Nerds and Dogs Unite

Danny Estrada — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 10:42:25 -0600

Do you sit in a pool of your own anxious sweat counting the hours until you can get home to see if Fido has completely trashed your $3,000+ Mac Pro setup? Neither do we, we all own cats. On the off chance that you do have a dog and spend your days worrying about Rovers canine antics, there is a DIY solution that will let you keep an eye on Rin-Tin-Tin while you are out.

Stephen Myer created a remote doggy-treat dispenser with some simple items that can be found around any self-respecting nerds house and ioBridge's beta hardware. The ioBridge comes with a pre-made servo smart board and a fill-in-the-blank web interface that helped him create a widget with some javascript. Myer then created a web app of his creation for his iPhone.

After adjusting the javascript available oh ioBridges site and optimizing the streaming webcamfeed, Myer had live video on his iPhone of his dog's kennel. Now Myer can keep an eye on his dog from anywhere, and reward the dog depending on it's behavior. This almost makes us want to get setup like Myers' in order to build and test this out on online editor Robbie. Readers could give him a treat when he does well. When he's goofing off, well, we're looking into a chair that delivers an electrical shock.

Check out video of Stephen demoing his setup with Cooper the dog.

Giving Sight to Mac OS X

Scott Rose — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 03:45:00 -0500

iUSBCam lets iChat work with webcams that might not otherwise be possible to use.

My dad and I both have Mac minis, and we want to use iChat for videochats with each other. The problem, however, is that Apple discontinued the iSight camera, and we can’t find any other FireWire webcams out there. We found a whole bunch of USB webcams, but none of them come with Mac drivers. Can you please tell us how we can use a USB webcam with Mac OS X?

Never fear—when Apple taketh away, it also giveth. Starting with Mac OS 10.4.9, Apple has included support for an open standard called UVC (USB video class), which many modern webcams support. If you’re running Mac OS 10.4.9 or later and your USB webcam is UVC-compliant, then it will instantly work with iChat, Skype, or any other program that can use a webcam.

If you’re running an older version of Mac OS X, or your USB webcam isn’t UVC-compliant, you still may be in luck. macam (free, webcam-osx.sourceforge.net) is a set of webcam drivers for Mac OS X that supports hundreds of USB webcams, old and new. After installing macam on your machine, you’ll most likely need to purchase and install iUSBCam ($9.95, www.ecamm.com/mac/iusbcam), which enables iChat to work with the webcam that you just installed the drivers for.

One other quick thing to note: If you own a FireWire DV camcorder, you can use it with iChat without having to install any additional software.

Mac|Life Web Camera RSS Feed

Nerds and Dogs Unite

Giving Sight to Mac OS X