Slashdot Mirror
Turn Your PC into a 'Moblogger'
ptorrone writes "Engadget's weekly how-to article this week shows how to turn a PC in to an 'automatic moblogging' machine. Their example they show a Windows PC, what do you use on your Mac or Linux machines to post images automatically?"
"as well as the house cat and dog, or as I refer to them, the meat pets."...remind me not to go to a BBQ at his place.
a freakin webcam? hello 1995?
perl -e '$_="\007/4`\cp%2,".chr(127);s/./"\"\\c$&\""/gees
what the hell is a "moblog"?
And who comes up with these ridiculous names?
Worst. Word. Ever.
Seriously, I think there is too much stuff put on the web just because people can. Blogs are mostly narcissistic rantings, with no regard to what purpose they serve. I'm getting tired of googling for something, only to turn up a useless blog or forum discussion.
That's just horrible. People need to stop this behavior. You'll be laughed at in a few years like we laugh at people in the 1970's.
Pay no attention to the laptop behind the curtain.
"A Moblog is usually a website which displays photos you send from your camera phone, but you can use the same site to automatically send and post photos on the web"
(from linked article, text slightly corrected)
that is silly, why do we need a howto to find a program to send emails of webcam pictures, and who in this would knew what a moblog was, this post should not have been posted here... it is not to the correct audience
Isn't this exactly what the 40,000,000 odd porn sites on the web have been doing for the last, um, decade or so?
Norman Cook's Ode to Sl
Ah, yes, thanks to technology he doesn't have to wait to get home to watch the cat toss up a hairball while the dog licks itself.
-- Fugacity: Confusing chemists since 1908
And it is so secure!
If I were doing something like this, I would probably use Perl.
How does the Slashdot Effect happen given that no slashdotters ever RTFA?
In the old days of webcamming I used Inetcam software. Does/did everything the article talks about
Mob logging? Is that when your site gets slashdotted and apache is writing to the log files as fast as it can?
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
Windows Box Running "Hello" (www.hello.com) ->
Mounted Samba Share on Linux ->
Apache/PHP Directory ripper which auto-gens the thumbnails.
Goofy but it works (when it's all up and running).
what do you use on your Mac or Linux machines to post images automatically?
cron
scp
"I like to look in on what the many robots are doing as well as the house cat and dog, or as I refer to them, the meat pets."
Dear god, this carbon based bi-ped has meat pets!
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
Much like the words "Gen-X," "extreme," "controversial," the "i-" and "my-" prefixes and everything else that has been marketed, hyped, and "Next on Entertainment Tonight!"-ed to death, the "-blog" suffix has now joined the ranks of things that instantaneously bring out my "HULK SMASH!" reflex and, unfortunately for much of the world, I was exposed to a massive dose of radiation last night. I'll likely just wither away and die, but on the off-chance that I wake up tomorrow with a set of X-Men-esque abilities, the guy who coined "Right Guard Extreme!" just might want to start digging a hole to hide in.
Cliches of the world, fear my wrath.
Mo blogging mo problems.
it is written in Perl.
Good riddance.... the ignorant masses are what make this site fun to read. Go watch TECH TV.
"Mr. President, we cannot allow a mineshaft gap!"
How about cron?
... you have to somehow find some way of 'copying' (or so i've been told) the output files into some sort of 'directory'
...
I did something like this many many years ago.
steps involved:
1. steal a webcam (no, i'm not paying anything over 5$ for a crappy 320x240 (or whatever) CMOS sensor.
2. get a v4l frame grabber
3. here's where it gets interesting, and kinda tricky
4. then you run your choice of automatic gallery-generating script, and WHAMO, you're on the bleeding edge of WWW acronymia and coolness.
really, being an techno-elitist aside, you can automate the entire process using cron and something like scp, rsh, or rsync (preferably some combination of those)
this is ollllllllllld news, incidentally. Seems to be the general tecnological ennui that's been affecting Askslashdot and other forums lately. Why go to all the trouble of using a search engine for locating information, when you can just fire off a post and wait a day or two for someone to write a recipe for you.
Incidentally, to quote the article
Basically, the way it works is as follows: you send any email with a picture attached to your TextAmerica account, the email address is the login/password so it looks like this login.password@tamw.com.
DANGER, WILL ROBINSON! DANGER!
That has got to be the stupidest solution to this problem that I have ever heard.
