IP Cam Geekyness
So I set up the IP Cam yesterday. Pretty neato. The little device captures decent pics:
I am pleased. I bought the wireless model so I would only need power. Easy to set up, only prob is that the silly thing requires IE/ActiveX to configure. But once you've done that, you can access the stream with any OS. motion is set up and workin well. It records little movies and still frames whenever it sees motion, AND is recording a time-lapse of the entire day wrapped up in to a 1 minute MPG. Watching the mailman deliver mail, cats pissing, birds playing, kids riding bikes, my neighbors constantly driving in and out. Pretty neato stuff. When I get a cool timelapse, I'll post a torrent for download.
My only gripe with my current setup is that motion is downloading so fast from the cam that it's sending a 400kB/sec stream across my WAN. I may go to manually downloading the pics and compiling a time-lapse later. Or writing my own CGI that fetches the images with a configurable speed.
I miss my motorcycle
Dear TinkerBell,
I hope you are doing well in bike heaven, playing with the other Ducati Monsters and having fun. I miss you. It's a sunny day today, the sun's out, 3 nice bikes parked up front. Feel free to appear in my dreams sometime soon for a few wheelies.
Truly,
-Nathan
IP Networking Camera
IP Networking Camera: "VCenter IP camera NC1000-W10 features a standalone system, which means a camera and a computer combined in a small package. Built-in capture module and web server provide users to view images through IP network (e.g. LAN and WAN) with a browser on any computer connected to network."
I bought this from KingOfGadgets.com monday. Recieved it in a (very beat up) DHL box on Tuesday afternoon. Already have it set up. Pretty neato. I expect to be posting a few neat images and movies from it soon. Right now, I'm using motion to capture little movies of action it sees, along with individual pics of the action, along with a time lapse of the day. Pretty cool!
Dell LCD's are kick-ass
Pic of my new Dell 19" 1905FP LCD's. I love them. I highly recommend you take advantage of some of the deals on http://dealnews.com and go get some.
Flickr also kicks ass
"Have you ever wanted to post photos from your favorite group on your website? Or photos tagged with something? Or photos from your favorite group..."
So, I highly recommend you all check out Flickr. I've been playing with it for a while but didn't really have time to sit down and browse/play. I'm almost upset I didn't buy David/Joseph flickr accounts for their birthdays. Maybe next year.
Update: OK, why Flickr is cool...
It's kind of like del.icio.us for pictures. Flickr lets you freeform tag all your pics. It lets you surf the tags. So I can find other pictures of "124 Spider". Or whatever's out there. Very neat. They also have unlimited file storage. And a 20GB upload/month. And cool little apps to help you upload. If you have a modern blogging system that supports ATOM API's, you can blog your pic right from the Flickr interface. Go check it out.
All about blogs
So at work I have been tasked with setting up a corporate blogging engine. My company would have about 10k users at any one moment that could use the system...so it needed to be robust, self-service and easy to administrate. Turns out, there were only a handful of things that got close to fitting the bill. S9Y, B2Evolution, Blojsom, MovableType, WordPress, Blogger and LiveJournal. The best one in my book is Blogger. At least for straight up broadcast blogging. But Blogger isn't open source and they don't have an appliance you can buy (yet). So I went with LiveJournal. My reasoning was similar to why I picked MediaWiki for the Corp Wiki solution...
- Open Source License
- Second biggest blogging engine (next to Blogger)
- written in mod_perl/perl
- VERY customizable
- Best-practice example in use: LiveJournal.com
- Excellent API support
After some mods to the base libs, we are up and running with our own instance, integrated into the corp SSO and all that goodness...a month later we've moved it to prod. Pretty damn cool. It's amazing how fast it is. You'd almost think by the speed of LJ's main site that it'd be slow, but it's not. The more I learn about LJ, the more I like it. It supports the ATOM API, RSS, FOAF, RDF, and all that goodness. Very cool.
There are also a few companies writing clients that use LJ's API's to post via BREW handsets. Not to mention the couple dozen clients for other platforms (Win/Mac/Palm/CE) that have been out for years. That very much validated my selection of a blogging engine. MovableType, S9Y, WordPress, none of them support the rich feature set of LJ. LJ's user admin interface is a little old school. It could use some polish, but that'll either come from my enhancements over the next few months or from the LJ authors.
I'm very pleased with how this has worked out and I thought I'd post so everyone else can know what a great engine LJ is. If you have any questions, feel free to ask me, I am happy to teach you what I've learned over the past few months.
The funny part about the last month or so...I've been working my ass off on a blogging solution for work. And haven't blogged hardly at all for myself. Heh.
New Star Wars movie 'a bloodbath'
BBC NEWS | Entertainment | New Star Wars movie 'a
bloodbath': "
The new Star Wars film is a 'bloodbath' which deserves its parental
guidance PG-13 rating, a critic has said after an early screening of the
movie.
Revenge of the Sith is the first Star Wars movie to receive a cautionary PG-13 rating in the US."
That rocks. I think I actually want to go see it now. :)
Nerdblog
So, I decided that keeping a seperate 'nerdblog' was silly and am merging the two. If anybody has figured out a good way to merge blogs with blogger, let me know.
Lake Hodges
Tracy and I went to Lake Hodges today to go hiking. The rain has overfilled the lake. Last year when we went, it was so dried up and small, we were laughing at it. This time, it had filled up far beyond normal and the damn was overflowing. Neato. Lots of greenery, wildlife and flowers. No rattlesnakes this time however.
I came home hungry with slight headache. Had some lunch and took a nap for a while. After a dream about getting chased by Jaws, I woke up and worked on the Fiat the rest of the night. Might be starting that sucker soon!
Yesterday I spent the day hacking up that ugly cedar tree in our front yard. Filled two 35 and one 45 gallon bucket with trimmings. Not that much IMHO. But it still has a lot to go. It's so close to the house I'm afraid to use and axe so I may have to get a chainsaw afterall. But powertools are fun.