Search results

  1. wtimothyholman

    So do you need a laugh? Story about security cams....by the WSJ.

    You're not missing a thing. The author of the article assumes that "security camera" = "cloud camera", and proceeds to give all his advice based on that.
  2. wtimothyholman

    Repurpose security cameras?

    For what it's worth, iSpy (now Agent DVR) claims that their software can communicate with Grainmedia cameras. https://www.ispyconnect.com/camera/grainmedia
  3. wtimothyholman

    Repurpose security cameras?

    No offense taken. I should have read your original post more carefully about the need to unlock them. Good luck in your quest, but even if you can't find a way to unlock them, then giving them away may still be your best option. Someone with more time and less money than you have might enjoy...
  4. wtimothyholman

    Repurpose security cameras?

    My advice on cameras this old is to give them away on Nextdoor. They are obsolete for you, but I'll bet there is someone in your neighborhood who is curious about security cameras but can't (or won't) spend the money to try them out. The adage of "any camera is better than no camera at all"...
  5. wtimothyholman

    INFO: still able to perform a free install and activation of Win 10 on a 2014 Win 7 laptop today

    I routinely use this trick when refurbishing old laptops for donation. It still works, even though the free Windows 10 upgrade was supposed to end years ago. I assume that Microsoft decided that a free upgrade to W10 was worth the lost licensing revenue, so long as it led to more customers...
  6. wtimothyholman

    Basic Indoor camera

    Agreed, but my concern is that the daughter is probably going to following the Amcrest setup instructions, which will connect her directly to the Amcrest cloud service. An Amcrest camera won't provide any security advantage at all in those circumstances. An Amcrest camera can certainly be made...
  7. wtimothyholman

    Basic Indoor camera

    I am curious about your recommendation of Amcrest. I have several Amcrest indoor cameras myself, but an Amcrest camera is very much a security risk if she is connecting directly to it via the Internet. Cloud storage of video is not the only risk. Any Internet-facing camera is hazardous...
  8. wtimothyholman

    Dahua Visit

    It certainly matters to me, and many others. Optimizing camera settings for day vs. night is fairly essential for LPR, among other things. I think that Dahua would find a very favorable response to such a function. The memory and computational costs would be minimal in modern cameras.
  9. wtimothyholman

    Dahua Visit

    If a $30 light switch can afford the memory, I think a modern camera can afford it. Plus it would be a nice selling point in terms of functionality. After all, a modern camera is practically a computer in and of itself.
  10. wtimothyholman

    Dahua Visit

    The issue isn’t resources, it is convenience. Right now you have to set up some sort of third-party software in order to switch the camera profiles at the right time. It’s simply a pain to do, when the camera could easily do it itself. I have a couple of “dumb” programmable light switches from...
  11. wtimothyholman

    Dahua Visit

    For those who are curious, here is the basic function in AppleScript for calculating sunrise and sunset times given latitude, longitude, and time of day. I adapted it from this document published by the NOAA. ____ -- Function to determine sunrise and setset times (in seconds) given latitude...
  12. wtimothyholman

    Dahua Visit

    No, you don't. You only need access to a time server to set the camera time. You can run a local time server on a computer if you don't want your cameras to have access to an Internet time server. The formula for calculating sunrise and sunset from latitude and longitude is surprisingly...
  13. wtimothyholman

    Dahua Visit

    On the software side, please tell the engineers they need to update the camera firmware so that the user can enter the latitude and longitude to automatically switch between Day and Night profiles according to local sunrise and sunset times.
  14. wtimothyholman

    Camscript - a sunrise / sunset camera utility for MacOS

    Camscript has just been updated to version 0.2b. This version includes commands for controlling Dahua -Z12E cameras that are typically used for LPR.
  15. wtimothyholman

    video surveillance for home please help

    The Alfred video feed is extremely compressed with minimal bandwidth, which isn't surprising. They won't give away much bandwidth for free, as their intention is to get you to sign up for an annual subscription. It seems to be their main source of revenue, along with embedded advertising in...
  16. wtimothyholman

    video surveillance for home please help

    Look at the Faceter web site, and the "service" becomes obvious. The real business of Faceter appears to be cryptocurrency mining, with the security camera service as the excuse for convincing people to add their computers as nodes to the Facteter mining network. The amount of computing power...
  17. wtimothyholman

    video surveillance for home please help

    The video quality is certainly on par with low-cost security cameras, but that's not surprising. After all, cell phones are designed to provide good video quality, although there are obvious compression artifacts in the streaming video. But as you pointed out, your phone is running extremely...
  18. wtimothyholman

    video surveillance for home please help

    To be sure, any high-resolution image is better than a low-resolution image, even if the perps wore masks. But in most cases I've assisted with, the police were much more interested in the license plate and description of the vehicle that my cameras were able to provide. Some advice that I...
  19. wtimothyholman

    video surveillance for home please help

    Child's play. My Scorpion AI software can track license plates through images recorded from satellites after being reflected off puddles of water.
  20. wtimothyholman

    video surveillance for home please help

    On the other hand, if the perp is wearing a face mask and hoodie (very often the case), then having a high-quality camera doesn't help at all. I've gotten some great high-quality images of perps wearing masks, which were useless to the police. What even an inexpensive camera can do is tell you...
View older results
Top Bottom