Then I got one.

First off, as cool as it is to refocus a picture, it does not matter if the picture is not very good. I thought perhaps I was doing something wrong with the setting, but it did not matter, the camera simply does not take good pictures.  Second, I found the refocusing to be of almost no use.  Its very rare that I take a picture and think, oh damn, I really wanted to focus on THAT flower.   In fact, I would say 90% of the pictures I take, the subject is more then 6 feet away, this negating most of the depth of field benefit that you get from this technology.

Well its now on sale in the UK for £399.  I have a hard time imagining anyone is going to buy this.  However, it was pointed out to me that all three retailers in UK are known for middle – upper class department store buying.  This means they are most likely looking for the ‘someone-who-has-everything-and-most-likely-will-only-be-interested-for-a-day-but-were-rich-so-what-the-hell’ customer group.  The only interesting thing is there is a wifi chip built into the Lytro.  Did not know that.  Well with the more recent update, its turned on and you can now see your picture with the iphone companion app.  That’s nice.  Would have been better if they released that function out the box.

I do not expect this will get too many sales, it did not really fly in the US, so I have a hard time thinking its going to in the UK.

So a few things we are assuming here..  You have a computer and/or laptop, and you have a wifi router and an internet connection.  You can do this with a wire only router, but that limits your flexibility a bit for where to place the camera.

So lets get our equipment in order.  In my case, I have a desktop PC and a laptop.  Both running windows.  I also have 2 webcams.  Both I got for under $30.  One is an older 800×600 and the other is a 720HD I got on sale.   Remember, we are doing this on the cheap, but if you are willing to spend a few more bucks, you could get a wireless camera that has pan/tilt controls, but I did not feel like spending $125 on this.

The set up

First you have to decided what exactly you want to capture and why. In my case, the building already has some outside security, so I just need to focus on people who defeated that and made it inside.  My second requirement is the see when my cat is up and about. (ok, its really my girlfriend asking for this, but trying to catch my cat who lives in stealth mode has turned out to be the most fun.)  So I decided I wanted to use the cheaper camera to watch the bed where she sleeps and the nicer camera in the front room where both the cat walks around and the most likely place a thief is going to go.  Next, hiding the cameras.  This is harder.  Not only do you need to find a good place to see as much of room as possible, but you need to hide it as well.  I dont think you need to go overboard like hollowing out a book or cutting up a stuffed doll, unless your into that kind of thing.  In my case I have it on a book shelf and surrounded the webcam with a Japanese pikachu and a collection of angry birds… dont ask how I got these. So all this AND we still need to be close enough to the computer for the usb cable to reach without being too obvious.  I thus recommend getting at least 1 usb extender.  In my case I was pretty lucky in that the webcam could reach the PC and still be somewhat hidden. Next, change the power setting on your computer so that the screen goes dark, but the computer never goes to sleep. Also turn the sound off.  BTW, if you do not have a second computer, you can get an old used PC online for around $200.  All it needs is usb and wifi.  My second camera is running off a really old Toshiba that has 1 g of ram and some old processor.  Heck, its so old I do not know whats it running. But does not matter.  You only need to run 2 programs.

Monitoring Goal

Keep in mind, once the thief(s) have gotten into your place, your stuff is pretty much history. So your home monitoring system is not to serve as a deterrent but instead help the police find the people who broke in.  So making sure we get the best pics of the perps we can is key here.  At some point they are going to find your webcam, so that is why I did not go over the top trying to hide it because once they start grabbing your stuff, its pretty much over.  This is the one case a fully independent IP camera has it advantage.  Even when they are nicking your computers, the camera keeps rolling.  If you did spend the money on a wireless camera, then you DO want to hide that bad boy to get as much film as possible of the crime scene. Since its only a matter off time before they find the cameras, we need to get the pics uploaded as fast as possible. In this case we need motion detection.  And that is where the software comes into play. There are lots of there to choice from, however I’m going to go with Yawcam.  Its a java app so that means it will work on almost any platform.

Its not fancy, and takes a little bit a tweaking, but if you are geek enough to be building your own webcam home monitoring system in the first place, you should be OK.  I’ll give some tips though.

