To be fair, he was peeing on the storage shed outside my house. Remember yesterday, when I posted the Archerfish surveillance system review? I included a video showing a guy peeing on my storage shed door, but the lighting out there is no good. The Archerfish system gave me a great first line of defense, providing me with proof that it was a person (not just a large dog), a general build of the guy, and more importantly, a good timeline. Now I just needed a good photo of him to go with it. This morning, at about 3:30 AM, I got my photo.
It’s not the best photo, but I’m working on cleaning it up and his face is burned into my memory. If I see him again, I’ll know. This guy has been peeing on our storage shed door for months, and it’s been happening more lately. About a week ago, I noticed the same thing happening to one of my new neighbors. After such a long time, we finally got the video with the help of Archerfish and filed a police report. Without some way to ID the guy, though, we couldn’t officially do anything. More importantly, he didn’t know he was caught and would surely keep coming back. That’s when my wife and I put together a plan to get the guy’s face on film while also letting him know he was busted. We didn’t know if he was bigger than me or if he’d try to fight my camera away or what. More concerning to me was the idea that he would walk by, do nothing wrong this time, and see me standing there with a camera. I didn’t want to tip him off before getting my photo and my chance to confront him. So we came up with a (hopefully) solid plan.
We took a nap, woke up at 2:30 and headed outside. I armed myself with my Canon Rebel XTi DSLR, a Pure Digital Flip Ultra video camera, my phone, and my LED Lenser flashlight and jumped in the back seat of the car. I rolled the back window half way down so I could get a good photo and stayed low. I was in a pretty uncomfortable position for about 45 minutes, but I was ready to pounce if he came by. Luckily, he dropped by, as expected, and walked toward me, between my wife’s car and the storage shed. For a second, I was certain he saw me because he turned and looked right at me. Then, he proceeded to urinate on my storage shed door as he had done many times. I sat up, pointed the camera out the window, and fired off a shot to get his attention (the flash was on, of course). He turned to face me, and the look on his face as the second picture snapped was priceless. Though it was a split second, it seemed like a long time that he sat there dazed before I said “don’t come back”, which was his cue to take off. I jumped in the front seat, started the car, and followed. I saw a silver truck pull out quickly and as I followed it, it sped up, eventually losing me in the neighborhood when I stopped to grab my phone.
After months of wondering and then worrying that I might never catch this guy, I finally got him! The best part is that he looked ashamed and scared that he got caught. I have a feeling he won’t be coming back. I’ll leave you with this video recap of what Archerfish confirmed was happening regularly outside my home.
I’d love to have a name for this guy, so if you recognize him, email joe@joetech.com.
When it comes to the safety and security of your home or business, sometimes you need more than just a perimeter alarm system. To protect the area around that home or business, a video surveillance system can give that extra level of security and peace of mind. A few weeks ago, I received just such a system. It’s the Archerfish video surveillance system from a company called Cernium. I set it up and used it for a couple weeks to really find out if it’s worth the cost.
What’s included?
Fir a list price of $2,499, you get an Archerfish SmartBox, two cameras, cables and complimentary Archerfish SmartPortal access for a month. I received an evaluation kit, which only included one camera. The kit came with good instructions, and everything was pretty well documented, I did have a problem during installation, but a call to the support number took care of that pretty quickly. In fact, they called back twice before I could return the call and try their suggestion. The included customer care is about as important as the product they support.
The included camera is designed to be used either outside or inside. I had played with IP cameras that were intended for only indoor use, so this was good. The little black box is where all the magic happens. All the video goes through this box. The included cable provides power to the camera while bringing the video feed from the camera to the box.
Getting set up After emptying the boxes and familiarizing myself with the hardware, I purchased a bird feeder. Because I was already having a problem that I wanted to catch on video, I wanted my system to be discrete, so the bird feeder I purchased was to house the camera without looking like there was a camera out there. I mounted the camera inside the bird house and stabilized the whole thing in my tree. The long cable made it easy to have the camera outside while the rest remained safe and secure in my house. With the hardware in place, the next step was to get the software figured out.
