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?"

Comments

Yipes

[darth_MALL]

"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.

what about..

[The Unabageler]

a freakin webcam? hello 1995?

Re:what about..

[Rupert]

What's the URL for your cellphone? I hope you have caller pays.

Re:what about..

[AndroidCat]

Lovely. Not only can people with cells tell callers that they're on the bus, but the GPS says where the bus is, and they can send pictures!

The rapid pace of "Hi, I'm on the bus" technology is just astounding! ;)

Moblogger

[Neil Blender]

Worst. Word. Ever.

Re:Moblogger

[falcon5768]

specially since I have never head of the damn thing... I think people who make up these "techie" terms should be shot, they make no sense and dissapear as fast as they appear sometimes

Re:Moblogger

[Anonymous Coward]

That word is almost as stupid as mebi or gibi.

Or "Gigli".

Re:Moblogger

[zulux]

I think people who make up these "techie" terms should be shot,

Techieterm: I like it.

Peprare to be shot.

Do we really need more blogging?

[genericacct]

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.

Re:Do we really need more blogging?

[chame1e0n]

and unlike your post, how?

Re:Do we really need more blogging?

[Anonymous Coward]

blogging is brilliant. it provides dudes who spout shit with the perfect soapbox with no risk of anyone paying any attention.

Re:Do we really need more blogging?

[Your_Mom]

What we are seeing in just evoloution. People are still figuring it out. I mean, look at the web mid 1996. Everyone had a web page full of useless stuff, a boat load of javascript and way too many blink tags. What little content there was, was "arcissistic rantings, with no regard to what purpose they serve". Give it a bit, people will get bored and move onto the next 'big thing'.

I try to post semi-useful thing in mine, like "I got this error at work today, here is what I did, It drove me nuts", in hope that google will index it so other people don't have to go through the wild goose chase that I had to go through. But mostly, mine is journal-type stuff.

Re:Do we really need more blogging?

[Capt'n Hector]

I always see these comments in discussion about weblogs, and they REALLY piss me off. These comments are ignorant at best. I won't speak for the unwashed masses of webloggers, but I've been doing it since 1999, from the original, editthispage manila software. Blogs can start out as "narcissistic rantings" but once you start writing well, everything changes. All my relatives and friends regularly read my blog, and they appreciate it for the window it gives into my mind. For example, this entry sparked a discussion between me and my uncle.

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.

Re:Do we really need more blogging?

[WuphonsReach]

Slashdot is more of a forum where anyone is allowed to come and discuss any topics.

Ha ha ha ha! Seriously, you must be new here? (Hell yeah I'm burning karma on this... no offense)

Slashdot and discussion do not fit into the same page. It's more of a soapbox-style comment system then a discussion forum. The user-interface has serious issues that interfere with having anything akin to a discussion. Discussion/forum software would allow a person to track threads that are interesting and easily check back to see if anything new has been added to those interesting threads. Slashdot doesn't allow you to do that (unless you manually bookmark stuff, or feel like constantly re-reading everything). In fact, any suggestions to that effect to the programmers gets either shot down, or "well, we don't want to it that way (some simple method), instead we're waiting to write some huge complex system (which will never get written)". (Case in point: adding another drop-down to the filter bar to only show posts within the last 1/2/4/8/12/24/48 hours.)

While it may not be a blog, calling it a forum is even farther off-the-mark.

Want to have sex?

[Nuclear Elephant]

Pay no attention to the laptop behind the curtain.

Re:I guess the big question is...

[vk2]

How about RTFA ?

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

Re:I guess the big question is...

[Bobdoer]

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.

Done before?

[Mateito]

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?

Checking in on the cat and dog

[zymurgy_cat]

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.

And it is so secure!

[YankeeInExile]

And it is so secure!

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. When we set up TinCam, the WebCam application, we will enter this info in. If you want you can send a test message to your moblog now, simply send an email and attach a photo, then visit your site to make sure it all worked. This is also a quick and easy way to post pictures on the web as well.

If I were doing something like this, I would probably use Perl.

#!/usr/bin/perl5
use Handwave::Camera;

use constant MYUSER => 'notauser';
use constant PASSWORD => 'notmypassword';

while (1)
{
my $image = Handwave::Camera->new();
#
# maybe use some of Image::Magick to transform image
#
my $message = new MIME::Lite ( To => MYUSER.'.'.MYPASSWORD.'@tincam.com',
From => 'notme@example.com',
Subject => 'another photo',
Type => 'multipart/mixed' );
$message->attach( Type => 'image/jpeg',
Encoding => 'quoted-printable',
Data => $image ) ;
$message->send;
sleep 60;
}

Inetcam

[DeanFox]

In the old days of webcamming I used Inetcam software. Does/did everything the article talks about ...um almost 10 years ago.

Mob logging?

[FattMattP]

Mob logging? Is that when your site gets slashdotted and apache is writing to the log files as fast as it can?

Your attention, please...

[The Ultimate Fartkno]

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.

The only problem with your solution is that

[Anonymous Coward]

it is written in Perl.

i love cron!

[lambent]

How about cron?

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 ... you have to somehow find some way of 'copying' (or so i've been told) the output files into some sort of 'directory'
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.

This is way cool!!!

[sssmashy]

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!

Textamerica??

[Kaa]

Textamerica is an interesting site. It claims ownership of everything posted to it, which is, umm... unusual for a blog-hosting place.

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:

"14. Textamerica.com may use, sell and/or share with its affiliates any information provided by you on this website, including your name, e-mail address, usage patterns, and uploaded images and text.

...

17. Textamerica.com and any images and comments on this website are intended for personal use only and may not be used except by Textamerica.com for commercial purposes."

Moblogging???

[WwWonka]

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.

Re:Slashdot Valedictory

[tunabomber]

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.

Dorgem

[HanClinto]

I realize that the comments here are mostly trolls and bad jokes, but here's a relatively serious comment.

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

Re:I guess the big question is...

[OrangeTide]

A rough translation of "moblog" is "waste of time".