I broke the Internet when I was messing with the WebCam earlier. There was a USB problem, so I stopped unplugged the wireless thing, which is plugged into a USB port. It totally refused to work again, after that. I rebooted the computer, did ipconfig things in the command prompt. All sorts (no, not liquorice). I found the CD that came with the wireless thing, and used it to reinstall the thing. Several times. The monitor claimed that it was in contact with the access point, but that the access point was not connected to the Internet. Such lies. The laptop accessed the Internet quite happily, using the same access point.

After the computer bluescreened and rebooted, I reinstalled the wireless thing again, this time leaving it plugged in - it says to have it unplugged before you install the software. Magically, it worked, although it still claims not to be able to see the Internet.

You heard it here first: bluescreens are not the kiss of death they once were…

After leaving the WebCam idea for so long, I thought I’d give it another whirl today. I found a WebCam service with FTP and Installer written in C# that I thought I’d download. It doesn’t tell you, but when it tells you you need to run installutil.exe, this is the one which is buried deep in an obscure folder. I only found it by doing a file search for it. The way it’s written on the web page gives the impression of its being in the PATH.

It also doesn’t tell you what to do next. Ok, so it’s running, but is it actually doing anything?

Seems everyone’s jumping on the bandwagon.

Damn them, they want money now and they say it was only a 20 day trial! I’ve not had it for 20 days, have I? It’s only 19.99 USD, though, which is only £11.50, according to xe.com, but £11.90 according to swreg.com, who I’d be making the transaction through.

Maybe I could write a program myself that would force the camera to take a picture every so often then ftp it to my server. Surely it can’t be all that difficult. Can it?

This task must replace my previous next step.

Afterthought: who knows; if it’s brilliant, I could let people download it from the Internet!

Reminder: C reminded me he sent me a link yesterday which might help with this.

…is to convert the Transitional XHTML into Strict XHTML.

Well, since I set up the webcam using the default page that EasyFreeWebCam provided, I thought I’d clag the picture on a page that fits in with the rest of my website (other than my blog of course, which has always been different. One day, it will all be the same. Maybe.

The original page of instructions I looked at (WebCamWorld) had a link to get this super-duper-sounding JavaCam Applet which seemed to do exactly what I wanted easily. However, I couldn’t get it to work even after following the instructions! Sod this, I thought, and looked on the Internet for summat else. I found this page, which said it uses EasyFreeWebCam and that there are problems with the JavaCam, but with help from http://www/irt.org, he worked out how to do it without using JavaCam, but just using a simple bit of JavaScript and posted the relevant code here. I copied and pasted and edited it (to make it valid Transitional XHTML) and now I have this page to show for my efforts.
I’ll probably take the default EasyFreeWebCam page offline eventually, but for now, it can sit there looking incongruous.

(Written earlier in March)

Now that I have my webcam all plugged in and the software updated and I’ve finished playing with it - the cat makes for dull subject matter: she just sits there - so I thought I’d do something technical with it and make a live webcam thing. I’m going to write this in tandem with setting it up so you can see exactly how it should - or shouldn’t - be done. So here goes:

1. Search Google for <”how to” live webcam>; click on second link to WebCamWorld. Looks promising so far.
2. Ok, so the camera itself isn’t a webcam, it’s just a camera. It’s a web page fed images from a digital camera.
3. Ok, it’s going to be a snapshot webcam, as opposed to a streaming one, because it uses less bandwidth and is apparently easier to set up. I’ll also be doing images sized 320 x 240 because I’m not bothered about refreshing it particularly often - this is an exercise in can I do it?, not here’s something exciting to show you.
4. Ok, how to do it. Well, I don’t want frames, so I’ll not be using HTML; without frames, it refreshes the whole page, and I don’t want that either. So it’ll be some Javary thing; either Javascript refresh or a Java Applet.
5. Hardware’s not an issue, seeing as I have it already. USB plug ‘n’ play camera. PC. Stuff. You know, a computer.
6. Hmm, so it’s not actually telling me what to actually actually do. Ok, next!
7. Hmm, I’m stuck. I need some software to upload the picture every so often, but the software I have doesn’t recognise the internet connection. Grr.

Update (26/03/06):

C had a look today at the WebCam stuff; he said it was easy, but when I showed him the software that I had tried to use before that didn’t recognise the network, he said that that hadn’t been what he’d used. He found what he’d used, CoffeeCup, and ran that. He’d only minimised the other software though, so the camera couldn’t be used by CoffeeCup, so I accidentally/mistakenly set the default camera to be some other video capture crap which doesn’t seem to exist and now there’s no way to change it. Stupid thing. So, I looked on the Internet for something else, and downloaded Fwink, which doesn’t seem to work either. It’s a known issue that it won’t let you choose the camera if there’s more than one, so it’s clearly chosen the wrong one.

I have just downloaded EasyFreeWebCam to see what that does. Well, I can select the camera and it shows me what the camera sees. Now I just have to faff about with the ftp settings and stuff and we’ll see what happens. Yeah, that seems to work. I’m not sure I’m entirely happy with the results, though, but never mind. You can see the results here if you must.