As you may know, I had my own little security problem at my house when a guy was repeatedly urinating on my storage building in the wee hours of the morning (no pun intended). Luckily, I was slated to review a very flexible and professional security camera system and caught the guy on video before catching him in person. The video and photo are in that post above, but today I learned of something just as interesting that happened at CES.
In the incident I referenced above, my late night visitor had no way of knowing I was recording him because I hid the camera very well and it was dark and late. In this story, the star of the video, Willy Wu, walks up to a booth, picks up the contacts book full of information from potential clients looking for further contact from the company, leafs through it, and casually walks away with it. At any other booth, he may have gotten away easily in a show as enormous as CES. Unfortunately for Wu, the booth he took the book from was that of Swann Security, a global leader in security monitoring solutions. Now that’s just dumb.
According to the article, Swann staff caught up with the guy at CES pretty quickly and he handed over the book without hesitation, but then ran off. Eventually, they’ll catch back up with him, but the important thing here is that he didn’t get away with all that client data.
I love to take photos. I have 8,447 photos on Flickr, and that’s just the ones I’ve taken in the last few years. The problem I have is when it comes time to upload them. It takes a while, so I always have to stay up late the night I took the photos and upload them or it ends up getting put off for weeks. I’m pretty good about keeping my cables and card readers where I can find them, but we’ve had several occasions with missing data cables for other cameras in the house and at the office, too. I hate having a camera full of photos trapped on a card when I can’t find the transfer cable, especially when people keep bugging me for them. It’s not just me, either. There are photos that my friend Lindze took on Halloween that I’m still waiting to see.
A good solution for this is an Eye-Fi card. This cleverly named device is a combination of an SD card and a Wi-Fi card. It actually uploads your photos as you take them (if you have it set up with a Wi-Fi connection in the area) or can upload all your photos when you walk in the house.
Getting Set Up
First thing’s first. Will your camera take an Eye-Fi card? They have a compatibility list, but you really just need to make sure your camera is SDHC capable. My DSLR (like most) does not take an SD card at all, and my wife’s Casio Exilim Z60 (the Frankencamera) has a dead battery, so I borrowed a friend’s Casio Exilim Z75.
To get going, I plugged in the USB card reader that came with my 4GB Eye-Fi Share Video. This was were I found my only gripe during the process. The reader is wide , so it blocks my second USB port. While inconvenient, this only needs to be in for a few minutes. With the reader plugged in, I slid the card into the reader and the typical Windows dialog opened up, asking what I wanted to do with this media. What was not so typical is that the first option was to use the software included on the card. New devices are a lot more fun when I don’t have to put in a CD, find drivers, or struggle in any other way to get going. The software installed and began with me creating an account on the Eye-Fi web site and setting up my wireless connection. My new account also required some configuration of photo and video sharing services. I set up my Flickr and Facebook accounts and then removed my card and put it in the camera.
The whole setup took about 10 minutes to get my account, wireless connection, and two services set up and the software installed on my computer.
Shooting and Sharing
There are two key ways the Eye-Fi can be used to make things easier for you. The first and probably easiest is to set it up once as described above, and just let it do all the work when you bring your camera home. This should happen even if you use it the second way, too. When the camera is on, it looks for that wireless connection you configured and automatically connects and starts uploading any new photos and video while retaining a copy, organized by date, on your computer. Here’s an example video showing how that works:
The second way the Eye-Fi can streamline your multimedia life is by uploading as you go. This is probably going to be less used by some people, but I think it’s even cooler. Let’s say you head to an industry event like Blog World. When you first arrive, you configure the Eye-Fi to use the event’s provided Wi-Fi connectivity. Throughout the event, you snap photos and shoot video, but instead of waiting until you get back the your hotel room to share, everything gets uploaded instantly to your selected account. This would work great on Christmas morning, too. Relatives who can’t fly in can experience everything with photos uploading as the presents are opened.
Whatever you do, you have the option of logging into your account to see photos and videos coming in and manage everything as it happens.
It also takes your privacy into account, which was a plus for me. When you set up a photo or video sharing service in your account, it asks you about privacy levels. During my testing, I had it uploading photos as I took them, but they were flagged as private in Flickr, so I was the only one who could see them until I reviewed and made them public. The user experience and small details were definitely not overlooked.
Win Your Own Eye-Fi
If you’ve read everything above and are thinking “I want one of those in time for Christmas”, you’re in luck, because they’re giving away 12 of them. Perhaps it’s for the 12 days of Christmas, but whatever you celebrate this time of year, you might get one of these things for free by just commenting on this post or sending out a tweet containing the hashtag “#eye-fi” with a link back to this blog post. Complete contest rules are here: http://izea.com/contest-rules-regulations/eyefi-contest-official-rules/.
Conclusions
In short, I love this device. It does what it says, but it does it elegantly and the setup is about as short and sweet as it can be. If you have an SDHC capable camera, this should be on your wish list for Christmas. That said, I noted two things that I’d love to see happen with the Eye-Fi. Mainly, I’d love to see this built into a Compact Flash card for my DSLR. My DSLR supports Wi-Fi, but not sharing to Flickr, etc. and it’s nowhere near as easy to get set up. I’d also like to see the ability to upload to up to three sharing sites concurrently. It would be great to be able to have my photos up on Flickr and Facebook instantly, for example. Over all, this is a great time-saving device, a unique gift idea, and decently priced.
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.
