Full Footage: 33 Minutes 17 Seconds 1 Hour a day: 2 Minutes 26.74 Seconds 30 Minutes a day: 1 Minute 19.64 Seconds 10 Minutes a day: 34.10 Seconds 5 Minutes a day: 11.41 Seconds Animal Life around the creek: 48.98 Seconds People around the creek: 10.44 Seconds Snowing: 3.70 Seconds
Project Day # 117 (Site Still Under Construction)
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This project is a small project I wanted to work on for a while now. There is a lot of work I still need to do with the site itself, but the project started recording on April 03, 2008 and I plan to record my creek for one year taking a time lapse every 5 minutes. On this page you will find two videos. On the left is Time Lapse footage updated everyday and on the right is live feed of the creek.
Time Lapse Footage Live Video Feed This text will be replaced Select Time Lapse Footage to Watch (Updated: 9:30AM PDT) 5 Minutes a day - 10 Minutes a day 30 Minutes a day 1 Hour a day Animals People Snow Live Streaming by Ustream.TV	Picture Archives July 2008 June 2008 May 2008 View all Images...

Site Construction Static Blog:

Here I'll add all notes I have about what's going on with the site construction as the Webcam records a few more days.

07/11/2008 - Day: 109

Happy to put in that by error I have fixed the major problem I was having with the live feed's audio. This problem being the major buzzing noise I was getting due to the distance the microphone was away from the computer inside being about 30 or more feet.

My initial idea to fix the sound problem was to buy a DC powered microphone that after searching I couldn't find one with the only option to open was to buy one on the Internet. As I was giving up hope to find one or build one myself and go the Internet route a sales person at Fry's Electrons came up with an idea that simply made me look very bad. This being since I'm using a USB microphone converter why not get a powered USB hub and put it outside. It was so simple, I had to slap myself on the head -- not in public of course.

For around 40 bucks I bought the needed hardware and cables and rewired the microphone to be around 100 times better in sound quality. All that is left is to build a custom housing to put the USB hub and power in to withstand the outdoor weather.

With the sound problem fixed, all that is left is to find a webcam that the Apple Mac supports.

07/11/2008 - Day: 101

All has been going somewhat well this past month. I'm still slowly working on site itself. As of yet, I still have not picked the color theme that I like for the site with the colors using the colors that are updated automatically day to day based on the main image of the day. As well I'm trying to work on the site itself but have ran into some problems with my host having problems with server and the administration control panel with me not really wanting to go to good old FTP to change file rights needed to setup the message board.

The biggest change that I have done this last month has been to change the videos from AVI using Microsoft Media Player to Flash. I get all around better video quality with much smaller file sizes along with removing the limitations of who can watch the videos. Switching to Flash has added more time needed to convert the videos from AVI to Flash on top of the time needed to create the initial AVI video due to the higher video quality I can now use, but I have automated the AVI to Flash task to run every night on any new videos updates found using a great command-line utility called FFmpeg.

The time lapse side of the project is going very well, but I'm still running into a lot of audio problems with the live feed side of the site. Off and on I have been looking into the problem and trying to find a way to fix the buzzing noise. I'm guessing the noise is due to the long distances between the microphone outside and the computer inside being about 15 or more feet apart. Although I do have a lot of computers side by side, from the tests I have done inside with other microphones and the current microphone before putting it outside has no background noise problems due to possible computer interference. But this is a slow problem I hope to fix at some point when I get a better understanding of all that goes into making a good microphone. If anyone has any ideas, please feel free to contact me.

Other then that with most of the site now automated and well tested over the last few months the big test came this last month when I left the systems for two weeks to run peacefully while I was away. I knew I wouldn't have all that much problems other then leaving my Windows XP system alone to stay alive recording the time lapse. When I got back the status of the systems looked like:

• OpenBSD box - running - when has it ever crashed I have to ask
• Windows 2k box 1 - running. (used to update website, basic image processing)
• Windows 2k box 2 - running.
• Windows XP Pro box - RUNNING WEEEE!! (used for Time Lapse, video processing)
• Windows XP Home (err) remote box - running
• Mac OSX 10.4 on a Mac MINI - CRASHED! (used for live video)

I would have never guessed that the Mac would be the system that crashed. What's odd, is the years that I have used it for my heater, it never crashed other then needing to be rebooted when ever I wanted to use it between the 6 to 8 month idle time not used - other then the heater.

