I used to play guitar quite a bit. I own 4 guitars, a couple amps, and several effect pedals (my favorite being an Ibanez Tube Screamer…think Stevie Ray). I keep my Fender Strat in my bedroom closet and play it un-amplified every now and then. I even have a battery powered cigarette box amplifier that I’ll plug into if I want to make some noise. One of my friends and I used to fire up a copy of Acid Pro and make our own music ala Trent Reznor style. Of course we thought we sounded good but I’m sure it was shite. Actually, I know a fellow engineer that works at the factory beside mine and he made an entire album with Acid Pro. He played all the instruments himself and even sang. It sounded pretty good. He’s obviously more talented than I.

Anyway, the reason that I even brought up this personal side of me is because I was reading Matthew Helmke’s blog this morning regarding a custom guitar amplifier that he made. That definitely sounds like a fun project. I wish I had the time for that. At one time I buried myself in amplifier design with intentions of making a franken-amp. After learning the fundamentals of amp design, I never actually got around to making one. I chalked it up as another project that I started but never finished. Story of my life.

Recently, my father had the task of trying to figure out how to view a webcam in surveillance mode. By that I mean that he wanted to hook up a webcam to his laptop out in his workshop at home, point it to anything that he wanted to monitor (CNC machine, battery charging monitor), and then view it from inside of his house on his desktop PC. Seems simple, right?

Since I don’t know jack about webcams, only having owned one for a short time in ‘97, I had to use “theory” in explaining to him how it might work. I threw out MSN Messenger (or Live…whatever they call it these days), Skype, NetMeeting, TightVNC, and VLC as starting points. Since I don’t own a webcam, trying to help someone who does was rather difficult for me.

Anyway, my father stopped by last night (with my mother, sister and her children for Halloween) and he brought his webcam along. I had been curious as to how openSUSE would treat an older usb webcam (Intel). So I plugged it in and of course nothing happened. A quick ‘dmesg’ in the terminal yielded a working usb device so I had hope. A quick 45 seconds on Google with the make and model of my webcam and operating system turned up a driver that was sitting on my openSUSE 10.3 DVD. So I installed the package and rebooted my computer for good measure.

We fired up VLC, went to File>Open Capture Device>Video4Linux tab and selected the “SECAM” device. BAM! I was looking at live video from the webcam. It worked and I was surprised that it was that easy.

We needed a WinXP machine for the next step. I grabbed my wife’s laptop since it is set up to dual-boot between WinXP and ubuntu. I fired up WinXP and then installed TightVNC. I already had my openSUSE box set up for remote connections. Once I logged into my openSUSE user account from the WinXP box using TightVNC, I fired up VLC and went to File>Open Capture Device>Video4Linux tab and selected the “SECAM” device again. And…it worked again! I just proved to myself and my father that you could make a remote connection to another computer with a webcam plugged in and see the video…live and in full screen…all inside of my network.

So that was my fun project for last night. I was impressed with openSUSE. I now wonder if it would have been this easy in ubuntu. I have a feeling that it would be. I aim to try because now I am curious. Linux just keeps getting better and better doesn’t it? And remember…I don’t know jack about webcams.