about the banshee cam

the banshee cam uses a variety of custom scripts to produce its images. the images are taken from a $90 connectix cam ball attached to a mac powerbook using the fine Timed Video Grabber utility written by Allon Stern. the output of this utility is a jpg file, when this jpg file updates, a custom applescript application invokes the Anarchie program to anonymous ftp the bitmap to my unix machine.

once on the unix machine, a shell script invokes a series of netpbm tools, adding a border and timestamp, and even generating a text image of the bitmap. then the script invokes scp to copy the files into place on my webserver.

while this seems somewhat roundabout, it reduces the traffic over my modem to a single 8k bitmap once every minute, and never sends a cleartext password across the network.