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 $50 “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
The command 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.
