A few weeks back we had some issues at my house. They involved my nine year old thinking that he had the right to get up in the middle of the night and do…whatever he wasn’t allowed to do during the day. He played video games, read books all night, ate ice cream…basically had the run of the house. Since he was quiet enough not to be heard, we sometimes had a difficult time figuring out how long he was up and what he’d gotten into. So, I started looking around for ways to capture his nocturnal behavior. What I ran across turned out to be a pretty slick service from homecamera.com that can be used for any type of home monitoring by using an existing computer/webcam setup.
Homecamera.com is a free service (currently in beta) that requires you to download a piece of software onto your local computer for the image/video capture. The software allows you to configure things such as motion capture:
Once the software is configured and running, you can control certain functions by logging into homecamera’s web site. This allows for remote control of your camera, and is ideal for those “did I leave the light on?” moments. This would also be useful for nannycam situations. An image or video can be snapped at the click of an icon:
I was initially a little apprehensive about using a cloud service to store images from within my house, but the more I thought about it, the more remote storage of the images made sense to me – especially if you’re using it as a security camera solution. Hypothetically speaking, if I was capturing images through my webcam and storing them locally, and my house was robbed, more than likely the computer (with the stored images of the perps) would be at high risk of theft. By sending the captured images into the cloud, even if my house was completely emptied, I would be able to retrieve images of the bad guys captured by my webcam.
Homecamera also stores captured images and videos in easy-to-access file system-like format:
While I wasn’t able to stop my son from his midnight gallivants (we resorted to a ear-splitting door alarm…don’t judge me! He’s sleeping now, isn’t he??? :)), I did manage to stumble across an impressive free service that could save you some money if you have a well-placed webcam and a need for in-home monitoring.
