Kitchen
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Living Room
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A camera in our living room and kitchen, a cable 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 ("misterblue-mb at misterblue dott com") and enjoy relaxing at our house.
Our house has been on the internet over 14 years. We started with an ISDN connection, went to DSL and now have a cable connection. These days anyone one can do this but long ago I had to write my own video capture software and know the phone number of the local phone company tech. A pictorial description of how the hardware is put together these days is on the How It Is Done page.
Many years ago we started leaving a light on at night so the people on the other side of the planet have something to look at besides black. Now you can control some lights so flash us and let us know you are there. I also collect one image an hour for the last 24 hours .
Our living room has been Christmas Cam for a bunch of years. You can check out:
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.
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.
Pointers to some camera technology:
- Axis Technology -- a great direct to web cam. I have an Axis 2100
- WebCam32 -- commercial-ware that makes your own home cam possible
- SpyCam An image capture and upload program for building your own web cam (shareware)