Kitchen

Living Room

Computer desk

Name State Description  Control  Teapot OFF Illuminated teapot in Kitchen area On   Off Dining Accent ON Accent lights around the dining room. You can see the purple lights on the livingroom cam On   Off Livingroom Light ON The lamp that lights the livingroom at night. If the picture is black, turn this on. On   Off Kitchen sink ON Accent lights over the kitchen sink. Can be seen on the kitchen cam. On   Off Remember that the cameras update every 20 seconds or so therefore you won't see the lights change immediately.

A camera in our living room and kitchen, a capture board, a DSL connection, a little software and what do you get? A family's home on the Web! Welcome to our living room. We are usually around in the evening (Pacific Standard Time). Send us email and enjoy relaxing at our house. A pictorial description of how the hardware is put together is on the How It Is Done page. Christmas morning, we will be opening presents and there will be a laptop on the coffee table and you can chat with us as we rip presents open. Just bring up an IRC client (mIRC is good) and goto irc.evilpumpkin.com #misterblue.  Stop by and visit for awhile. I've started leaving a light on at night so the people on the other side of the planet have something to look at besides black. I also collect one image an hour for the last 24 hours . Our web-enabled music system (using the AudioTron from TurtleBeach ) shows what's now playing in the livingroom: State: Playing   Length: 945/1098 sec Title: Romeo and Juliet Artist: Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky Album: Best Of The Classics - Peter I and what is playing in the family room: State: Inactive Title: Artist: Album: Our living room has been Christmas Cam for a bunch of years. You can check out: ChristmasCam 1995 ChristmasCam 1996 ChristmasCam 1997 ChristmasCam 1998 ChristmasCam 1999 ChristmasCam 2000 ChristmasCam 2001 ChristmasCam 2002   If you don't believe in Santa Claus, in 1995 we caught Santa Claus putting presents around the tree and drinking the milk left out for him (RealMedia video). We didn't ever catch him again -- we think you can only fool the Santa guy once. Family pics: Halloween party 2001 Paris 2002

December 26, 2003 Most of the mess is cleaned up and presents put away. I'm leaving the tree up until the end of next week - not all of the 12 days of Christmas, but most of them. Comments [3] December 25, 2003 Not many people showed up for the chat room. I'm going off to play with my new toys. Comments [5] December 25, 2003 Merry Christman to everyone the world over!! Comments [0] December 24, 2003 We have a chat room for Christmas morning. We'll probably be in on the morning Pacific time. Come by and say Merry Christmas. Comments [5] December 24, 2003 Pictures of perogie making are up. It took a while to get all the flour cleaned up. Comments [1] December 24, 2003 Ok, so why didn't anyone tell me that the light control scripts were broken? Fixed now. Comments [0] Old Notes

NOTE TO THE CRIMINALLY INCLINED: our house has an alarm (door and window sensors and motion detectors) and we live in a small town whose cops actually show up in five minutes. So, save us both a lot of trouble, and don't even bother.

YM: MisterBlue

Pointers to some camera technology:

• Axis Technology -- a great direct to web cam. I have an Axis 2100
• About.Com:Internet Conferencing -- excellent information on how to put up a web cam, the types of hardware that's out there and the software to use.
• WebCam32 -- commercial-ware that makes your own home cam possible
• SpyCam An image capture and upload program for building your own web cam (shareware)

Friends links -- people I've met on the web.

• Songbird's Webcam -- a nice lady who has had a cam possibly longer than I have.
• Tim's website -- making his mark on the web

If you are a Webcam-aholic, here are other Cam pages (list updated February 7, 2003) :

• The Wired Home -- not exactly a cam (although he has several). This fellow also records when the toilet was flushed, when the cat uses the litter box, what was thrown away in the trash bin and many, many more measurements of a home in the Netherlands.
• Drive Me Insane! -- another person with cams and a remote controlled house. The "drive me insane" part is that YOU control the lights in his house.
• Webcams in Freudenstadt, Switzerland -- good city cams from far away, exotic Switzerland.
• World Webcam Monitor -- excellent collection of interesting cams of places, phenomena, space, weird, ...
• 123cam.com -- despite a slightly irritating UI, a gigantic collection of cams
• Franck's Top WebCams - but a lot of annoying ad popups
• AltaVista's Cammunity -- good collection
• CamVille -- more adult and people oriented
• WebCam World
• Tommy's List of Live Cam Worldwide -- with a lot of links to other fun stuff
• Helmut Halfmann's Realtime Camera Paradise (in German but even an American can figure it out)