After registering for my myarcherfish.com account, I walked through the process of getting my zones and motion detection schedules set up. With this system, you can create up to three zones per camera and the box supports up to four cameras. In my case, I had just one camera, so the setup was pretty quick. Figuring out the zones was not obvious just from trial and error, but after reading the setup guide, I had a couple zones set up pretty fast. The zones are polygon areas that you define one border point at a time. Additional points can be added in the middle without starting over and the zones are color coded to make it easy to view all zones at once. I really liked how this was done. Another area where the Archerfish motion detection stood apart from other systems is the offering of specific detection of a person or an automobile in addition to the standard “any motion”. I set it up to detect a car or person in the larger zone or any motion in the smaller zone.
After the zones were set up, I was able to schedule my alerts. The scheduling would be much better if I could apply a single schedule to every day or set up a weekend/weekday system. The advantage is that I would be able to set up specific schedules for each day of the week, but in my implementation, schedule grouping would have been better. The final step was to set up the notifications. The Archerfish system can notify you of any detection via text message with an included image or email with a ten second video. I used both throughout my testing, but ended up choosing email notifications because viewing an SMS on the iPhone is still cumbersome at best.
How does it all work?
The real test of a system like this is to catch someone actually doing something that they think they’re getting away with. Luckily for the review (but not for me), something unpleasant has been happening on my property for months. After a couple months of noting a strange smell in our storage shed and replacing the shed door once, I discovered that the source of the smell seemed to be urine. Disgusted, I set out to find out how this was happening. After a couple more months and a couple other (much less expensive) camera systems, I finally got a hit from the Archerfish system. The video below is dark. To be fair, the system is designed to work with adequate lighting. Despite the dark video, I finally had confirmation of what I suspected was happening. In the video, you can see someone walk up, urinate on our storage shed door, and casually walk away.
While the video was too dark to positively identify the culprit, it did confirm my suspicions and provided something to show the police when we filed an incident report.
This video, along with a few others during my review period, also provided a decent time frame of when this guy comes by. It was amazing to finally have some answers after months of wondering and trying to get the guy on video. The Archerfish portal put the video in front of me in a simple web interface from work, home, or just about anywhere. The SmartBox also has a USB port on the back to hook up an external drive and a button to enable it. I used a MyBook backup drive to store video and wound up barely putting a dent in it after a couple weeks. The backup system stores the video in one-minute chunks and sorts them all into folders by date and hour.
My wish list
While I felt this was a pretty complete system and it certainly did what I needed and expected of it, there were a few things I wished it had while I was using it. The most important would be a larger video capture to the attached backup drive. The stored video is very clean at its resolution, but I really wanted to get a closer look with a larger resolution video. I also would have loved to see the portal support browsers other than Internet Explorer. The player worked great in IE, but just wasn’t an option in Firefox or my iPhone’s Safari browser. An option to view captured (or live) video in a Java player would be welcomed. Of course I already mentioned my want for schedule grouping.
Conclusions
For the price, this is an incredible system to help protect any business or home with video coverage of key entrances or parking lots. You could almost get it completely running without touching the instructions. The only really technical part was getting my router to redirect the camera’s feed on a specific port, and even that wasn’t hard, especially with support so close by and eager to help. I really can’t see any reason not to buy this system if you can afford it. There are cheaper systems out there, but you’ll have to get creative for outdoor use and might not have all the features that Archerfish offers.
Yes, indeed, there IS an “app for that”. In this case, “that” means creating a virtual bobble head of yourself or others with your iPhone. It’s called iLoveMe, but don’t let the name fool you. It’s all about having fun.
What does this thing do?
It does just what I mentioned above. It creates a bobble head like interactive animation using the images you provide. Once you have all the images in, you just shake it around and laugh at yourself (or, in my case, the Robosapien).
How does it work?
It’s pretty simple. To create your bobble head, just take three to nine photos. You should have one with your head pretty straight and then two or three (each side) of your head tilted to varying degrees. The more photos you take, the smoother it will be. Take a look at the video of my example below.
Conclusions
I’ll be honest. Having already known that John is a really smart guy, I figured it would be a cool app, so I was already a little biased. After playing with it, though, I really like it. Of course, it’s only $0.99, too, so that helps. The interface is pretty basic, which doesn’t look the best, but simple is good. Besides, the important part is how it works, and that part was perfect. This will be a great app to pull out with friends and make bobble heads of them. The only thing it really needs now is the ability to save multiple image sets.
Want it for free?
