Home Defense, Geek Style?

Yo Maing writes "So my mom got lives alone, and got her car broken into last night. We have a motion sensor light in the driveway, and the car has an alarm but apparently both of these deterrents were ineffective. Crime has been rising around her neighborhood, and only action the police can take is to file a report. So I ask you, Geeks of Slashdot, what tricks do you guys have to defend yours and your loved ones homes against crimes like this? Not looking for anything that would get someone injured, but more in the area of detection and repulsion. Anyone have a holographic Yeti generator to scare away intruders? :)"

Comments

Re:Just Video

[DaHat]

A couple of months ago I had a neighbor break into my house and thought I wouldn't notice. As soon as I got home I did, and on consulting a camera in my living room I found pictures of her where she shouldn't have been.

Video cameras are great, but require lots of tape and can wear out, even digital ones require large amounts of disk space.

I was very happy that I was using a MemoCam that I had picked up in a thrift store back in December. I was very eager to use it as I had a pair of DVD's disappear the month before, and after many months of sitting idle it found my burglar (at least in this one case).

As for the camera, it's a small B&W cam that uses IR to detect motion, when detected it starts snapping pictures to a MMC card. It even supports scheduling so I have it automatically enable motion detection soon after I leave for work and disable it again just before I get home.

With such a device, there is always the risk that it could be stolen, along with the pictures it contains. To help prevent such an occurrence I have since improved my camera arrangement in my home... all I will say is that I now have more than one camera and not even a burglar setting fire to the place could prevent me from having good, usable pictures of the event.

For those who didn't go to the link above, my burglar initially denied everything until she was confronted with the pictures by the police. She's now facing charges of 2nd degree burglary and petty theft, charges that carry maximum jail terms of 10 years in the state pen and 30 days in the county jail respectively.

We are now at 3 months to the day since the break in and still the wheels of justice are turning slow... but at least they are turning, all because I am paranoid enough to have a camera in my home.

That is a good plan, but insufficient alone. If they recognize the camera and have any sense to them, they'll want to find the tape. Do you think they'd leave a PC intact when they suspect it has a video of them breaking into your house?

A few good kicks aught to do the job, or more if one has time.

I'm running some custom software in my home currently, one of the features of it that I'm trying to get working just right is a reporting feature where under certain circumstances, the app will upload pictures to different locations in case the camera and the machine running it are compromised.