![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chipper chewy cam cam
Tuesday, January 15th, 2019 12:15 amI've been feeling fairly chipper today, considering I got less than 4 hours sleep last night. I should have gotten 6, but had trouble falling asleep.
.
Remember that big tree at work by the pond, which a beaver started chewing on over a year ago? The trunk finally was chewed all the way through. At first, the tree fell over onto a nearby tree and leaned that way for a while. Then it finally fell down into the pond. Within a few days of that, the grounds-people had taken it away. So much for all that work you did, beaver. I have photos; may post them one of these days.
The beaver (or beavers) have been gnawing on a bunch of other smaller trees too, and the small trunks get chewed through a lot quicker. One of the felled trees had nice bright green leaves, some kind of evergreen; I felt sad for the pretty tree. The grounds-people had removed it by the next day too.
.
I bought two Wyze cams to try out. They are inexpensive, and let you record 12 second motion-activated clips and store them online for 2 weeks, for free. You can view the clips from your phone, and you can configure it to notify you when motion is detected. The cameras can also store video to a micro SD card, and you can view the camera live streams on your phone when you are away from home. So far, the cams seem really neat. One drawback is that after each 12 second clip that is stored online, it doesn't save more until after 5 minutes have passed. But if you have the SD card installed and keep your home's wi-fi running all the time, after getting a notification, you can make a note of the time, and then go and view the continuous video recording from the SD card, all remotely from your phone.
I have had a few problems so far. A 32 GB microSD card works fine, but an old 4GB card doesn't seem to work. And when I turned off my wi-fi overnight, for some reason the camera stopped recording an hour later until I turned wi-fi on again in the morning. Supposedly from what I read, it is supposed to keep recording to the card even when the wi-fi goes out. I'll have to try that again.
[ Update: It happened again; this time it stopped recording half an hour after turning off the router and wi-fi. So maybe that's not supported after all, but I will check. ]
I'm not sure how good these would be for security purposes (if a burglar can get to them, they can steal the camera along with the SD card, and then the recording on the SD card won't do you much good.) But for remotely monitoring things, they seem quite neat. This is the kind of security camera I've been looking for, where you don't have to pay an ongoing fee yet still can access the video streams remotely, and get notifications and all.
Admittedly, I have been viewing the video streams and clips only when connected to wi-fi (both at my house and remotely), as I don't want to use up my phone plan's data. Between yesterday and today, just from my playing around with it, the app on the phone has used half a Gig of wi-fi data. If I were using the phone's data, I'm not sure how long it would take for the video and clips to load.
.
Remember that big tree at work by the pond, which a beaver started chewing on over a year ago? The trunk finally was chewed all the way through. At first, the tree fell over onto a nearby tree and leaned that way for a while. Then it finally fell down into the pond. Within a few days of that, the grounds-people had taken it away. So much for all that work you did, beaver. I have photos; may post them one of these days.
The beaver (or beavers) have been gnawing on a bunch of other smaller trees too, and the small trunks get chewed through a lot quicker. One of the felled trees had nice bright green leaves, some kind of evergreen; I felt sad for the pretty tree. The grounds-people had removed it by the next day too.
.
I bought two Wyze cams to try out. They are inexpensive, and let you record 12 second motion-activated clips and store them online for 2 weeks, for free. You can view the clips from your phone, and you can configure it to notify you when motion is detected. The cameras can also store video to a micro SD card, and you can view the camera live streams on your phone when you are away from home. So far, the cams seem really neat. One drawback is that after each 12 second clip that is stored online, it doesn't save more until after 5 minutes have passed. But if you have the SD card installed and keep your home's wi-fi running all the time, after getting a notification, you can make a note of the time, and then go and view the continuous video recording from the SD card, all remotely from your phone.
I have had a few problems so far. A 32 GB microSD card works fine, but an old 4GB card doesn't seem to work. And when I turned off my wi-fi overnight, for some reason the camera stopped recording an hour later until I turned wi-fi on again in the morning. Supposedly from what I read, it is supposed to keep recording to the card even when the wi-fi goes out. I'll have to try that again.
[ Update: It happened again; this time it stopped recording half an hour after turning off the router and wi-fi. So maybe that's not supported after all, but I will check. ]
I'm not sure how good these would be for security purposes (if a burglar can get to them, they can steal the camera along with the SD card, and then the recording on the SD card won't do you much good.) But for remotely monitoring things, they seem quite neat. This is the kind of security camera I've been looking for, where you don't have to pay an ongoing fee yet still can access the video streams remotely, and get notifications and all.
Admittedly, I have been viewing the video streams and clips only when connected to wi-fi (both at my house and remotely), as I don't want to use up my phone plan's data. Between yesterday and today, just from my playing around with it, the app on the phone has used half a Gig of wi-fi data. If I were using the phone's data, I'm not sure how long it would take for the video and clips to load.