The first five people to tweet about this post (use the short URL http://lnk.gd/ft) will get a copy for free to play with just because I think you’ll have fun with it.
I’ve wanted a head mounted display (HMD) for a long time. I’ve seen them in movies and I’ve seen tons of work with wearable computing (and would like to build something, myself), so I was absolutely thrilled to find the Vuzix iWear AV310 in my mailbox just waiting to be reviewed.
Look, feel, and function
The first challenge, I imagine, in creating a good head mounted display system is in building something that doesn’t look to nerdy, isn’t too bulky, and fits comfortably on your face. Vuzix has gotten pretty close on all three, which is about what I expect from a consumer product, even a high end one. The bulk is the real hurdle. They’re essentially cramming two TV screens in to something smaller than most remotes. The fact that it’s so small lends to how comfortable it is to wear, of course. The AV310 is pretty light, so it sits there on your face, hardly noticeable. That is to say, hardly noticeable by the person wearing it. To the rest of the world, it jumps out and says “cyborg”. “Cyborg” is a couple steps up from “geek”, and the AV310 looks at least cool enough to surpass just “geeky”. It’s pretty decently designed, actually. It’s just dark and curvy enough to make people wonder about it and where to get one. The nose piece is pretty rigid and is designed to keep everything in place, perhaps at the expense of some comfort. I adjusted it to be the most comfortable and eventually got used to it enough that I forgot about it while watching YouTube videos on my iPhone.
I loved that it comes with the iPhone/iPod connector. Better still, this connector is equipped with a mini USB power port for keeping your iPhone full of juice. That’s smart thinking, but almost an obvious need if I’m going to drain my iPhone’s battery by watching a movie on it. Of course, it also comes with a standard RCA cable for connecting to just about any home theater or gaming system. What I would have loved to also see would be another connector for my computer, but two out of three is pretty good.
Visual performance and interface
All that stuff above about how it looks and feels doesn’t mean a lot if the picture quality were to suffer for some reason. Gladly, that wasn’t the case here. The video wasn’t as crisp as my HD TV, but it was really good. It did seem a little bit washed out on darker videos like the trailer for 2012, but everything else looked great. And for those darker movies, the settings come in handy. In between the AV310 and whatever you’ve plugged it into is a small remote on the video cable. The remote lets you turn it on and off, but it also gets you into the settings with a tap of the power button. Using the power button you can move down the list of settings such as contrast, hue, saturation, and aspect ratio. A couple of additional physical controls exist, too. Under each eye is its individual focus. With a little patience, I was able to focus each eye for a perfect picture.
Something that became a good thing during some use, but otherwise a bit annoying was the gap between my face and the AV310. Through this gap, I could see my laptop, Rubik’s Cube, or other visual noise. When I was watching an instructional video on solving a Rubik’s cube, that was a good thing. When I was watching a movie, it was a little distracting. It wasn’t enough to keep me from enjoying my movie, but it was noticed. Fortunately, they have an eyeshield that you can attach to (seemingly) completely solve the gap issue. It goes for $14.95, but I think it’s worth it. It’s hard to really describe the experience, so I made this quick video to help give you an idea of what it was like to use the iWear AV310 video eyewear to watch an episode of Gadget Pron from G4TV.
How I used it
When I first tried the iWear AV310 with my iPhone, I thought it didn’t work. When I plugged it into the iPhone, I found myself looking at a message telling me that my device wasn’t made to work with the iPhone. I ignored it and eventually was happily watching video from my iPhone through the AV310. It worked great with a podcast and YouTube videos as well as videos I recorded on the phone. Next, I plugged it into my XBox. My wife loves her SyFy channel shows, so it was nice to be able to enjoy some gaming without taking over the big screen or making lots of noise. Finally, I hooked it back up to the iPhone and found a video on YouTube about how to solve a Rubik’s Cube. With the iWear AV310, I was able to see both the video and my Rubki’s Cube, but more importantly, I was mobile while keeping my hands free for other things or just being able to lay down without holding my iPhone up in the air to watch something.
Conclusions
Not all of the luster of owning a HMD wears off. After having it for a while, it’s still pretty cool to use and practical in some cases as well. The $250 price tag isn’t too bad for all it offers. It may scare off the casual gadget buyer or those who just want to buy it because it’s a really cool gadget to have, but those who have more practical uses for the AV310 have no reason not to buy one.