Software set up and deployment

Fire up your machines and lets get to it.  First download Yawcam here. Install as instructed.  Now now time to setup. We are only going to do the basics here, motion detecting and email notification. Ok, click on ‘Window’ and ‘Motion Detection.  Lets tweak those settings. Since I want to catch my cat, I have to set the sensitivity WAY higher then normal. My camera has a pretty wide view so catching that little fur ball is going to be tricky.  I had the cat in the room as I was working on that and that little bugger is smooth!!  I see why we get the term cat burglar.  I did not even bother with sound detection. She will in mid pounce before you hear anything anyway.  No.  To catch this gal, we need to push the detection limits. So we are going to play with 2 settings. The Sensitivity and the Tolerance that you will find under the ‘Settings’ tab.  I had Sensitivity set to 89% and Tolerance set to 16%.  Basically I can catch an oversize bee with these settings.  And STILL, she slipped by a few times!  Man, she is hard to catch. So I has to make one more tweak.  I changed the area that the software is looking for movement to the area where my fur ball normally walks.  You can adjust this by changing the ‘Motion Detection in’ from Entire image to Define area. Caution! Pet hunting is fun, but remember, we want to catch our scumbags who break into our place as well, so do not set the area select too small.  You have to figure a compromise, the smaller the area, the more sensitive you can make the settings, but then you may miss key areas you want to monitor.

Remote computer control using TeamViewer

I have an iPad and love teamviewer. Once of my favs.  I tend to recommend teamviewer to my non tech friends because of how dead simple this app is as well as the fact it is PC/Apple friendly and it works on you iphone and iPad. My only complaint about TeamViewer is that it does not support sound.  Ah well, no matter, moving on..  So install TeamViewer on your machine(s).  Sign up for the free account.  It will make logging on easier epically if you have more then 1 machine.  The reason you want to do this is no matter how well you set up your system, you will still need to tweak things.  For example we left for our trip at o’dark 30.  Since I have the sensitivity set to molecule level, video noise and sun shadows and change in brightness was being picked up as movement, so I had to remote in and turn off motion detection. A fix for this is to get a night light strong enough to keep this from happening and leave it on.  I did not realize this till it was too late, so lesson learned. However, I’m going to take this as a further challenge to tweak the settings.   The cool part of using TeamViewer is that you can get a live view video feed anytime!  Nice!  Of course Yawcam supports setting up a live view and even storing that video to disk and the cloud.  If you are brave you can set up your firewall to allow this, but I did not want to bother.  Its more important that I get images.

Congrats!  Your up and running

Now that was not all that hard was it?  We only spend around $50 for two camera (assuming you do not already have them) and another $200 for an old cheap laptop.  The cool thing is you can keep expanding as you need more rooms or more views covered.  At some point as you want to add more coverage, you may want to start spending some money and getting IP wifi wireless cameras.  Yawcam will pick those up as well.  I really wish you only find yourself having fun playing with your new set up to track your pets or buddies who are suppose to check on your place and never need to use this to file a police report.  BTW, remember you MUST let anyone who is coming into your place know you have this set up.  Its against the law to film anyone in secret.  Plus its just plain creepy.

Enjoy!!  Now… lets see if I finally catch that little fur ball..

P.S.  As you can see from the images, I got her.

R.I.P. Flip

A quick moment of silence for my favorite hand cam the Flip. Yesterday Cisco announced it was closing down its division of Flip, a fun little handheld camcorder, as part of the restructuring of its consumer business unit. Cisco purchased Pure Digital, the maker of the Flip, in 2009 for $590 million when they were the best-selling camcorders on the market.

I can understand why the Flip is no longer ‘flipping’ people’s lids. Smart phones now are getting higher megapixel cameras and the ability to upload video to one’s website of choice is much easier with the phone than moving the videos from Flip to computer to web. I also expect that smart phones will kill the pocket camera industry as well here soon.

I will continue to use my HD Flip for my Youtube channel, but am sad that I won’t be upgrading to a newer version of this handy little pocket recorder in the future. R.I.P. Flip.

I tested this out on my 3G thinking; well it will be a little slow because of the processor, but no.  One second. Just as advertised.   According to the site, both the iphone 3GS and 4G is supported, so if you are into take pics with you phone at all. This is a must have.  So impressed I am, that it will be added to my top 10 jailbreak apps.  Not sure where I will put it, much less who will get kicked off, but that is another post.

Some other bennies, of this app.  You can use the volume button to take the picture.  WIN. You can deselect it if that is not your bag.  Same thing with the GPS stamping.  However, I like having both there.   There is also an option to have the picture taken as soon as you load, but I found that the camera comes up way to fast before I can set my shot, so I would not bother with this feature.

Its a paid app, so you need to cough up $1.99 via paypal or amazon.  Cydia has a process in place to handle payments if you have not tried it yet.

Check out the video below and be amazed!

