Microship Labcam

(Updated hourly)

This image is being served by a decommissioned Macintosh Quadra, aided by a ComputerEyes/RT frame grabber from Digital Vision and various cameras scattered around the lab including one on a 100' hunk of coax that can be placed anywhere. The hardware, OS and other component versions are so old that none of the webcam packages available for download wanted to work, so I cobbled together a little kluge to FTP an image once per hour.

Basically, a cron-like scheduler known as MacAT invokes a simple AppleScript whenever the clock strikes whatever, causing PPP to dial Whidbey.net, our local ISP. Fetch is then told by the script to connect to Zocalo, which hosts this website... whereupon the labcam.jpg file, updated every 30 seconds by Timed Video Grabber, is then transferred to the server. PPP then disconnects, and life returns to normal. At the moment there is no error handling, motion detection, captioning, or any of the other fancy enhancements common in Real Webcams... this is just a quickie to give you a way to peer over our shoulders in the Microship lab here on Camano Island.

We'll try to keep things interesting by keeping a camera aimed wherever the action is, hopefully avoiding the torpor of a DeskCam!

Hope you enjoy it...

Steve and Natasha