More Low-Carb Eye Snacks For My Viewing Public….
Uncle Andrew
….all eight of you. 😉
Sorry it took so long for me to post another entry, but I’ve been busy setting up my newest toy, The Birdie Cam, which lives in the left column of my blog, just above the weather reports. By popular request (i.e., Margaret, the most popular person in the world, to me at least), I have gone and erected a Web cam pointed at our back yard bird feeder. Here you are likely to see house finches, chickadees, starlings, flickers and others, depending on the time of day and season. The suet feeder will occasionally be completely covered with a swarm of bush tits (if you should catch one of these events, feel free to shout out “Whoah, look at the bush tits on that one!”)
I managed to pick up an Intellinet 550710 IP Camera for a song at my favorite local computer store, Computersonics. It’s a wonderful camera, capable of hosting up to 100 simultaneous users, with a lot of nice bells and whistles not normally found in a camera in its price range. Among other things, it streams images via both and ActiveX (read: Microsoft plugin, Microsoft browser, probably only compatible with Microsoft eyeballs), and Java, which is fairly unusual. A lot of cheaper cameras only offer ActiveX, which makes them unavailable to Macintosh users. It even supports Power Over Ethernet (POE), and has a CS lens mount, compatible with a wide range of closed-circuit television/security cameras.
I upgraded the lens to a Computar 12–75 Zoom Lens, which brought the bird feeder to a zoom where you could actually identify the birds. Hell, at this zoom you can practically see up their little nostrils. (Do birds have nostrils? Have to check with my wife on that. Of course, she’ll probably say “How the hell should I know?” which is what she usually says when I ask her an animal-type question, despite the fact that she’s a veterinarian.)
Anyway, I hope to enjoy many hours streaming the video while I work, and I hope you find some mild amusement in it as well. The bird traffic should be much higher during the summer, so check back as often or as rarely as you see fit.
Postscript: turns out I’m using the wrong lens, which explains some focus problems I’ve been having. Have to get a spacer to make this lens fully compatible with the camera. Yippie, more to tinker with! I may make a hobby out of this.
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January 29th, 2005 at 3:01 am
Wise choice on the streaming types for the new camera. All the cool techies (the ones who are not cool and well healed enough to use a Mac) are switching to Firefox or Konqueror and neither of those browsers supports ActiveX.
I find it funny that Microsoft has been taken to task for bundling Internet Explorer with Windows. Bundling gave Microsoft an initial competitive advantage but the product cycle for Windows is much longer than for browsers. As a result, people are locked into insecure technologies like ActiveX as Microsoft pushes back the release date for the next version of Windows while new technologies like RSS mature in a non-Microsoft environment.
January 29th, 2005 at 11:34 pm
“As a result, people are locked into insecure technologies like ActiveX as Microsoft pushes back the release date for the next version of Windows while new technologies like RSS mature in a non-Microsoft environment.”
Amen! And in some ways, this is exactly what Microsoft should be doing with Windows: providing a solid base upon which others can build, rather than trying to be Your One-Stop Bit Shop. On the other hand, a lot of that sort of behavior would appear to be market-driven: consumers want their computer to check email, play games, look at and edit video, play music, store their photo albums….all without having to download or install anything new. The only way you can do that reliably is if you have a total hammerlock on both hardware and operating system….as with Apple. And even then, software monoculture sets in, and you don’t get the best of everything, just the most stable and likely to work with the hardware.
January 30th, 2005 at 3:21 pm
Birds have nostrils.
January 30th, 2005 at 4:15 pm
Excellent, thank you. Now I can add “bird boogers” to my ever-growing list of personal invective. 😀
January 31st, 2005 at 10:55 am
Hmm, how much bandwidth did you say you had? Here’s some fun: Ctrl-Click on the Birdie cam and choose “Open in new Window”. Do this six or seven times. Hit the F10 key to use Expose to view all the pages at the same time. Look at all the birdies!
Ok, I need a life.
January 31st, 2005 at 12:23 pm
Oooo, you’ll get yours when “Alpa-Cam” goes online, buddy, see if you don’t. 😀
January 31st, 2005 at 3:10 pm
So, are we likely to catch glimpses of either you or Margaret refilling the feeder?
I think I still have a bikini top you could borrow for the photoshoot…..
January 31st, 2005 at 3:34 pm
Don’t you dare sully the good name of Birdie Cam with your filthy musings! 😀
Wait until Spring; we’ll be out there refilling the damn thing every thirty minutes.