If you’ve ever explored the Ballot Box web site (I’m guessing that’s how you got here) then you’ve probably come across the WEBCAM page that shows a new image from the webcam mounted in the picture window, aiming out over the front lawn and the parking area of the driveway. As long as there’s power the webcam captures an image of that view every 60 seconds, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and FTPs it to the Ballot Box web site. It then gets displayed on the webcam page on the web site, and that page refreshes itself every 60 seconds so you get a minute-by-minute idea of what’s happening in that little parcel of the world.
That convoluted sequence (snap an image, FTP it, build a self-refreshing web page, etc.) is to get around the annoyance that direct access to the webcam requires a password. I had initially written the webcam page to access the camera directly, listing the password right on the web page so visitors would have direct access to the camera, which provided a jerky-but-observable motion video capability, refreshing the image at a variable frequency (as good as 5 frames per second or as poorly as about a frame every 2-3 second, depending on the viewer’s bandwidth and the distance traversed across the internet). With a password, a user also had pan and zoom capability with the camera, which concerned my neighbor across the field with respect to his privacy (his house was viewable if one panned the camera a little to the right of its rest position). Because of my neighbor’s concern I rewrote the page to its current format, which is the display of the FTPed image. *I* still have direct access to the camera, though, at an administrative level, though, which gives me a bunch of other useful capabilities that are not obvious.
This model of webcam ( a Panasonic BL-C131A, in case you’re curious) was originally marketed as a “Pet Cam,” so pet owners could keep visual and audible tab on their pets during the day when they (the owners) were at work. Features that are not obvious, but make sense when you think about the possibilities, including having a microphone built into the camera so I can listen to the sounds inside the house (the microphone is disabled whenever anyone is in residence).
It also provides the option of two additional modes of persistent surveillance. The first option is to detect motion within the field of view and send an email (or a series of emails) to a specific email address. This provides me with instant alerts whenever something moves out in the driveway area. The sensitivity is settable, so it’s not triggered by a leaf blowing outside, but the power company’s meter reader triggers it with his or her truck, and the propane delivery tank truck triggers it, and the guy who plows our driveway in the winter triggers it, and the guy who mows our lawn in the summer triggers it (a lot!). Its also triggered by large birds or other animals, flies and hornets on the INSIDE of the window crawling past the camera lens (when a little bitty bug is that close to the camera lens, it looks REALLY big!), or unknown or suspicious vehicles reconnoitering in the driveway. That LAST one is the one I’m most interested in.
Whereas everything I’ve described so far is pretty much self-contained in the webcam, the second persistent surveillance option involves a computer on the same internal house network as the webcam. With that computer and some Windows software that comes with the camera, I have set up a motion-activated full-motion video archive. The “trigger” sensitivity for this is managed inside the computer software (whereas the sensitivity for the email trigger is managed inside the webcam). When the motion “trigger” is tripped, the software records a specified period of full-motion video and stores it on the computer hard drive, ready for viewing after-the-fact. I only have access to this video archive when I’m at the Ballot Box because the videos are stored on the computer at the Ballot Box, which is not accessible from outside the internal network, but it gives me more detail than the emails snapshots give me, AND it includes sound as well (which doesn’t have too much bearing on my particular configuration, since the triggering motion is outside and the microphone is inside). We’ve caught turkeys parading across the lawn (while we were there), early morning lightning, our snow-plowing guy, and even an early-morning joy-rider that pulled a U-turn across our front lawn!
This device has provided us with a fair amount of (perhaps false) security, being away from our Maine getaway for longer than we’d like (we’d LIKE to be up there all the time!). I’d like to think that if anything subversive did happen, the email system would warn me of it immediately and I’d be able to call the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office right away. I may be deluding myself, but at least it makes me FEEL better, and it’s fun to be able to check on the conditions up there in real-time!
It is a little annoying in the springtime when the flies emerge in the house and seem to KNOW that if they dance across the window in the right spot for long enough, Gene will get 4 to 5 HUNDRED emails, each one with a photo of their dancing feet!
This past weekend was Boys Weekend at the BallotBox. My friend and work colleague Robert (who owns a chainsaw and knows how to use it) had offered a number of months ago to help me fell a not-long-for-this-world tree that was at the edge of the treeline out back and tall enough to possibly hit the deck or the house if and when it finally fell. We settled on the 2-3-4 December weekend for a number of reasons, including it was a weekend when Lynn was scheduled to teach a quilting class at the Cambridge quilt shop. So it would be a boys-only, testosterone-filled weekend. I initially dubbed the adventure Chainsaws and Lobsters and Beer, but I found out that Bob is not enamored with lobster as much as I am, so it was actually a Chainsaws and Salmon and Beer weekend!