.If you have a Sony Aibo, you can use the built in application which sends a photo email to also send a photo to the Moblog, I have 2 of my Aibos doing that now
Does it strike anyone else as odd that not only can he afford to throw away cash on something like an Aibo, but he can justify doing so more than 2 times?
Imagine a cluster of Aibo (sorry)
Isn't it?
My webcam (currently pointed at robin from a few inches away) uses a neat little freeware app called Cam2Web. Very barebones, it simply accepts a connection and then returns image data. Nice thing is how it uses HTTP 1.1 push to send up the images, which lets me avoid FTP and all that. I use another program to download an image every five minutes and save it for the archive. It all runs on a laptop with Win98.
I'd use a few simple shell scripts if my webcam actually worked in Linux. Oh well...it's an old cam, and Logitech never released any data.
...
I sure hope moblogging becomes much more widespread than it is now! If there's one thing the world needs, it's millions of pictures that capture inane and random figments of some stranger's life. Whoa, look at this whimsical picture that she look of the sunlight glistening off the back fender of her Taurus.... instant art!
In fact, I look forward to living vicariously through the lives of strangers and acquaintances. Why, it's almost as if I had a life of my own!
Mandrake contribs since 9.2 contain a package called camdump. It's a very simple program that copies all the new pictures from a gphoto2-supported camera to a predetermined directory. It includes and uses SWIG-generated Perl bindings for libgphoto2.
the world thanks you in advance.
sulli
RTFJ.
http://www.ratemypxt.com/ ?
I simply email my website with a specially formatted email and at the other end have proc mail process the email and send it to a python script which breaks the message apart into the subject, body and phot. I them pass this to an o-xml script which adds to the xml data file and creates the html pages. /b
this whole moblog thing sounds like a reinvention of the wheel as far as webcams go.. nothing really new.. I used to have a webcam set up in my bedroom to keep an eye out for my siblings/parents. This was years ago..
I am guessing the great majority of people with accounts at Textamerica never read the Terms of Service and don't know that they don't own the images and text they posted to their own blogs there any more...
Quotes from their ToS:
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
Or is is some police surveillance thing, a 'mob logger', that keeps track of groups of insurgents?
Also, WTF is a 'zine'? Is it some type of italian dressing? Maybe a kind of pizza from the middle east?
Nathan's blog
probably named by the geeks who invented the idea.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Moblogging?
Hmmmmmmm.....
4.27.04 Tony Z, Little Pasta, and I went down to Bruno's for a slice at noon. Talked bout sum bizness that needed to be handled with the Skarpaze family. Bastards owe us points from the game.
4.28.04 Little Pasta and Tony Z were arguing over "shotgun" in my caddy. Whacked em both cause I was getting irked. Buried em in Ma's rose garden. Got another slice at Bruno's.
If so, this article was a perfect example.
Because thats all this article was good for...
1. Pic of speedometer when traveling at high speed
2. Pic of toilet
3. Pic of topless and/or naked chick
4. Pic of food
5. Pic of a computer screen, displaying a message to someone (the ultimate in rube goldberg communication!)
6. Pic of some current event that you can see in real time, e.g. opening day at a baseball game
7. Clandestine pic of someones ass or cleavage.
Ahh, technology.
Why is the GPL "anti-capitalist"? It provides corporations with high-quality software that they can use without paying license fees. And furthermore, it requires that any modifications to the software must be released to the general public, which would benefits all users of the software, corporations included.
Also, it encourages competition by preventing malicious companies from pulling an "embrace and extend" maneuver on an existing piece of software. I think it's far more anti-capitalist when a company does what ever possible to lock users into their proprietary product, deflecting the attempts of others to release competing products. Eliminating the competition is not the same as competition.
If you release software you've written yourself under the GPL, you are not some pinko anticapitalist commie. It is your right as a participant in a capitalist job economy to name your own terms under which you do work, whether it be $140/hr or for free (possibly with the GPL as the sole string attached). Remember, communism is where people are FORCED to work for the benefit of the greater whole. In the FOSS, people VOLUNTEER to work for the benefit of the greater whole. It's capitalistic because the developers have the ability to choose whether or not they want to volunteer or demand pay when they write software.
And no, the GPL does not FORCE people to give away their source code- if you don't want to give up your source code, don't modify GPL'd software. It's not like you'd even have the opportunity to modify the software if it was released under a proprietary or "shared source" license, so don't complain.
pi = 3.141592653589793helpimtrappedinauniversefactory7
So before you start a narcissistic rant about how blogs are mostly narcissistic rantings, remember that this useless forum discussion takes place on a blog. That's right, slashdot is a blog.
