I thought it was about time I put something nice and dynamic in my site header, shamelessly being… umm… inspired by the Live header at Mike Davidson’s blog and the realisation that a 640×480 badly compressed network camera image doesn’t really do the view I have over Midsummer Common in Cambridge justice. I had an old Canon Powershot G2 lying around (it got replaced by something that fitted into a pocket more easily), and a slightly dodgy laptop running XP that was collecting dust. Combine the two with a USB cable and the appropriate drivers and you have a rather oversized webcam. Add in the timelapse mode in PSRemote, using an upload script as my ‘Image Editing’ software and everything is in place locally to squirt a snapshot to my web server every 5 minutes.
At the remote end things get copied from the FTP drop box into the relevant webspace. The raw file is then processed by some PHP and cached ready for use as the header. I would post the code here, but am a) lazy and b) haven’t had a chance to check for obvious screw-ups I don’t want to admit in public!
Of course, the temptation now is to try and do more stuff with the images - motion detection and storing interesting images seem obvious ideas, although I’m sure I’ll think of more that’ll also never see the light of day!