We’ve recently taken on a new helper to help around the house while we go to work. It is a big help as it leaves you to concentrate on the other things in life. There is only one concern (they may be others) how safe is it to have somebody else living in your home? Can you trust them?
So we decided to look into some kind of security camera that will give us the ability of checking-up every now and then.
There were several new things on the market; PCCW sold a camera that connects throught a mobile connection (of course you have to have another mobile phone account for this) which looked expensive. It also didn’t store the records of the day.
Next stop was the corner computer shop. I’ll say that it’s not easy trying to decide on the best solution when the seller doesn’t speak the same language, one time I had to draw what I wanted – that worked.
We settled on a Panasonic BL-C131 as it had a wifi connection and seemed fairly straight forward to setup. It was easier than I thought as the camera uses upnp and I didn’t realise my router had this, so I spent the first hour trying to configure it manually.
Once it was all running I noticed that the camera had a function to capture still images and send them to email or ftp; hmm, I thought, what can this do for me? it seemed to be a solution in the making.
I tried to set up a free ftp account and managed to get the images sent there, I also worked-out how Quiktime could convert these images into a video. Success I thought. But not so. The free ftp site made downloading 200 images so slow that I would be spending about 2 hours each night downloading and reviewing the days footage – not acceptable. Why get a helper to save me time and then spend that time reviewing what she does.
A few years earlier I had used a hosting site called Totalchoicehosting.com which worked for me but then I didn’t need it (so it got closed). It was time to revive that account.
A quick check on the forums, a few emails to the support guys and off we go. The solution now is:
The camera saves the files to a particular folder on my server
At 9pm the folder of images or zipped and saved to another folder (with date/time etc)
At 10pm the original folder of images gets emptied
All this is done automatically with cron jobs and php scripts that were borrowed from other people
Leaving me free to just download the zip file which now takes just 2 mins. Fantastic!
The next question is; now that I have this server… what else can I do with it?