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DMI News |
Previous Entry.. Next Entry.. An RNN Update, for those who were whining
April 09, 2004 01:34 Accomplishments in the last month have been somewhat sparse. Most of my efforts have been transparent at best, mostly hardening the site against abuse, of which I seem to have attracted a significant quantity of. I'm therefore taking a rather zero tolerance attitude toward otherwise borderline behavior. Some features that I had previously disabled because people thought they were too extreme have now been reactivated. People are more than welcome to enjoy the site, but if they can't do so in a civilized manner, they will be removed immediately, and most of the process is automated. If your command of the english language has a tendancy to be garnished with colorful 4 letter words, you might wish to restrain yourself while sending messages or leaving comments. There won't be a warning, and I won't accept excuses after the fact. I've rearranged things in the garage a bit to get several controllable objects on a single cam. Tomorrow I intend to reactivate the bear and smiley face, and to start working on a TV interface. At first, the interface will likely just give you the ability to turn on/off a VCR and change channels. I'm intentionally going to use a broken VCR at first, primarily because it's not doing anything else and I've saved it all these years for SOME godawful reason. It just won't be playing any tapes. I've started rewriting the howto pages so they look more professional and possibly even more useful. My efforts, in progress, can be viewed here. No, all the links don't work. Comment on it later. Now, you can not only see how many people are watching a specific cam, but you can also see who. Just click on the # of people watching link and it will pop up a window with a list of names. Stalk a stalker today. If you want your cam on the site, you can add it by going here. The adding process is rather straightforward, but might require at least a little bit of understanding of what you're doing. If you need assistance, there are instructions, and people in the chatroom can help. I'll eventually write a wizard to make adding the cams easier, including detailed instructions on how to work around firewalls and routers, which at the present time I assume the user knows how to do. Tomorrow I'm sending off to get one of the capture cards Shiznet pointed out to me a while back. If after I get it and confirm it works well under linux, I'll be purchasing 5 more, each of which has a video source awaiting it. Over the next month, expect me to add three more cams, interface a controllable TV/VCR with streaming video output, interface a game console of some type, allowing you to view and play games remotely, and to set up the sprinkler somewhere visible from a cam. And of course, get the doorbell interfaced to the computer. No, you still won't be able to ring it. Some other minor projects I intend to invest some time on in the near future are to get audio feeds working on all the cams and other video sources, set up temperature sensors in and around the house, and polish off the server software so it's in a releaseable state. I also want to make a more proactive use of my grocery scanner. There's at least one local grocery store that has an online order and delivery system, so I might look at interfacing that again.
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