Since "blog" is short for "web log," what exactly does Slashdot log?
The difference between news sites with discussion and blogs is one of the personal nature of the content published. Slashdot isn't a log of anyone's life, and it's far more discussion-oriened than the usual expositionist diaries that characterize blogging. It has little in common with the blogs that came after it other than the fact that it has articles and discussion.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Hmmm. He said they're *mostly* narcissistic, and you get all "pissed off" and defensive. Who's got the problem here?
/. is better than many, and I think much of that is due to the moderation and metamoderation. Harmony Central could definitely use that.
I'd say the poster you responded to was somewhat right. A lot of it *is* just narcism. But it's more complex than that. There are the early adopters who just *have* to use it, the folks who think it makes them cool, the keep up with the Jones types, and others. For most people, a plain, old journal would do as well, if not better.
OTOH, this sort of thing can be useful. In some cases they're much more useful to those who know us, in which case a mailing list or restricted "Live Journal" type setup is better. For the rest, I agree that we're still figuring this out. That applies to most interactive spots on the web.
Finally, you write as if it's inevitable than everyone who blogs will find their writing skills improving. That hasn't worked with any other Internet technology, from email to usenet to chats to web pages to IM; why should blogs be different?
post pictures on the go!
tell me that doesn't sound exiciting! it's on the go! the go! man, the go!.
How can that many exclaimation marks not be exciting and hip?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I was afraid this was going to be a low budget porn site for a minute...
I set up a similar setup for my fiancee so that she could see me at work and get a smile by getting to see my picture. (she lives in another state and we don't get to see each other that often) The utility that I use is a fantastic open source tool called Dorgem.
It has text overlays, transparent graphic overlays, motion detection, automatic capture, ftp upload, and most text fields can use replacements like %dd, %hh, %mm, etc etc etc to insert the date, the time, or various other things. You can even read from a file and have it overlay the title of the current song playing in Winamp.
I didn't notice any features in their screen captures of TinCam that weren't filled in Dorgem.
Cheers!
--Clint
For now I have hacked together two scripts, one that watches an email addy and looks for email with images attached. It stuffs the email text(subj,from, date, body,etc) into fields in a database, then uudecodes the mime data to a date structured directory(/somedir/year/month/day) uses perlmagick to create thumbnails and midsized versions of the image(if its large), saves those images alongside the original, and inserts their location into the database. Then I have a perl script that you hit on the webserver that at the moment displays the latest image in a medium size(512x512 if I remember right) and then displays the 5 previous as thumbnails below it. Its very early in my work on it, but I hope that the images will be links to the full sizes soon as well as haveing a Calender style archive that lists the months with highlighted/linked days that images were submited on. I realize there are pre-mades that do some or all of what mine will eventually do, but its a fun project that is getting me understand a number of things in perl I would not otherwize cover. Anyways, the site currently is resting under http://www.lostgotham.com should someone be interested, but mind you its running of a cable modem....so....
what they mean to say ir 'Anti-Corporate'.
I thought you only had to share the source code if you wanted to distribute your changes?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
"The Internet is a communication tool used the world over where people can come together to bitch about movies and share pornography with one another." ~Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back
ZING!
A *zine* is what blogs (or m'blogs??) used to be before Al Gore invented the net in 1998.
There used to be a great zine-publisher's coffeehouse called QuestionComma, where zineheadders could meet up to talk shop and check out each others' scooters -- now you know why they are called Mod Points -- until SCO had it shut down...
...
Yeah, and shouldn't it really be called a "mophlog"?
That would be especially appropriate for amateur voyeurcams, no?
Damn those pesky terrorists
Yes, it is for my friends and family. Obviously nobody else gives a rats ass what I'm up to.
I set up some e-mail filtering and a page on my domain that allows me to post pictures taken from my phone directly to that web page. Pretty much just like textamerica but I own all of it.
Not really, what you're talking about, in consistent nomenclature, would more appropriately be called something like 'state monopoly capitalist socialism.' Communism isn't totalitarianism, at least in theory. I haven't seen any communist societies yet, just variations on socialism that tend towards totalitarianism. Even commie political groups in North America don't seem to get this, they're generally mental toadies to totalitarianism.
