Turn Your PC into a 'Moblogger'

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Turn Your PC into a 'Moblogger'

Posted by michael on Friday April 30, 2004 @05:05AM from the mob-log dept.

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?"

19 of 208 comments (clear)

Yipes by darth_MALL · 2004-04-30 05:07 · Score: 5, Funny

"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.. by The+Unabageler · 2004-04-30 05:07 · Score: 4, Funny

a freakin webcam? hello 1995?

--
perl -e '$_="\007/4`\cp%2,".chr(127);s/./"\"\\c$&\""/gees; print'
Moblogger by Neil+Blender · 2004-04-30 05:08 · Score: 5, Funny

Worst. Word. Ever.
1. Re:Moblogger by falcon5768 · 2004-04-30 05:10 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  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
  
  --
  "Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
Do we really need more blogging? by genericacct · 2004-04-30 05:09 · Score: 4, Insightful

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.
1. Re:Do we really need more blogging? by chame1e0n · 2004-04-30 05:11 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  and unlike your post, how?
2. Re:Do we really need more blogging? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-04-30 05:16 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  blogging is brilliant. it provides dudes who spout shit with the perfect soapbox with no risk of anyone paying any attention.
3. Re:Do we really need more blogging? by Your_Mom · 2004-04-30 05:17 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  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.
  
  --
  Objects in the blog are closer then they ap
4. Re:Do we really need more blogging? by Capt'n+Hector · 2004-04-30 05:28 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  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.
  
  --
  Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
  Africus aut Europaeus?
5. Re:Do we really need more blogging? by WuphonsReach · 2004-04-30 06:50 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  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.
  
  --
  Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
Want to have sex? by Nuclear+Elephant · 2004-04-30 05:09 · Score: 5, Funny

Pay no attention to the laptop behind the curtain.
Re:I guess the big question is... by vk2 · 2004-04-30 05:09 · Score: 5, Informative

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

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No Sig for you.!
Re:I guess the big question is... by Bobdoer · 2004-04-30 05:11 · Score: 4, Informative

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.

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EVERYDAY IS CATURDAY
Done before? by Mateito · 2004-04-30 05:11 · Score: 5, Funny

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?

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Norman Cook's Ode to Sl
Checking in on the cat and dog by zymurgy_cat · 2004-04-30 05:11 · Score: 4, Funny

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.

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-- Fugacity: Confusing chemists since 1908
i love cron! by lambent · 2004-04-30 05:22 · Score: 5, Informative

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.
Textamerica?? by Kaa · 2004-04-30 05:30 · Score: 4, Interesting

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."

--

Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
Moblogging??? by WwWonka · 2004-04-30 05:34 · Score: 4, Funny

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.
Dorgem by HanClinto · 2004-04-30 05:59 · Score: 5, Informative

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