News items for tag webcam - Koos van den Hout

Interesting weather this morning: snow started between 7 and 8, and it was nearly melted away again before 11. Overview on webcam.idefix.net Uithof archive Monday 8 March 2010.

I just noticed something: the archive of webcam.idefix.net in the Uithof in Utrecht now covers a longer period (now 3 years and approximately 3 months) than the archive of webcam.idefix.net at the Beneluxlaan in Utrecht (which stopped just a bit over 2 years). How time flies.

Het is een regenachtige dag vandaag, maar de neerslagradar van het KNMI heeft momenteel geen data, en buienradar.nl is maar naar de backup-methode overgeschakeld, zo te zien duitse radar. Op de webcam zijn de buien te zien die voorbij trekken.

Ik zag van het weekend dat er weer een duif zit te broeden in de conifeer voor het raam van onze werkkamer. Het leek me wel leuk om tijdelijk een uitbreiding te maken voor mijn webcam site zodat iedereen het nest kan volgen zoals Vogelbescherming Nederland ook doet met hun Beleef de lente project. Helaas, geen werkende extra webcam beschikbaar. De extra webcam op het werk geeft rare usb errors en weigert.

It seems the painters of the building were either very sloppy or aspiring vandals, they painted over the window right in front of my webcam on 7 April 2009. So I moved the webcam a bit.

First winter weather of this season: it snowed in large parts of the Netherlands yesterday. As a result the number of visitors to webcam.idefix.net quadrupled. Most interesting new link to this webcam I found was an Italian site about the Netherlands where I think they describe it as a view of a palace. No, it's just a university building.

Pouring rain this morning... the most interesting weather sensor at home would be a rain sensor, which is planned in the self-powering weather station.

Today is one of those if you don't like the weather, wait five minutes days. I have seen snow, hail and sun in the last thirty minutes and rain will probably happen too soon. The webcam shows interesting cloud views and the temperatures at home are dropping due to the snow on the roof.

I upgraded to Apache 2.2.x at home so now http://koos.idefix.net/, http://webcam.idefix.net/ and other sites at home can all be reached on IPv6 addresses. One downside: logresolve (the postprocessing apache log resolver) has absolutely no idea about IPv6 addresses.

For a while I had the webcam running from work pointing at a moderately nice view from the Kruyt gebouw pointing at the construction work for the new 'FE' building of the Hogeschool Utrecht. Since I used my standard webcam-scripts, there is a full archive, now online: Archive of webcam pictures from when the cam was in the Kruyt building. Enjoy, or something. I like this one: 8 am morning fog in October.

Moving at work to a new office with all the associated network reconnection problems, things getting lost and other issues. And a new view for my webcam.

My webcam is back generating fresh images. Still people visit it, so I might as well give them something to look at.

While transplanting the Coffeecam to new hardware I made a copy of the entire system to a different (more silent) harddisk. The next problem was getting grub to install itself on that second harddisk. Which was easy, given the hints on a Software RAID Howto. Grub does not complain when I tell it /dev/hdc will be the future (hd0). This is something that would be a lot more trouble to get right in lilo.

Interesting webcam stuff (this subject keeps interesting me!).. the Alaska Volcano Observatory has webcams monitoring several active volcanoes in Alaska. The people in the areas affected by these volcanoes visit the site often to get warnings of possible ashfall. Great site, and it is good to see how modern communication methods (radio networks, internet, web) improve the flow of specialized news to faraway communities interested in that specialized news.

Redid the design of my webcam page. May look almost the same, but it's a lot cleaner in html. Fun thing is people still visit the site daily (40-50 visits a day is quite normal). Lots of webcam pages still link to it.

I finally got around to building a script around the archives I kept of webcam.idefix.net when it was still at my previous house. Now you can see the view from any date that was archived (there is a small hole in the archive) at the Webcam Beneluxlaan Utrecht archive.

The Coffeecam at work is back on-line. The harddisk in the machine died (a 1995 harddisk that had been in use most of the years) last Friday. Re-installing the OS and getting stuff running again (especially the philips webcam driver) was a bit of work as the stock debian is compiled with gcc3 (tsk! the README says to use 2.95), the debian kernel source seemed to be inflicted with some gcc3-isms (tsk! again) and the philips webcam driver is discontinued (I understand his reasons, but the other choice in webcam is 'no webcam at all'). But, I dug up a somewhat compatible kernel, gcc-2.95, waited for the kernel to actually compile (takes quite a while on hardware this old), a binary of the webcam decompressor and now it's back. The one and only Original coffeecam (The Trojan Room Coffee Machine) is now rackmounted at Spiegel online.

Round of Apache web server upgrades, with included PHP upgrade. Somehow Apache on FreeBSD still doesn't like to build shared objects, so the Apache on idefix.net is statically linked again. Affected sites: The Virtual Bookcase, Camp Wireless, webcam.idefix.net, Fight Spam on the Internet!.

Memories of my Alaska holiday... since then, the FAA has added webcams with the purpose of seeing the current weather state at many airports in Alaska (to aid in planning visual flight rule flights). Nice to get an updated view of the weather when (limited) daylight permits. I see places on those images I visited (ok, if a road is visible and it's in a town I visited, I have been on that road. There aren't that many.)

Played a bit with Geo::METAR so now my Webcam knows the almost-local weather and pastes it into the image.