CamDesk

Watch your six

One of the guys I work with discovered this cool little open source program called CamDesk. What it enables you to do is set up a video feed from a USB camera plugged into your workstation. It has a little window that hovers on your desktop that you can move around and will show you whatever the camera is looking at.

Several of our desks face away from the entrance to our department and we started using this program so we could just glance down and see who is walking into the department.

It takes up hardly any resources on your computer and you can also make the window semi transparent so you can see stuff that you are working on behind it. I believe you can also plug in multiple cameras for multiple feeds as well. It also has some recording options that I have not yet explored. It supports multiple OS's (not sure if the Linux version will run on OS X or not).

I ran into some compatibility problems with cameras on my computer (which to be fair, is long over due for a rebuild). I couldn't get the Microsoft LifeCam camera to work but we have several old Cisco ball cameras laying around and that works fine.

You could probably get pretty creative with uses for this program, just keep in mind it isn't meant to be a full blown security system. Just a widget for displaying a camera feed.

MosquitoHammock.com Jungle Hammock - Review

"Many a good hanging prevents a bad marriage." -- William Shakespeare 

Over the weekend I had the opportunity to take my Jungle Hammock from MosquitoHammock.com for a test drive. In short I am extremely pleased with it and slept very well in it. Rather than put the money towards a hotel room for two nights, I opted to purchase a Jungle Hammock and have a more adventurous weekend.

Hammer of the Gods

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" -- George Santayana

A week or so ago the Art of Manliness blog ran a fascinating article entitled The Generations of Men: How the Cycles of History Shape Your Values, Your Idea of Manhood, and Your Future. It is quite a long read and I will need to go over it a few more times to grok until fullness. The title really screamed out to me because I have been trying to understand the times I live in from a cyclical/historical context and how that should shape my choices for the future.

Survival Defined

Thus spake the Norseman

In the future I plan to have a blogroll up featuring some of my favorite places on the internet. In this post I am going to highlight one of them. This man goes by the title Norseman and is a USMC survival instructor. He knows his stuff, and explains it in an easy to understand fashion. Here is a link to his blog. I believe he is still active duty so he doesn't post very often. One of his youtube videos had a pearl of wisdom in it that