ajft

The time had come to fire up the Honda after its two weeks of rest. Unsurprisingly, the battery was so flat it could barely light the dashboard lights, so I had to play the jumper lead game. The new battery is getting further and further up the priority list...

After successfully managing to get to work without getting myself killed, I took a long lunch and rode into the city to join in the protest against the new $AU50 "safety" charge being added to motorcycle registration as part of the state budget. All the tasks that this money is earmarked for are suitably wishy-washy, and most of them have to do with all road users, noticably the ones in cars who keep on driving into things that they don't see. I'm no good at guessing crowd numbers, but there seemed a lot of people (and bikes) there. Everyone gathered at 222 Exhibition street, TAC headquarters, and assorted media photographers ran up and down filming us all, then at noon we rode around into Spring St, parked and there were many speeches regarding the "safety initiative". It appears that neither the government or the opposition could be bothered to send a spokesman out to address the crowd, which may say something for their attitude to this latest revenue raiser.

[http://bigmouth.here-n-there.com/]

all praise the singing fish.

[http://www.linux-usb.org/]

time to see if I can make my RoboCam work on wyvern.

Seeking here and there, I found that I needed the following to install the kernel modules for the USB camera:

depmod usbcore
depmod ov511

mount -t usbdefs none/proc/bus/usb mounts the USB filesystem so I can look and see what is attached... A VIA USB HSB rev17 for starters!

The LifeView RoboCam™ is really just an ordinary OV511 camera (USB Id, Vendor=05a9, ProdID=0511), so most software should work. I tried gqcam, xawtv, streamer with moderate succecss, then used imgstamp to stamp the image and upload it. Nothing is quite automated yet, but its a start. Certainly better results than I've got from the support from their company, the provided software for Windows XP fails to install and the email they sent responding to my request basically said “can't help you, it works for us, except in much worse english.

[http://www.thedirks.org/v4l2]

Video for Linux 2.

webcam

Please be patient. I'm experimenting with a USB camera connected to either my desktop PC at work, or a laptop provided by my work, both of these run some form of Windows software that grabs hold of images. The main part of the experiment is to find a seamless way of uploading these images to ajft.org.

I haven't found any free Windows software that will do what I want in an unobtrusive manner, nor can I get the USB camera to work at all under Linux on my home machine. Any hints or suggestions would be very welcome!

To add an extra degree of difficulty, once I installed the drivers and software for my digital camera on the laptop, the USB camera has stopped working completely.

There's a chance I can use the Digital IXUS 300 as a webcam, but that would definitely require me to buy an external power supply for it.

2002-May-14: Latest news is that with a bit of experimentation, I've managed to get the LifeView RoboCam™ working under Linux. Still needs work to automate the snapshots and uploads.