Thursday, January 04, 2007

Just a Big Load of Geekery Over Here

This week my company bought a new MacBook Pro for one of our people. Her old machine was an ancient iBook that smelled kind of bad. Like melting plastic bad. So we had to run right out our local Mecca and get one. No time for mail order! We have a melting iBook that we *must* replace! Anyway, she also had an iSight camera and since her MBP comes with a built-in iSight, I liberated the old one and stuck it on one of my monitors. Again, being the Admin comes in handy!

Not content with merely having an iSight camera, with which I could iChat video-ly with the rest of the planet, I decided that I absolutely must get “geeky” with it. (Not *that* way, get your mind out of the gutter!)

So I rigged up a shell script and cron job that would take a photo every fifteen minutes and upload that image to my Flickr account. Then, flickr would put those images I’d uploaded into a “badge” which you, dear reader, see on the right side of this page. Actually, the cron job and script just handle snapping the photo and the rest is accomplished with AppleScript and its lovely Folder Actions. New file gets dropped into the folder, the folder action sees it, executes the script which emails the photo to flickr. And then, Boom! Me! In all my balding-and-staring-at-my-screens-all-day-long glory!

Here is an example of what you get! For free, mind you! It’s me on the phone! At five o’clock (exactly!) this afternoon. How exciting!

And before anyone tells me, yes, I know this is very Web 1.0-JenniCam-it’s-1999-all-over-again stuff. It was mostly an excercise in digging into the scripting nonsense. Very fun.

If I have time (ha!), I think I’ll might try and bypass flickr all together and publish to Expression Engine’s moblog module.

1. I decided to join you in the Jennicam fest.

   http://flickr.com/photos/72feetabovesealevel/346240398/

   Posted by michael  on  01/04/07  at  09:54 PM

Commenting is not available in this weblog entry.

Holy Crap! Look at all this STUFF down here. It's awesome!

 

Really, I'm glad you made it down here. Almost no one ever comes down here. I'm like in a freaking dungeon down here. I get lonely. But not you. YOU made it all the way to the end of the page. For this I think I've a little crush on you. I don't know, is "love" to strong a word to use in this situation? Well, if it's not "love," then it's very strong "like." I'm totally in like with you for coming down here. You are awesome. Please love me back! I know, I know, I shouldn't be all needy, it's not attractive at all, but you don't know how it is to be stuck down here. Who scrolls all the way to the end of a page anymore these days? Anyway, thanks for shedding some light down here in the depths. I appreciate it. Shoot me an email and I'll send you a dollar, OK?

©2005-2010 Jon B. Deal All Rights Reserved. All comments belong to the respective commenters.