We got up to the Ballot Box around 6pm Friday, after a stop at the Damariscotta Fish Market (our favorite) where we bought oysters for half-shelling and salmon for grilling. We also hit the local Hannaford’s to stop and get some beer and a green vegetable (asparagus) so we could get brownie points with our wives for remembering to eat veggies too. After the feast (we bought a lot of salmon), which was washed down with Dogfish Head 90 minute IPA, we watched the first 3 episodes of Star Trek: Enterprise via Roku/Netflix and called it a night.
Saturday morning we headed to Waldoboro (20 minutes north) to Moody’s Diner for breakfast (Bob’s spouse Sara loves Moody’s so she was green with envy!), then did errand stops at the post office (pick up mail) and the lumber yard (buy some plywood for basement shelves – had the van and the plywood fits in the van), before heading back to the house to tackle the tree.
The tree was tall enough to be a concern about hitting the deck or the house when coming down in free-fall (it was leaning that way, too), so we spent about 45 minutes trying to toss a sock with a rock tied to some fishing string over a limb on the tree (made it eventually) to pull a rope up over that limb and around the tree to tie it off to some trees behind the doomed tree so it would pivot away from the deck.
We tied it off and pulled the tension tight with a come-along, then dropped it right along the line separating the woods from the lawn to the right of the house. Turns out it was indeed tall enough to clip the deck if we had let it fall free. It did hang up in some smaller trees, but I maneuvered the van over into the side yard and re-routed the pull-rope over to the trailer hitch and used the van to pull the downed tree off the other trees.
Then we cut the tree up into 1-foot pieces (to fit into our portable fire-pit), loaded it into the cart and piled it under the deck where I’ll whack away at splitting it over the winter. After cleaning up and putting the tools away, we headed off to King Eider’s Pub for dinner (Baxter’s IPA and Steak & Ale Pie).
Sunday we hit a local lunch counter for breakfast, drove around the Pemaquid Peninsula sightseeing (Pemaquid Point Lighthouse, Christmas Cove, etc.) and then headed to the Lion’s Pride Pub in Brunswick for a late lunch, some awesome beer, and a view of the Patriots/Colts game. A fun and successful weekend was had by all/both!
A few still images of the battle: http://www.flickr.com/photos/genevogt/sets/72157628273734331/
A video of the chainsaw man at work: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1g37HM_bkE&list=HL1323098426
We’re hitting the holiday season now, with Thanksgiving next weekend and then the long stretch for the Christmas/New Year’s season. It gets tough this time of year to be able to take up an entire weekend to head north to th Ballot Box. We were up at the house last weekend but the next chance we’ll get (and it may not include Lynn) will be the December 3rd weekend. Right now Lynn is scheduled to teach a quilt class that weekend, but our friend Bob and I are planning to head up for a “boy’s weekend” that involves felling a tree or two (playing with axes and chainsaws), eating lobster and drinking beer. If Lynn’s class gets cancelled she’ll be able to come up with us that weekend, but after that we may not get back up until after Christmas. We plan on spending the entire week between Christmas and New Year’s up there, but we planned the same thing last year and Mother Nature had something to say about that!
Shelves and Temp Office
The floor-to-ceiling shelving lining 16 feet of the south wall of the cellar is almost done. All I need is 4-5 sheets of plywood cut 2×8 for the shelving on the right side. I finished the left half last month and was able to clear out half of the cellar’s worth of “stuff” onto those shelves. The right half will hold my tools and hardware and stuff like that. Then I’ll be able to start finishing off the basement to make the southern third (with the shelves) into a storage area and workshop of sorts, and northern two thirds (with the three French doors) into an office and a guest room. I’ve already set up a temporary office on the German fest table we have (see photo).
Back in March of this year my “introductory offer” for expanded cable TV service in Maine that included the New England Sports Network channel (NESN, home of the Red Sox) expired, and what was costing me about $18 per month extra was about to jump to $65 per month extra, so I cancelled the expanded service and we dropped back to the lowest Time-Warner package (local broadcast channels, a half-dozen shopping channels, the weather channel, and a country-music MTV-like channel) for $13 a month. The only impact that change had on me was that I could no longer watch live Red Sox games while up in Maine (unless I wanted to drive down to the Newcastle Publick House bar and buy beers while I watched). Since then I’ve been investigating alternative ways to get broadcast baseball into the Ballot Box.