I as well run into site problems itself with most of the site information being corrupted due to the host problems noted above. But other then that, all went well and I didn't loose a day of filming. I have to say that I'm very happy in how I have this hole project automated.

06/13/2008 - Day: 72

For the last month I have been lost in building up the Other Links database and with that the site itself says its' unprofessional ugly look. At this time I'm mostly just watching day by day as the color theme changes. I myself, do not really like the colors and as of this point not sure how I'll end up setting up the site's theme colors.

When this project started out, I had ideas of wanting to use a live stream to show the creek live on the Internet, but with my limitations of Comcast using my current account wasn't really sure if I would ever be able to pull it off so I put it to the side and forgot about it. About a week ago I came across a cool site where I guy was using a live stream to show his daily life behind a computer. What caught my eye as I was getting lost in watching him, was that he was using a free service to broadcast his live stream. After looking at the service he was using an getting a second Webcam I was able to get a live stream of my creek up and running within 1 minute. Yes it was that simple. This free service being UStream.tv. Believe it or not, this isn't a new service. The site has been around for about a year if not more. From what I have gotten, the site itself is still in ßata but from what I found, the live video is about the same if not better then youtube. Amazing.

As of this point I'm not sure what I'm going to be doing with the live stream and I haven't really got it setup fully. What I have done so far is bring yet another computer into this project using my never used Intel Mac Mini to host my second Webcam. I can rant a hole lot about that part of the project but I'll just sum it up with this simple statement: The Mac sucks. I take that back; THE MAC REALLY SUCKS.

The second Webcam is a QuickCam Pro for Notebooks. The camera is so good that I may replace my old camera with this model. But I haven't as of yet really gotten to see the full usage of the camera since it's not supported on the Apple Mac. (More ranting could go here). So far I have setup the Webcam and a custom microphone I built from a few older microphones. As of yet, I have not mounted the second Webcam so it's in a temp location right now.

05/14/2008 - Day: 42

Most all my work still is on the back end of the website. I have added my web links page which I update dialy with any new links I find.

I have been working with what I can do with my images and ways that I can create new images from the use of a great utility I found called ImageMagicK which more or less lets me manipulate the graphics from the commandline. With the use of ImageMagicK, I have moved most of all my graphics routines from VB. I am still using VB to copy the files to the web site and collect the theme colors for the day.

The two main images that I have ImageMagicK create are the main logo of the site and a new animated gif:

The animated gif is showing the last 30 days of images which are taken every day at 9:00 in the morning and the gif is updated once a day.

There's a bit more I need to work on before I get to the heart of the site itself to make it look a bit more professional.

The over all project has been going well with little to no problems capturing the creek time lapse. I'm on the 43th day with a total of 630MB of footage captured.

04/23/2008 - Day: 21

Wtih most work still on the back end of the site, I'm trying to find a way to get a good color palate to use for the overall site's theme. I think I found the palate of 320 colors by cutting up the latest image of the day into 320 sections and then from each section getting the average color:

Until I find what colors I'm going to use, this site's theme colors may look a bit off. At the end, what this new color palete will give me is a way to give the site's theme a dynamic look each day with the theme changing day by day.

I have started updating the videos with a bit more selection. Each day if my utility finds new files, they will be updated.

04/16/2008 - Day: 14

Most all work has still been working with the back end of this site. With the use of my WWCopy utility and with the help of the site's GD Graphics Library created a dynamic banner Ad:

As well, added the current video of the project. As of this point it's using the Windows Media Player Object and the DivX codec.

04/13/2008 - Day: 11

Reworked my WWCopy utility a bit to update the site to show all pictures taken to date. I added this page more so I could see the day to day change of site's theme.

Daily Photos -- This is just a temporary page.

04/11/2008 - Day: 9

I've been working on the site's logo. I didn't like the first version I had, so I changed it from a boring static logo to a dynamic logo. To do this, I added some features to my custom application, WWCopy, which will create a new logo once a day from the last seven days of pictures taken. The code I written turned out very well, and was very happy with the mask I was able to use. I still need to work on the mask, since I really don't like the font I'm using.

As I was rapping up the logo, I thought about the idea of changing the background and font color of the site itself based on the logo created. Each day, the site's theme colors will change as well. To do this, I got the overall average color of the logo to use as the background color and for the font color inverted parts of the RGB colors.

Now that I'm done playing, I guess I should create the website itself.