Webcam

Sometimes I do some things that even I can’t explain why I did ’em. Did this one in one of those times as well. This is a simple script to monitor motion in front of your PC, auto-lock it when you are away and auto-unlock it when you come back. Did it just because I was really bogged down by the shitload of work that I’ve been doing for the past few weeks (and even weekends as well), so wanted to take a break for a few minutes, and just chanced over my own “Home Security Using a Webcam and Twitter” post, so thought of doing something related to motion detection again. [Read More]

It’s amazing, isn’t it? Even a sneeze at google makes the headlines. Well, it’s not the sneeze today but the new favicon I just got. So, are you also seeing the all new, re-designed, artisticly polished “g” as the new favicon? In other news, my Twitter-Webcam integration post has bypassed my earlier lifehacked post about Remote File Access Through E-mail by more than a few thousands, even though the time difference between the two posts is more than 3 months. [Read More]

Worried about someone breaking into your house in your absence? Or just need to keep a tab on who enters your room while you are away? Well, all you need is a webcam, a linux PC/laptop and a twitter account. And you are set for real time updates through twitter about all that goes on at your abode behind your back (can even receive a text message/sms on your phone). Keep reading for the very simple setup you need. [Read More]

Did you know that instead of installing special software to view your webcam video, you can simply use mplayer for the same purpose, and with a lot of fine control. e.g. try running the following command with your webcam attached to your computer. And you can use mencoder to capture and encode video from your webcam: mencoder tv:// -tv driver=v4l2:width=60:height=40:fps=60:device=/dev/video0 -nosound -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mjpeg -o test.avi Have fun playing with the huge number of options available. [Read More]

I have an old noname cheapo webcam, that I dusted out of my junk (why? More on that in a post coming soon). I hoped that it would work in my Ubuntu setup out of the box like most of my other hardware. I connected it to my laptop’s usb port. dmesg gave the following output: [21328.211333] usb 1-1: new full speed USB device using ohci_hcd and address 2 [21328.319698] usb 1-1: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice [21328. [Read More]