Communism is mainly about worker-controlled economics, primarily common ownership of the means of production, not about controlling workers from above. All that other stuff is just propaganda from both sides muddying the waters.
Having the ability to choose where and how you work isn't capitalistic, it's democratic, or at least economic freedom, and it's a condition that doesn't require the accumulation of capital to exist. Different concepts.
Just trying to minimize the FUD.
Damn those pesky terrorists
Use iPhoto, install myPhoto and everything from iPhoto is automatically online.
I just had terrible visions of trolls forging emails from someone else, sending copies of the goatse fellow to them :/
Just have to get the email address and...
How long would it take to download one? There is no mention.
I thought every article regarding speed or storage breakthroughs is measured in encyclopedias per x.
This being slashdot... Believe me, the blow-up doll doesn't mind at all being filmed.
Does that make any sense to anyone? Maybe someone should have finished fifth grade!
No, it's called no mo blogging
There is only one satisfying way to boot a computer. -- J. H. Goldfuss
doh! sorry. wrong place.
I have my webcam pointed at my computers to see if government spooks or my roommate ever tries to bork my systems from the console. It serves pics via http on a custom port which is forwarded from the cable modem to the router through the firewall and to the computer which actually has the webcam.
I thought about a shell script to grab an image from the camera at a specified rate and then drop those images into a directory which can be parsed by a standard httpd. Whatever...
I'm not that worried about government spooks and the consoles are password locked with vt switching disabled.
+++ATHZ 99:5:80
Nearly every useless blog site has "blog" on the page somewhere. Next time that happens to your search, just add -blog to it to exclude anything with the word "blog" on it. Works well.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Blogging:
There is already a word for this sort of thing: It's called a "Journal". I dont think just because it is on the Internet, it deserves a new name.
People just seem to be catch-phrase and buzz-word happy. Just like my old boss.
the TextAmerica site from the article works fine with my Mac once I set up an account. I just send an email with an attached file to the email address they provided and it appears on the website ready to go.
however- after reading the TOS above about them "owning" all the content, I think I may not use the service.
I like microcars
When I read the headlines, I thought how nice it would be to have a mob to help out with the loggin'. We could get all those trees loaded in just a few hours. (For those who don't know what that is, "loggin" is the term used for pulling the trees out of the woods after they have been cut for sale. This is a common term used by the logging industry.)
Yes. I agree with you.
;)
It should be called "eJournal"
That's the most intelligent piece of writing I have ever read off of a link from slashdot.
Then again, taking any referral to another site from a slashdotter's post and not reaching an image with a guy stretching his anus is a moment of bliss worth writing about in itself. Such comes this post.
Cover your eyes and click this link!
Wordpress
is an excellent php-based blogging utility with "Blog by email" that has numerous modifications available. One of which is the ability to attach photos to your email, and have them posted automatically. YMMV, but I'm having some success.
I make these: http://beatseqr.com
You must be proud of your "offspring".
Eh? Not so. I recently removed my web url from my slashdot profile. Why? Because a google search for my sitename was bringing up scads of /. threads I had posted to.
Now we know what the person behind goatse had. One day he probably felt like farting real loud in his webcam to one of his so-called "friends" and *OOPS*, pic goes in the net, the host then made the guy famous for defying the laws of "elasticity"
Hi,
I just can't stand the cruft sprint makes your friends sift through to get picture mail.
For Sprint phones, I have maintained a screen scraper sort of tool, that intercepts "shared image" emails as you send them, cuts out the spint ads and junk HTML redirection, and sends it on its way as a plain old attachment.
This can easily be interfaced to blogging sites like text america -- they know how to look inside e-mails for attachments, but that's about this.
More details at: http://pcs.hoho.com
(PS: its free, and the Python source is available.)
cheers..
I set up my co-located web/mail server to support moblogging in a few hours. I was running procmail anyway, so it just involved adding a new recipe for email messages coming from my mobile phone. They get handed to a perl script that extracts any pictures and text using MIME::Parser. It then creates unique file names for any images, the HTML for the blog entry and inserts it into a postgresql table along with the date. My personal home page lists the table entries in reverse date order in order to generate the blog.
>> "In fact, I look forward to living vicariously through the lives of strangers and acquaintances. Why, it's almost as if I had a life of my own!"
Ummm....
So I suppose that you don't watch TV, or movies?
Oh wait, you did say "almost as if I had a life" didn't you...
That would be great!
Now a burgler would know not only where all the cameras are, but how far away from your house you are.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana