Thursday, July 20, 2006
This will rather speak for itself, if it's turned on at my end.| Broadcast Yourself LIVE |
Labels: webcams
Steve 8:13 PM [+] (0) comments
Thursday, December 08, 2005
Yay!My webcam's up and running again.
After 4 months I finally got round to finding out how to do port forwarding on the wanadoo livebox wireless router.
Anyone else out there having trouble with port forwarding on their router, or who's found some programs that used to work on their modem now don't work on their router should check out this site. It'll tell you everything you need to know.
So anyway... the webcam's working again. The link's over no the left somewhere. It won't be on as often as it used to be, this being Andrea's place and all. While I don't mind letting complete strangers invade my privacy, it's not just me I need to think about now.
Labels: webcams
Steve 3:22 PM [+] (0) comments
Wednesday, May 25, 2005
More progess with my eye.Went back to the clinic and the doc says there are now no visible signs of inflamation inside my eye, despite some irritation on the outside So I'm off the ointment, and cutting down the steroid drops to almost nothing over the next 3 weeks.
What else can I tell you?
I've found an amusing use for a glitch I discovered some time back with my cam and tv card.
It seems that if I unplug my cam, my webcam software defaults to taking a video stream from my tv card. Now, while this doesnt actually work with the webcam software I usually use (coz the resolution is too high), I can then fire up msn and it'll also use the tv card as the video source, allowing whoever I'm chatting to to watch the same programs as me. If I fire up the tv software, I can change channels too.... and then use skype to provide audio to go with the video.
Long winded... but fun when you let non-brits watch brit tv with you.
Labels: iritis, medical, webcams
Steve 6:19 AM [+] (0) comments
Saturday, February 26, 2005
What a week.Monday started out with a trip to the hospital which left me feeling really angry.
You may recall some months ago I mentioned having a lump ...er... putting it bluntly... on my bollox. Well, the treatment I was given didn't seem to do a whole lot, so a month or so ago I went back to see a different doctor, who decided it was probably an epididimal cyst, and made an appointment for me to go and have an ultrasound scan at the hospital.
So when I got there, talk about being treated like a piece of meat.
There were two guys, one a (greek?) doctor who's only interest appeared to be football, and a techician running the machine, who had all the communication skills of a house brick. To make matters worse, just on the other side of a partly drawn curtain where a bunch of other people who seemed to be using the room as an office, and they kept walking through while I was laying on the bed with my bits out, being poked and prodded at.
So... after being made to feel generally very degraded, the doctor announces that yes, it is a cyst, and I ask if it's anything I should be worried about. his reply was "Yes................. in around 2098." Now excuse me, but when I'm looking for information and reassurance about something that I find quite worrying, especially having been made to feel like a worthless piece of meat that barely warrants a "hello" when they walk into the room, I find having a joke about it not only inapropriate, but downright disgusting.
Anyway, moving on.
On the way home, it snowed, which I rather liked, but I somehow managed to lose my bearings and got lost along the maze of cycle paths on the wrong side of town. Heh.
On the plus side, it snowed all day, and that night I went out and took some photos.
Here's an example....
Certainly one of my better night shoots.
What else have I been doing?
Ahhh.... Babylon 5.
Yup, I've had my eyes glued to the tv, working my way through the box sets for the past couple of weeks... every spare minute I've had. It really is that good.
Saying that... I'm a bit concerned with season 5.
They obviously knew they were gonna be cancelled at the end of season 4, and so basically completed all of the really important aspects of the story, leaving only a few loose ends. They could very easilly have left it right there, and you wouldn't have been left feeling short changed and left hanging.
Then they got picked up by another network, and continued with season 5. Trouble is, having already completed the main story, I was concerned that 5 would feel tacked on... and to be honest, the 4 episodes I've seen so far feel very much like that.
I just hope it improves. I'm not writing it off yet.... but so far, it doesn't look promising.
I've mentioned before that Andrea lives some distance from me. Around 105 miles away, up north, to be a bit more specific, meaning we only get to see each other at weekends.
So, up till now, we've been running up huge phone bills, speaking to each other every night in the week.
Well, we've found a solution to that.
During the week, I tried to initiate an audio chat with Andrea using msn messenger, but it wouldn't let her accept the call as she didnt have a cam or mic. So... next day she goes out and buys a cam and mic, and we duly tried again.
The results were... variable. Cam to cam with no audio was excellent, brilliant frame rate. However, as soon as we fired up the audio, the cam frame rate dropped down to a crawl, and the audio was very choppy, and broke up enough to make holding a decent conversation almost impossible.
I figured turning off the cams would improve the audio, but no... still very choppy and broken. Pity.
However....
For the past year or so, I've been hearing about a program called Skype, which a number of people have been using for audio chat, and have said is *very* good.
So, I figured why not give it a try. It's free, so what is there to lose?
Andrea and I duly downloaded, installed, and signed up to it, and oooh boy, is it ever good.
I've used a number of audio chat programs in the past, all with fairly decent results, but this absolutely stomps all over them. It's way better than phone quality audio. In fact, without exagerating, it's like being in the same room. Better yet, if you buy credits (which I haven't done yet) you can call people's home phone using it, for a fraction of the cost of dialing them on your own phone.
Anyway, to top all of this off, we discovered it's possible to run skype for audio chat at the same time as using msn messenger to run webcams, and the cam framerate is almost exactly the same as running msn webcams with no audio at all... ie, very fast.
The end result was that we can now chat for hours, face to face, with near realtime (and excellent quality) cam images, and audio like we were in the same room.... and all of this costing absolutely nothing.
Good stuff :-)
Labels: annoyed, medical, photos, webcams
Steve 5:21 PM [+] (0) comments
Saturday, October 18, 2003
I have an online friend who watches my webcam from time to time when we're chatting.Now, every once in a while he'd report a strange phenomenon on his pc. Apparently, my webcam image was appearing in places it simply shouldn't be, like on websites that I have absolutely nothing to do with.
Imagine the horror of finding my image plastered all over yahoo, or worse, on some porn site. Anyway, this chap's a funny guy, with a sense of humour I can totally relate to, so I can't say I always took such reports one hundred percent seriously... not to say I though he was lying... just... oh, y'know... I know a good joke when I hear one, and tended to think it was one.
So anyway... he's recently bought a digital camera, and just look at the pic he sent me.
That's my webcam image appearing slap bang in the middle of a tripod popup from this very weblog.
Poor, poor guy.
I've known people to get obsessed with me, but when a pc does it, there's something very wrong with the world.
Labels: webcams
Steve 9:00 PM [+] (0) comments
Sunday, September 14, 2003
How curious.Someone's been watching my cam and listening to my audio stream for hours... like, all night. I don't recognise the hostname, so no idea who it is.
It doesn't bother me.... if people wanna watch and listen, that's what the cam and audio are there for. I just wonder how bored this poor soul must be to watch and listen for so long.
I'm piping Radio Benway through my audio link at the mo, since I'm not gonna sit here and talk to myself for the sake of being entertaining.
Anyways, if that person reads this blog, why not drop into the chatroom or something?
Labels: webcams
Steve 1:47 AM [+] (0) comments
Sunday, July 27, 2003
More webcam/audio related waffle, so I'm sorry if that's a boring subject for you.I've discovered that I if I run the camarades webcam software first, and then the other software, I can provide a decent quality cam image and live streaming audio with none of the glitching or beaks in the audio, as the camarades software uses a different port than the audio to send the cam image. You'll still need a broadband connection to hear the audio effectively, but it's much better than it was.
What this means though is, I now need to go back and remove all the cam 2 links from the sites I added them to and add an audio link to the main cam page. That's gonna have to wait a few days, as I don't have the time at the moment... it's going to be a busy week.
Busy? Moi? How can that be?
Today I'm spending some quality time with Brigitte as I tend to neglect her quite badly when I'm on a roll web design wise. Tomorrow we're going to London as Brigitte has an audition for another tv game show. Tuesday my mum's coming round and will likely take up a large chunk of my day. Wednesday I'm out buying birthday pressies for Brigitte, and on thursday we're off down to Dorset for a couple of days.
Maybe I'll find time between now and thursday to sort it out... maybe not.
Labels: webcams
Steve 11:08 AM [+] (0) comments
Friday, July 25, 2003
Right then, after much testing I've made the new cam live on one of my main sites, so there's no more annoying popups and the design is much nicer.Truth is, it's still something of a compromise, as the audio stream breaks momenteraly each time the cam image updates. It's tollerable on a broadband connection, but fairly hopeless on dialup, even using the LoFi audio option. I've included the option to disable the cam, for those strange people who may want to listen to whatever I'm doing rather than watch and don't want the glitching.
The other issue I have is what to do about having two cam pages. The usual one is functional again and has the benefit of being on a community site, so it pulls traffic to my websites... but the new one has the funky audio option. The problem being I can't run both at the same time.
I guess I'll just alternate from day to day, and you'll always know if the original one is online as it has that funky status indicator.
