Ed's Big Plans

Zinc grows an eyeball.

So, before Cara and I left home yesterday, I decided on a whim to quickly attach an ancient webcam to Zinc to use as an ad hoc surveillance device — well ok, it’s mostly for fun. This webcam was actually purchased and used with Bronze (my very first laptop), so the refresh rate, white balance and optical zoom are all from circa 2004.

Here, Zinc’s eyeball has been mounted with macam and works like a charm. The frame rate is inexcusably horrendous– but over a VNC connection, I seriously don’t care.

Eventually, Zinc will use macam’s quicktime application component to automatically shoot a photo once every x minutes, and send an e-mail to me if there is significant optical difference between the two images. In a stagnant room– this is not very challenging technically.

Giving Zinc an eyeball has granted us more peace of mind whenever we decide to travel– thus improving again the value of the mac mini… wait till you see what I’ve got planned next…

Tin Eats 2, 2GB Sticks of RAM

A while ago, I wanted to make sure I knew how to upgrade RAM in Tin and Pewter– so I swapped the RAM chips from one machine to the other. This ended up giving Pewter 2GB of ram, while Tin got 1GB.

Today, I’ve completed the upgrading cycle by popping out the 1GB kit from Tin, and replacing it with a 4GB kit. Unfortunately, this earlier Core 2 Duo architecture machine reserves the upper 700MB of the address space for other hardware… many of the items are trivial, requiring about 4kB each, but at least one device requires 256MB. The net result is that only 3.3GB of memory is ever addressible at a given time. That’s OK though– and even running technically unmatched, performance has been shown to improve by various third party reviewers. So, I’m happy– and so is Tin.