A voyeur’s paradise

My iSight was waiting patiently for me when I got home, and I spent the next few hours in videoconference with my ex in California, who I haven’t laid eyes on in 5 years. I was pretty nervous about it – all those unrequited feelings were bound to leap into my throat when I saw him. And they did. He’s still as gorgeous to me as ever. But I got used to it pretty quickly and we moved on to some of the cool things inherent in the new iChat AV technology.
The first thing I did was attach the lightweight camera to my PowerBook, which is wireless enabled, and take him on a long-distance, untethered video tour of my house! I just carried the laptop around and he watched. He did the same, although with a bulky regular Handycam camera. Then he discovered that, using the FireWire port, he could relay regular video to me, and proceeded to pipe in whatever was on his TV.
This is such a cool (but ultimately not too useful) technology, that I decided to expand my experiments in connecting the web to my world. Up until today I had one webcam and two radio stations broadcasting from my house, but as of this evening, I’ve got THREE webcams running: my backyard (with the addition of live streaming video), my office, and my “on location” camera – the iSight attached to my PowerBook and relayed wirelessly from wherever I am in the house (or elsewhere, depending on the connection). You can peruse the new cameras at genecowan.com.