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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?"
A Moblog is usually a website which displays photos you send photos from your camera phone, but you can use the same site to automatically send and post photos on the web
No Sig for you.!
According to the UrbanDictionary, a moblog is a "Moble Photo Weblog, a weblog made up of content (mainly pictures). Usually this content is published using a moble cellular phone that includes a digital camera."
This might have been more obvious if you had RTFA.
EVERYDAY IS CATURDAY
In the old days of webcamming I used Inetcam software. Does/did everything the article talks about
what do you use on your Mac or Linux machines to post images automatically?
cron
scp
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.
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.
...
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..
You can kinda see where the train of thought went in order to get it to this:
Web Log -> __b log -> blog -> mobile blog -> mob___ blog -> moblog
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
You can go to moblogUK. Their code is Creative Commons licensed. And this is from their site:
"Unlike most other moblog services, we don't presume to claim ownership of any of your stuff, you're free to choose your own license for your photos, video and audio. In addition to this, we'll never sell or misuse your personal data (email address, personal details, site use patterns and so on) Relax, rights and privacy are as important to us as they are to you."