it will start again. The updating web page sends you a new image every two seconds, not as good looking as streaming but it’s more reliable. Have a look:
There’s a neat linux program called Motion that does some pretty cool things with webcams.
Someone wrote it to detect when the cat was approaching the plants and it would turn on a blender to scare them away.
It’s a command line program, which doesn’t make it easy to use but makes it easy to combine with other neat programs.
Cool, I’ll look into that! Thanks!