Now featuring =TWO= webcams!

Posted by Thomas J. Brown at 1136 hrs

That's right, kids, version 3.01 of the site is now up and running. I moved things around on the right side a bit (it looks way better this way) and added a second webcam.

I was at this one girl's website last night, and she has five webcams! And you can control the lights in the various rooms! So now I'm obsessed with having crap that people can turn on and off, but Morah says she doesn't like that idea because it would creep her out know that people are watching us and messing with our lights. I assured her that I would choose something small (read: low energy consumption) and not in the bedroom (because (A) I don't want to be woken up in the middle of the night because someone in Yemen is playing with my lights via the Internet, and (B) I'm pretty open minded, but I am still American and therefore ashamed of my body. So no naked Thomas on the Internet, thank you very much), but she's still pretty much against the idea. I think I'll be able to sway her once she sees how cool it is.

The webcams in my flat (yes, there are two there, as well!) are X10 cameras that I ordered... A long time ago. I can't remember when. Anyway, they came with this thing called the Firecracker Home Control Kit. Basically, you can control stuff in your house via remote. Since then, X10 has expanded their product line to include a whole bunch of different home control options, including via computer (the software can learn your daily patterns and automatically turn lights on and off at the times that you usually use them to create the appearance of an occupied home, even when you're on holiday). Ever since I started playing with these (we have a lamp in the bedroom hooked up to the remote), I've wanted to get more. You can control up to 256 units (cameras, lamps, et cetera) from =one remote=. Cool, huh? So I was thinking that there's probably some way to hook this system up to the Internet and control your lights online (or, in my case, allow users to control certain appliances online).

What else? As you may have noticed, I started trying to recover my blog entries. It's probably a good thing that not very many people posted comments, because I'm pretty sure they're all gone forever. It really is a pain to have to go through the whole stupid process of reformatting my entries, but it's actually not quite as difficult as I thought it would be. It is, however, just as annoying.