Saturday, March 6, 2004

New Feature!

I'd like to introduce a new feature that I doubt will be highly used, but was fun to set up from a technical perspective.

The Bredenberg Webcam!

I could set it to update every so often automatically, but frankly, there is rarely anything worth noting to take pictures of in the office. Instead, I'll snap shots from time to time, as you can see by the picture that is there now.

So, what's the big deal? Well, this was a cheap webcam that came free with a PC I bought about 4 years ago. It worked with Windows 98, but I could not get it working with XP due to driver issues. I was seconds away from throwing it in the trash the other day, after once again trying to get it working with XP, when the idea occurred to me that it might work with Linux. After some reading, Googling, and tinkering... Presto! I have a working webcam attached to my web server.

Until I figure out the value proposition (as my father-in-law would say) of this addition, I'm just going to revel in the fact that such a thing was possible, and with far fewer headaches than in XP.

And speaking of reasons to switch to Linux (we were, weren't we?), I set up Wine on the Linux partition of my desktop this morning and installed the copy of Quicken (for Windows) and got it working! I could install my copy of Starcraft, if only I had not lost the CD Key...

I love Linux!

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