My first thought was to subscribe to MLBTV.COM, but they impose blackouts of home AND away games in your team’s “viewing area,” and all of New England is within the “viewing area” for the Red Sox, so that wouldn’t work. Then I checked into satellite dish subscriptions, but they’d cost as much or more than the Time-Warner option. Radio reception up in Newcastle stinks too, so I couldn’t even pick up the affiliate broadcast AM or FM radio. I was limited to the MLB streaming-radio-over-internet option that was included with my “Red Sox Nation” membership.
Then a few weeks ago WOOT offered a refurbished SlingBox Solo for less than half the list price, so I bought one. SlingBox is a device that gets inserted between a video source (cable box, DVR, etc.) and a TV, where it peels off a copy of the audio and video coming out of the video source and streams it out over the internet. With the correct software installed on a laptop or PC or iPad and the correct username and password, a user can pick up that streaming audio and video coming from the SlingBox, and watch the television shows coming out of that video source from anywhere in the world where a decent internet connection can be found.
It works like a champ!
SlinkBox TV on Laptop
The SlingBox was delivered to the southern house while I was up in Maine, so it was waiting for me when I got home after my extended Labor Day weekend in Maine. I set it up and configured it to work with the non-high-def digital cable box that Lynn sometimes uses in her sewing room. I’ve installed the software on three machines so far (my personal laptop, my desktop workstation in my basement office, and my MITRE work laptop), and each one works well. The SlingBox software running on the computer also includes a virtual remote so I can change channels and do similar stuff remotely as if I were controlling the cable box from the sewing room.
So I will now be able to watch Red Sox games (or anything else we get as part of our Comcast subscription in Woburn) at the Ballot Box, or anywhere else in the world when I travel on business! The system only allows one machine to view the video stream coming out of the SlingBox at a time, so we can’t double- or triple-dip, but the “No Baseball in Maine” problem has been solved! YAY! And just in time for the (fingers tightly crossed) post-season!
Visual progress on our English Cottage Garden is finally showing! Lynn’s been in plan mode for a while, designing a quaint cottage garden out in front of our Ballot Box cottage, with an arbor entrance, a meandering pathway of rustic, loosely-spaced pavers of some kind with grass and moss and little flowers in between, beds of all kinds of perennial flowers on either side, a bench for sitting and reflecting, flowering shrubs along the front of the house, all bordered by a white picket fence with rambling roses.
During our very first garden discussions I recognized the fence as being the “cornerstone” for the garden, bounding it and giving visual definition to the project. So we started in the spring by pounding wooden stakes into the ground out front as a “strawman” fence alignment. We needed to live with this faux fence to see if it was placed correctly. Indeed, it wasn’t. We made at least two adjustments, one based on the visual symmetry with the house, and the other related to the view of the fence and the future garden from the dining area picture window.
DigSafe Markings
Once we were satisfied with the placement, we tried calling or visiting a couple of fence companies to see how much it would cost to install a straight-line 24-foot picket fence across a level lawn. After we got back up from where we had fainted, we devised a different strategy, which involved finding the fence parts pre-made and installing it ourselves. We bought PVC picket fence sections and PVC slip-covers for 4×4 posts from Home Depot, with the intent to install three 8-foot sections (with four posts) along the front of the Ballot Box. When I went to install the fence, my garden claw and clam-shell post-hole digger was no match for the summer-hardened clay that was hiding six inches below the imported loam that had been brought in for the lawn. Plan B was to rent an earth auger, but if I was going to throw some power-tool automation at the challenge, I figured I’d better first have DigSafe come in and flag the locations of the three utility conduits that were buried across the front lawn, going from the telephone pole by the street to the corner of the house. There are three conduits in total; one for power, one for the cable for internet and TV, and one empty one waiting for a phone line (we never installed a phone because we have line-of-sight coverage to a cell-tower about a mile away). A Central Maine Power worker came a day or two later and spray-painted and flagged the lawn to indicate where the conduits were buried.
So now we were ready to begin installing the fence, but before we got around to pulling the trigger on plan B, plan C came into focus; a local “fence installer” who was willing to dig the post holes and install the fence for about the cost of renting the auger. He and his son came last Friday and did the work, results being visible in the header photo.
The next step is to dig and bury a feed-pipe conduit from the corner of the house over to the fence, and demarcate the flower beds. The feed-pipe conduit will let me run a quarter-inch irrigation feed-pipe for a drip watering system around the entire perimeter of the garden, where I can tap into the feed-pipe at any location and run rubber tubing to any and many places in the garden that need watering. Then by hooking up a highly programmable faucet switch, we can water the garden at whatever interval we want (once a week, twice a week, three times a week, once a day, twice a day, etc.) for any duration (an hour, 10 minutes, 5 minutes, 2 minutes, etc.). We have these drip systems set up on both our decks (in MA and ME) for the hanging plants on the deck, and it’s a real plant-saver!
