Today I purchased my second webcam. A year or so ago I had purchased a very inexpensive unit and hooked it up to my computer system. The thing was, quite frankly, a piece of junk. I was not impressed with the quality or usefulness of it and pretty much decided it was all a big waste of time.
Now, however, I have a reason to own a webcam. My wife has been ill lately, and I worry about her constantly while I am at work. She has asthma and diabetes, and both conditions can on occasion be serious. I know in my mind that she's fine and I should not worry, but I still do so, especially if I cannot reach her on the phone.
A webcam, I decided, would solve this problem very nicely. It would allow me to proceed to a password protected page on a web site and see what's going on in our house. I would be able to see if my dear wife was doing fine or if she was in trouble.
Of course, the flaw in the plan was I only purchased one webcam and we have a number of rooms in the house. However, it would at least allow me to see the state of things in the living room, which is where she spends much of her time.
So off I went to Best Buys to look at webcams. I decided that my mistake the last time was being cheap. This time I purchased a nice, middle-of-the-road unit for around a hundred bucks. It was a Logitech Pro 3000, which appeared like it would fit the bill perfectly.
I must say this company has taken the concept of webcams and boiled it down into something really simple. You get a camera which plugs into the USB port and some CDs with lots of software. You insert the installation CD, follow the instructions, reboot twice (at least on my machine), plug in the camera and then you are set. The installation was very simple.
Now what I wanted to do was take a picture every minute or so and upload it to a web site. Unfortunately, this is where the Logitech people failed to deliver what I really needed.
You see, for whatever reason, they have decided not to support automatic FTP uploads to web sites. They do allow you to upload to their web site (Spotlight) but the plan the offered was so ludicrously expensive as to be a complete joke. Not only that, I wanted the pictures on MY web site.
Other than that, the software was very nice, and if you wanted to use their service I'm sure it would be very good. It's just not what I wanted in this case.
What I had to do was find some third-party camera software and have it upload to my site. This solved the problem nicely.
Now I am happy - I have a way to look in on my wife once and a while and make sure she's doing well. The camera is very nice and it works well.
Unless otherwise noted, all photos and text is Copyright © Richard G Lowe, Jr.