Ten years ago I made a video titled One Year, which showed the founding of our farm; from the building of the barn, the digging of the well that provides water to the barn, the erecting of the fencing, and the arrival of the llamas and the sheep. However, that film was with the old analog camera pointing out a window, and — while I love it — entirely too long at over 16 minutes.
I have been looking for a similar project since.
Read More »Noon All Year Almost immediately after I posted my last entry on the trials and tribulations of an EvoCam on life support, the software crashed again. Fresh start, minimal other applications running, and poof. I cleaned up the mess, and then instructed my iMac to restart itself every Sunday at 1am.
If all goes as planned (stop laughing!), this will be enough to help keep EvoCam running between restarts. If not? Then the next step is increase the frequency of the reboots until I can set up the Mac Mini, and start all over on that machine.
Because, I am all out of options as far as out-of-the-box software after giving SecuritySpy a close look this weekend. The results, as always, were mixed.
As you may recall there has been a lot of effort (by me) put into trying to make EvoCam as efficient as it can be in regard to its resources usage. I figured if the software has been abandoned I have two choices: learn to program and roll my own EvoCam clone or do what I can to keep it alive, and hope that I find a replacement. Long time readers (LOL) know that I chose the latter, because the former would take too long, and probably drive me mad.Read More »Don’t (Kernel) Panic! 🤪
Recently I wrote about night vision and green screen, and I assumed that it was a trade off. It kind of is, but maybe not in the way I thought.
Every time I make a change to EvoCam or to the Hikvision settings, something new occurs. Not necessarily good or bad, just new. And times like this I am simply baffled.
Again, it’s time to look under the hood.
When I woke this morning, I was pleased to see that all systems were go, and things appeared to be behaving themselves. Then I got to work, opened my Air, connected to the iMac via screen share, and … grey screen?
Sigh.
Look, I have never claimed to be an expert on anything. I hunt and peck my way around the keyboard, and do the same when it comes to figuring shit out.
I like to pretend that what I am creating with the FarmCam Project is like software development; each tweak or improvement a new version. Sometimes it feels that way as I wrestle with EvoCam to get the most out of the abandoned software, that has gone dark without explanation. I can’t just make a support request or post to a support forum. If there are diehard EvoCam enthusiasts, I have no idea where to find them.
These instructional entries are here for two reasons. One, I hope to help others who may have similar interests — or needs — to my own. Secondly, if I don’t write this stuff down somewhere, I am likely to break something and forget WTF I did. These are my own manuals in some sense. Hence, many entries with lots of guess work and promises to report back later. Most of the time I forget to do some things in advance, and I am left wondering if a change will make any difference at all. Other times, I’m not patient enough to test things before I write about them here. [This is another of those times!]Read More »Do As I Say, Not As I Did
I turned to cron/crontab in order to run an Automator application and Transmit to (sometimes) smoothly synchronise the daily movies on my iMac with those on the remote server. Then I learned much of the hard work I was scripting could be done from within my beloved EvoCam. However, EvoCam does not appear to be able to handle the archiving part of the operation. At least not to my specifications.
A few days ago I wrote about the new features I have added to the FarmCam. While writing the entry I stumbled upon actions settings in EvoCam that allowed me even more flexibility in the ways I share the views. However, I had a few concerns before I could decide if it would be a viable replacement for the current method.
My experiments in the last few days have resulted in mixed — but encouraging — results, and as promised I am sharing them with you.Read More »Options Are Always Nice
In October my Australian cousin Peter, challenged me to create a different sort of time lapse. He wanted to see how the view would look at… Read More »New Features for the FarmCam
For years I have been frustrated by a nagging issue where the screen of the webcam goes green. Sometimes in flickers, and sometimes for long… Read More »FarmCam Update – Dark Nights or Green Screens?