I’ve decided to take the Wambooli porchcam offline.
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The year 2008 is drawing to a merciful close. The last few days of the year are truly meaningless; nothing happens, nothing gets done, nothing, nothing. It’s during this time that most news organizations, eager to fill space, come up with their annual lists and reviews. Wambooli is no exception, so here is the year (more or less) in review as far as PorchCam images are concerned.
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I’ve replaced my webcam. The old one was nice, but designed primarily for indoor lighting. Because of that, the image washed out white outside. So I replaced it.
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After a sightless drought of almost 3 years, the Wambooli PorchCam is back up and running. Ta-da!

The PorchCam dwells in a box to one side of my front porch, tucked under the eave so that it’s protected from the weather. The camera’s USB cable threads through a hole through the wall into my office. where it plugs into my test computer. The software (YAWCAM) uploads the image to this web site 24 hours a day.

The old PorchCam wasn’t Windows Vista compatible. When I replaced my test computer with a new Windows Vista system the old camera and software failed to be recognized. I kept trying! I bought a camera on eBay and downloaded new drivers at least once a month to see whether they would work. Nothing ever did.

For a while now I’ve been researching new webcams. Some of them are pretty fancy, some wireless, and some remote-controllable. But I ended up getting a typical, desktop web camera, the Logitech QuickCam. The software is shareware I found. It works really well — much better than the old stuff I was using.

So enjoy the new PorchCam! See a vista similar to what I see every day as I work in my office. Granted, the view doesn’t change much. But someday you might be able to catch a stray cat, college student, alien invasion, or perhaps the mailman. Or maybe even myself out mowing the lawn or shoveling the snow.

Relevant Links. Wambooli PorchCam. Logitech QuickCam Communicator. YAWCAM.

Windows Vista SP1 Review. This guy on CNet makes some good points. I’ll do the update myself, but apparently there are no performance improvements, performance being one of Vista’s weak spots.