fun on a saturday night
I actually had a good day overall yesterday.
I've been pondering for some time now what to do about my webcam at home. Denise is kinda paranoid about having it turned on all day, so i've basically had to keep the lense covered. That is a huge waste of a webcam to be broadcasting a post-it note all the time. So i was trying to think of something else to do, and i figured why not point it outside? The only problem was that the computer is nowhere near a window, and the cable from the webcam is about 6ft long, so that wouldn't work. Then a few days ago it occurred to me that I could possibly use the really old (like 4-5 years) HP Omnibook laptop with wifi. This laptop is a brick. It weighs about 12lbs, and has a Celeron 433 CPU, with 256MB RAM and a 4GB HD. So we're talking slow and heavy. I wasn't sure if it could run fast enough to handle the bandwidth that the webcam needed. But I figured i'd try and see. I installed FC3 without any problems (although it took almost 2 hours). Overall, getting the webcam working was both easy and difficult. I had no trouble getting it working on a basic level (I could use a GUI to watch the video, or grab snapshots), but the tool that I had been using in the past to script taking snapshots seems not to work on FC3. I just kept getting USB bus timeout errors, which made no sense at all seeing as how I was getting good results with GUI based tools. I tried emailing the author of the tool, but the email address listed on his website bounced, and since his tool hasn't been updated in a couple years, I'm guessing that he's moved on. I spent much of the evening searching for a replacement. I finally found a good tool, called vgrabbj which is working well. The only remaining issue is getting a decent snapshot. This is more of an art than a science. I wanted to pan off to the southeast, since I think the view is much nicer in that direction, but the camera was getting overwhelmed by the direct light of the sun rising this morning. So I've repositioned it to the northeast, where i'm getting fairly decent pictures, but the few is kinda crappy in my opinion. I might try again for the southeast later today to see if the image comes out better when the sun isn't in the direct line of sight.
Last night I made macaroni pie for dinner. It was just an idea I had when trying to figure out how to use up all the assorted leftover ingredients we had from Thanksgiving. I made it by first cooking 1 cup of elbow macaroni, with diced onions, parsley, oregano, garlice powder and diced carrots. Then I added a can of pasta sauce, and some diced up turkey. While that was all simmering, I baked a pie crust in the oven at 450F for about 7 minutes so that it wouldn't disintegrate when i put all the hot pasta mixture into it. Just before i poured the pasta mixture into the pie crust I added some shredded jack cheese. Once the pasta mixture was in the pie crust I covered it with more shredded cheese, and put the rest of the pie crust over the top to seal te pie. I baked it in the oven at 450F for about 40 minutes. The final result was really tasty.