Today Steve announced the a new feature called HDR that works something like clearcam, it basically takes 3 pictures and combines them to create the best shot from the three.  What it does not seem to do which clearcam does it create a sharper and larger image from the shots.  Of course, clearcam uses 6 shots to make this happen, but you can see from my test shots it makes a difference. Check these pictures out..

Original Shot

Enhanced Shot

https://www.perivision.net/wordpress/?p=1114

Here is the link to another post with more pics;

Anyone still using the 3G iphone should still get this since there is no word on how well this will work with 3G phones.

I’m not going to go over everything, you can find that anywhere.. I’m instead going to look at a few things that I think are really interesting…

HTML5 support!  Why is this so important?  HTML5 is like having flash lite without the plug-in!  (I still wish I had flash though).  But take a look at some of these demos..

http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/02/mozilla-demos-impressive-firefox-31-features-at-scale.ars

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_goes_html5_demoes_expermental_gmail.php

http://htmlfive.appspot.com/

As a developer, this opens up all kinds of possibilities to create a rich experience without having to code in CoCo and go through the app store.  As 3.0 gets out there, and dev’s feel that there are enough users to make it worth it, you will see more ‘web’ based applications on the iphone then ever. From the rumor mill, you will be able to access GPS, camera and accelerometers from the web app. Again, RUMOR!!

Video.  What did I say way back?? Apple has been holding video back because they want to keep it in their back pockets; either to partner and sell a video app or use it to sell the next version of the iphone. Well, today we know it was the second option. But I have to say, from what little I saw, they did a great job! I’m quite impressed with how rich the support for shooting and editing video is on the iphone; VGA at 30 fps, auto focus/white balance/auto exposure, in app scrolling, editing in the camera roll, share via MMS.. Its enough to make me think about getting the new iphone and deal with ATT for another 2 years.

Find my iPhone.  I have not lost my iPhone yet (knock on wood) but its something I fear.  I once misplaced my treo650 while in Portland and freaked. Fortuently, someone turned it in and I got it back 2 weeks later, so now I’m way more careful about my phone because of all the personal data in there. Well, not only can you ping your phone and get it to ring (and perhaps send back GPS location, but you can remote wipe it!  This is great… IF you have mobileMe.  Which I do not. And do not want! So its a tough call for me.

Other side notes if interst…

Shake to undo.  Kinda cute actually.

Tethering but not with ATT.  Ok, really?  So WHY would I stay with ATT?  Since I’m jailbroken, and its looks like jailbreak for 3.0 on the 3G (NOT the 3G(s) as the new phone is called) is stable, I may not worry about it. But I’m near the end of my contract, so we’ll see if I’m willing to go two more years without a keyboard on my phone.

BTW, I was using the free version, so I cannot take a pic of anything beyond 1.5 feet.

Now I know what your thinking, ok, this is cool, but just how useful is it?  Eh, not very. However, perhaps others would find it useful.  For me, its just something fun.  Now the images..

ClearCam, the original post here, is a program that will enhance and enlarge the image taken with your iphone from 2meg to 4 meg as well as help sharpen the image.  When I first took my test photos, I was impressed, however, the image I took of my roll-up desk did not seem fair since one came out brighter then the other.  So yesterday I retook it just to see.. and the improvement were even more impressive the second time around.  Have a look at these close ups.

Original Shot

Enhanced Shot

Crazy right?  And this is not two separate pics where my hand was more steady the second time, this is the original image taken by ClearCam and then the enhancement. Anytime I take a picture of anything still (or even semi still) I will only use this software.  Below are the full images. Even without zooming in, you can see a marked improvement.

Remember, this is jailbreak only at this time. If others have really good examples of using this app (as well as using the clarifi maco lens) send them in and I’ll post them up.

The difference may not look all that great, but if you click on each image and view them full size, you can see it’s sharper and has less noise.

Now have a look at these two..

In this case, the image actually ‘seems’ to be brighter despite being taken only 5 min apart.  Take a careful look at the batteries to the right.  The difference in sharpness is most acute here.  I may reshoot this because there is not reason I can figure for it to be brighter.  We’ll see if I get around to it.

The app is only for jailbroken phones at the moment, and even then you only get a 15 day trial, but the cost is around $10 if I remember correctly,  so a pretty good deal I would say.  Go get it… now..

So, what should we do here? Put a sensor in place to let us know its in macro? Make a little lens cap? Auto sense the distance to target, place a motor on the lens and move it out of the way automatically? … actually, that would be pretty cool.

No, the solution is a good old fasion one  …. GET USED TO IT!    I still love it though.