Watching Paint Dry

paint webcam The "dial-up friendly" low-bandwidth webcam is back, but below are some videos of when things were a bit more "dynamic" and you could even turn stuff on & off.

Time Lapse Videos - Snapshot

Feeding the goldfish
A typical HOUR at WPD in 26 seconds
A typical DAY at WPD in 38 seconds
Installing the blinking Christmas lights
Kaelcol sent this Glamorous snapshot
You can even Watch snow shoveling

About this website
The D-Link webcam is being used for something else - here's how it was used to ... uhhhhh ... watch paint dry! ;-)
You are ... welllll ... Watching Paint Dry in my basement crawl space via a D-Link DCS-6620G wireless webcam. X10 Powerline technology is used to control the various "zones" and allow you to turn them on and off in real-time. Yes, you (and anyone else on the Internet) can toggle the rotating drying fan, make that Rainier Beer Sign light up ... or if you have had too much to drink, turn it off.

For the techies out there, the video feed is rebroadcast via a 100 Mbps web server (rather than a direct connection to my house), so there is quite a bit of bandwidth available, especially since I'm doing 3-second jpeg updates (typically about 50 KBytes) rather than streaming video. Back-end is a buncha home-grown Perl code along with the nifty CGI::AJAX module. There is a front-end software rate-limiter so that the X10 hardware doesn't get overwhelmed due to its 1-2 second latency ... daily data is shown in the X10 Controls toggled ### times (### tries) line. I.e. there is a lotta scalability, so this web site should be able be able to sustain a significant number of visitors.