because i have a thousand better things to do with my time i have invented the mogcam.

just take one l’espion digital camera, one suse linux box, spend half an hour searching for the usb cable, install a whole host of bits and bobs like usbview, pkg-config, libgphoto2 and gphoto2, get lots of help from sites like this one, write a few bits and bobs of scripts for the gimp to take the pnm file that gphoto2 grabs from the cam and turn it into a jpg, add some writing onto the pic (couldn’t get it to let me put spaces in the writing when the writing came from a variable so i gave up), up the brightness, contrast and colour saturation because my landing is not as grey as the raw picture data would suggest, type stty sane more times than i’ve had to do for a long long time, sort out ssh public key stuff so i can scp into my web server without the need for a password, and finally set up a cron job to take a picture every minute.

simple. you windows do it all with one click and provided with drivers and software by the manufacturer people don’t know what you’re missing ;-)

only problem now is getting the cats to play and sleep in sight of the cam… that’s the really complicated bit.