webcam

Gaia Demands to be let in.

I'm not a fan of sports, but I am a fan of stereotypical and culturally inappropriate sports icons.
Happy St. Patrick's Day everybody.

I brought OSX home with me for the weekend. I have a couple of projects I have to do at home, and I thought, rather than kick Jeni off her laptop so I could work, I'd just bring my Mac home. Its not like it's all that hard to lug around. Anyway, Gaia was very excited to see Daddy's "New Computer," and she kept asking me if I was putting my old one in the trash.

Regardless, Gaia enjoyed Photobooth immensely. All babies do.

Please congratulate me. I can move one of my life's goals over to the "been there, done that" category. On this day I have managed to trigger a "Gay WebCams!" link in the Google ads I run on this site.

Now, dear reader, I have to tell you, it doesn't bother me that Google thinks that gay Webcams might be a good match for the site. I'm quite proud, in fact.
But realize this: The ads Google picks for display are really more of a reflection of what Google thinks about _you_, the people who read this site.

So, from the attached Google Ad, we can infer that you, the reader of writelarge.com have a reasonable likelihood of setting up a Gay WebCam on your Macintosh. I'm not the one saying it, Goooooogle is.

And they say Google's semantic mashups are dangerous. I say they're goddamn magical.

I spent the better part of the day trying to get the PlayStation EyeToy functioning on Ubuntu. I think I can say I've succeeded. But at the same time, I think I've hit the wall.  The eyetoy camera works. I haven't really messed the microphone, I assume it doesn't work, but that's fine, there are lots of microphone inputs on this machine.
So, I can make pictures appear in _several_ ways. Certain programs use certain drivers that certainly don't always work. And Flash? Fuggedaboutit.
So, here's the problem. Until the world gets over flash, the only thing I'm really interested in doing with my webcam is almost exclusively flash-based. (See also: Seesmic and Ustream.)
And, as near as I can tell, Linux Flash doesn't yet support the Video4Linux driver, which I'm told is the one I've had the most luck with. And, according to the monkeys responding to this post, "Nobody in the Linux community is remotely interested in using webcams with flash."

So here's a breakdown of my experiments today.
First, here's the eyetoy running in Camorama. It's the first time I got any kind of picture out of it. Yes, it's broken, but I felt this was a big first step.

Without making _any_ changes, here's the same driver and camera shooting video via the Ekiga softphone. (I'm certain I could be doing more with my Ekiga Softphone account along with my Vonage Subscription, but maybe not. That's beside the point.) Notice how it's actually capturing an image that is not broken.

So, I loaded up Seesmic!

No good.
I did, however, record this video for you all. It's five seconds of imageless silence. I like to imagine that it's crashing Seesmic's servers the world around.  See! Linux is Easy.

Finally, I installed camstreams, and it grabbed a bunch of driver packages during the install. Damn you KDE! It worked the best out of all of them. At least I can do webcammy stuff via a manual ftp.

In summary, it is my belief that Webcams via Flash for Linux "Just Working" are a long way off. I'm disappointed by reports that those who have built in webcams in there tiny, tiny Linux laptops have discovered that flash will not work for them either.

Linux will not be a competitor to propriety operating systems until it stops sucking in regards flash. "Wa! This is Adobe's Fault!" people often respond to criticisms of the state of Flash in linux.

It might be Adobe's fault, but it's our problem.

There's a degree of madness going on here at the HeyGabe compound this morning.

[Direct Link]

My Podcasting presentation was at 4 p.m. I was in multi-tasking hell, so I forgot to record some of it, but enjoy.

You guys missed Some Hardcore Outside Decorating Action on the Gabe-o-vision just now.
Marvel as Gabe untangles wires in the cold!
Be amazed as Gabe climbs up a ladder off in the distance but you can't really see it!
Be saddened as the mail carrier brings Gabe his city of Milwaukee tax bill!

It's the most original, touching film of this holiday season if you discount every other film!

These thrills can be yours by visiting the uStream.tv archive of Gabe's recorded shows.

It's no secret that I've been having a good time streaming video around the Internet these days with the built-in camera on my laptop. If you've been the recipient of any of my recent twitters, tumblers, flickrs, or drupals on the subject, you've probably been invited to watch me and my family have thanksgiving dinner, decorate the house for Christmas or even trim our tree. It's been fun for us, but it's also fun for Gaia's grandparents who get to watch without having to make the trip to the city.

We've also been playing with the pets, having dedicated days to streaming our finches in their cage or the rabbit in her hidey hole. I see the appeal, man. There is something so relaxing about watching your own pets loll around in their cages when you're not home.

So, the webcam has it's own home at Writelarge.com; when it's live, you'll see live pictures. When it's not, you can visit the show page at UStream.TV and roll some of the saved recordings that are stacking up over there. There's even an RSS Feed, but I'm not sure what the point of that is, since it doesn't include enclosures of the video files.

Good Times. Good Times.

We're going to be decorating the tree tonight at our house.Won't you Join us?