Okay, so my Linux knowledge has skyrocketed in the past week.

I now have Motion (most annoying software name to google for ever) running on a repurposed Dell Dimension 8200. By the way, if anyone has any RAM for one of these kicking around, you're sitting on a gold mine. I wanted to pick up 2x512s for it and it uses some bloody obscure and expensive RDRAM. At least it is significantly quieter than the box I have running the cams now. On which webcamXP hangs often.

Anyway. Motion is like the swiss army knife of webcams. I am SO excited that I can finally have something stable that does what I want it to. I've ditched the last two USB cameras I was relying on and have all network cameras now. But yeah, going from Windows to a command-line-only Linux program where you have to roll your own FTPing? Small learning curve.

And... dun dun dun... wrote my first shell script! Well, with a little help :) It's rather nice to be surrounded by Linux-y friends.

The most exciting news is that it actually does motion detection. So the cams are only updating when there's activity on a particular cam. It can also write events to a mysql db, so I will be able to use this for much more advanced tracking and home automation. It also creates timelapse videos at any interval. Have I mentioned how much I love Motion? I'm serving up the currently live camera at about 1FPS over Apache, and the others are FTPed (if changed) to the webserver at a more reasonable interval.

Gotta actually mount the new cams, tweak a couple of scripts, and the new (much more stable) system should be up in a few days on stephthegeek.tv!

PS. Anyone tried LinuxMCE? I watched the demo video and I'm totally in love. It even uses Motion itself for the automation stuff. And supports ZWave.

Totally forgot to mention this. Jay and crew for the CamGirls documentary are coming for the weekend! They're doing a follow-up, since, well, a lot has changed in the two and a half years since the first shoot and almost two years since Vegas. They're actually going to crash here tonight, so wave hi to Jay and Shannon. Not sure exactly what they're going to be doing... a little more slice o' life and an update, and more interviewing.

What's with the weird zoom on CAM1?

This is probaby better suited to a FAQ but lacking that at the moment, the forums seem to be a good place :)

I've used Yahoo Widgets (formerly Konfabulator) on and off and they can be handy little buggers. Now that I've got even more cams, I thought it'd be a good time to point out a handy widget that's great for viewing multiple cams (mine, others, any cams!). You can position it anywhere, make it always on top, and easily switch between a multi-cam and single cam view.

Start by downloading and installing Yahoo Widgets (making sure to uncheck the toolbars and default search engines and crap, unless you want them). Then I right-click and close pretty much all the widgets it comes with :P Download the Multicam widget and open the file from within Yahoo Widgets. Go into Multicam's preferences and click on cams 1-4, adding in the URLs for whatever cams you want. Here would be the settings for mine:

Cam #1 - http://www.stephthegeek.com/stephcam.jpg 1 min refresh
Cam #2 - http://www.stephthegeek.com/cam1.jpg 15 sec refresh
Cam #3 - http://www.stephthegeek.com/cam3.jpg 15 sec refresh
Cam #4 - http://www.stephthegeek.com/viewcam.jpg 10 min refresh

Anyone know of any other handy cam utilities?

Steph "Making herself easily stalkable since 2001" TheGeek

Anyone need a webcam program to monitor their ("perhaps hundreds"!) of moles?

Okay, ignoring my neverending quest for a cam program that actually does EVERYTHING I want for the moment, here's a request for one that at least does one thing I want:  a remote image overlay.  And one that's actually stable would be nice.  I need to pull an image from a remote url and then have it overlay that to the cam image.  webcamXP's feature for this does not seem to be working.  It throws me an error every time I give it a remote image.  "Webcam Publisher" (uh, great name dude) was promising to do this, but clearly the weather overlay is not actually updating in the image.  I was checking out ImageSalsa briefly, but its lovely Java menu kept crashing FF, and the demos haven't been updated in years, so I'm not exactly jumping at giving them my money.

RE: neverending quest -- if anyone knows a cam program that does all the following things, please send word via email, PM, IM, carrier pigeon, etc. immediately:

• Network camera support.  In other words, it will pull an image from a remote url
• Multiple camera support.  Ok, a lot of programs technically do this, but not in the way I need, which is control over the profiles for each camera.  So I can give each cam its own FTP location, upload interval, filename, etc.
• Reasonably advanced image/caption controls.  I want to be able to overlay multiple captions/images, and apply different effects (cropping, rotation, etc.) to images
• Relay.  I can run the software on one PC to bounce its attached devices to an instance of the software on another PC
• A PROFESSIONALLY WRITTEN, STABLE PROGRAM WITH SUPPORT.  Oy.  I've never seen such a bunch of amateurish programs as I have in webcam software.  Can't people design a standard GUI?  Or perhaps NOT requiring me to edit text config files (don't get me wrong, the flexibility is nice... but for the love of god, not for basic things)?  Maybe something that's actually stable and out of beta?  A program that doesn't look like it was written by my grade 11 Visual Basic classmates?  

</rant>

If I was a hamster, this would be my home...

 

(from HamsterTracker.com) 

That is all  :)

~~~  

Ok, no it's not.

We have curtains up!  Yay for no blinding sun at 6:30am!  

So many pictures to post.  

I have a new Spaz.  Well, a Melissa  :)  She's starting out by helping me get the new cam stuff together and up as soon as possible.

Thank you to everyone in the chat (and particularily Chris in, uh, real life) for putting up with my whining and yelling about the fact that every webcam in the world seems to hate me at this particular moment  :P  Seriously... I have never, ever encountered so many problems with one project.  And I have never encountered anything so shitty as any and all software surrounding network cameras.  

Gah, so much to post but I'm trying to focus on actually DOING stuff and taking care of myself rather than talking about it... so please forgive my serious lack of communication lately.