Video – rick scully

16 Jun

Sometimes I Feel Like Somebody’s Watching Me

Whether you are interested in a hummingbird’s eye view of a half billion monarch butterflies waking from their naps (see video above) or a Komodo dragon destroying a (robotic) spy pig for muscling in on his mating rituals, these spy animal videos have you covered.

From the people behind the BBC Earth & PBS Nature program(me) Spy in the Wild and Spy in the Wild 2, get up close and personal with the help of robotic cameras made to look as life like as the animals they portray. Choose from bats, penguins — these are narrated by David Tennant and not Benedict Cumberbatch — singing (and farting) gorillas, ostrich, otters and eagles, owls, seals AND sharks, and even the adorable quokka. And of course, a spy tortoise.

Not enough creepy spy animals for you? Well, tune in to see spy orangutan, spy crocodile hatchling, spy meerkat, spy egret, spy prairie dog, spy macaw, spy sloth, spy cobra, spy bushbaby, spy squirrel, spy adelie, and spy baby hippo.

This post was created for MetaFilter, but I forgot to search before I composed and found on preview that there was a post from only last month.

03 Feb

Noon All Year

Ten years ago I made a video titled One Year, which showed the founding of our farm; from the building of the barn, the digging of the well that provides water to the barn, the erecting of the fencing, and the arrival of the llamas and the sheep. However, that film was with the old analog camera pointing out a window, and — while I love it — entirely too long at over 16 minutes.

I have been looking for a similar project since.

Farm Cam Moves to Farm Site

After some hemming and hawing, and consulting with Sarah, we’ve decided to move the Farm Cam Project to our Gage Hill Crafts site. It was something being considered for some time, and now seemed like the time to do it.

All the articles and technical musing on the project will remain here, in my private stash. If one is interested more in the technical aspects of the project than catching a glimpse of a good snow storm or one of the llamas posing, those types of musing will still live on this site.

The images are also all still being uploaded to this site, which will remove any broken image links from the past. Redirects have also been established for any links to the previous location, so there really shouldn’t be any interruption to the find visual products you are used to seeing at Rick Scully dot com.

Be sure to bookmark the new location; and follow me on Mastodon for daily reminder links when the new videos post.

Lastly, there is a new outdoor webcam project in the works. Stay tuned.

20 Feb

The SecuritySpy That Doesn’t Love Me

Almost immediately after I posted my last entry on the trials and tribulations of an EvoCam on life support, the software crashed again. Fresh start, minimal other applications running, and poof. I cleaned up the mess, and then instructed my iMac to restart itself every Sunday at 1am.

If all goes as planned (stop laughing!), this will be enough to help keep EvoCam running between restarts. If not? Then the next step is increase the frequency of the reboots until I can set up the Mac Mini, and start all over on that machine.

Because, I am all out of options as far as out-of-the-box software after giving SecuritySpy a close look this weekend. The results, as always, were mixed.

Pros and Cons of Wide Dynamic Range

Recently I wrote about night vision and green screen, and I assumed that it was a trade off. It kind of is, but maybe not in the way I thought.

Every time I make a change to EvoCam or to the Hikvision settings, something new occurs. Not necessarily good or bad, just new. And times like this I am simply baffled.

Again, it’s time to look under the hood.