Anyways, HERE is the link to the new cam page, and it'll also be in the sidebar on the left.
Labels: webcams
Steve 2:09 PM [+] (0) comments
Thursday, July 24, 2003
The website that usually hosts my webcam appears to be down. Hopefully this is just a temporary situation, but it did cause me to go looking for alternatives. One of the things I found is a piece of software that not only streams video, but also audio.I've been tinkering with it for a few hours now, as the idea of having a live audio stream is very appealing. So far I've managed to make it produce an mp3 audio stream, but am unable to alter the bitrate, rendering it useless for anyone on dialup, and probably not too useful if I have several viewers.
Anyways, if you'd like to have a look/listen, HERE is the link. To listen to the audio, click the triangle/arrow button on the page.
This will probably only be active for tonight, though if my regular cam hosting site remains down, I may set up something a bit more permenant.
Labels: webcams
Steve 7:29 PM [+] (0) comments
Wednesday, May 07, 2003
Being kinda high-profile on the web can be very trying at times, what with all the trolls, time wasters and people wanting a piece of me, but every now and then it can be really rewarding.Over the past few days I've recieved a few emails from various people... some just wanting to say they love my music or art, others thanking me for providing a portal site that's helped them find exactly what they were looking for, and one today asking for advice on a college project, 'cause they figured I was the most well informed person out there in that particular field (poor deluded person... hehe). I really do love getting stuff like that, and yeah, I am gonna help the college student if I can.
Last night was kinda fun. I was sat in the #england chatroom on undernet in the early hours, watching a few people taking the piss out of some poor deranged canadian twit, and joining in a little myself. I never need much of an excuse to wind up a canadian ;-)
Anyway... just hours before, I'd altered certain details in my software so that anyone curious enough and knowing the right commands would be able to find my webcam. I honestly didn't think anyone would do this, but during all the piss taking, one young lady messaged me out of the blue and asked if my cam was on. After horrifying her with my face on cam, we then sat and had a thoroughly enjoyable conversation, during which it turned out she has a blog. So, being someone who always enjoys introducing new bloggers to the readers here, here's Cori, lover of many things techie, and nemesis of sad bullfighter wannabes.
Steve 4:46 PM [+] (0) comments
Tuesday, March 11, 2003
There's not much to be said about today really.I got up, went to work (easy day again), came home, went to sleep... got up and behaved in a typically lazy manner, doing pretty much bugger all. Just how I like it :-)
I found myself rather amused when a person came into the chatroom and asked me a load of technical questions about the room and cams, 'cause he wants to build something along similar lines. It's kinda cheeky really, but I figured since I'm not worried about competition, and this other cam chat site would be in a private members area, what the heck... I showed him/her how it all works.
Truth is, the cam chat area of my site is very basic and low-tech... certainly not rocket science.
Steve 6:19 PM [+] (0) comments
Monday, March 03, 2003
It's no secret that from time to time I frequent certain 'adult' webcam sites, as much out of curiosity as anything. It's the motivation and mindset of the people displaying themselves that interests me, and while some are completely beyond my comprehension, I do feel I've kind of got a grip of one little sector.Some of these sites aren't supposed to contain adult material, yet I'm sure if you've ever visited such places, or even been for a wander round various rooms on yahoo messenger, you'll have seen them... middle aged guys sitting there talking to no-one in particular, with their tackle out, often spanking the monkey. I don't understand this behaviour at all, not even remotely. Now I'm a pretty red blooded guy, very healthy sex drive and all that, but I can't comprehend the urge to slap the salami in front of countless strangers. To me, there are no excuses... that kind of behaviour is just warped.
Then there are the sites that feature communal chat rooms with 'adult' cams. Typically, there are the monkey spankers, but there are women doing it too, and more than that, you often see couples having full sex, right in front of their webcam. I guess I can get my head around this a bit more, with there being group chat... it's a thrill, and ammounts to something of a cyber gang-bang. Doing it while chatting with and watching/being watched by loads of people certainly isn't my scene, but I can understand it, even if it does seem strange.
The sector that most interests me though are the young (and sometimes not so young) girls who do it for money. You may know the kind of place... they sit around in their underwear in a chatroom, with all these guys drooling at them and predictably requesting the girls get naked and perform various acts on themselves, upon which the girls tell them to buy a show and they'll do pretty much whatever's asked of them.
Why are these places more interesting? The motivation is no mystery, it's all about money.
To be honest, there are a couple of things that interest me in these places, one that I don't get, and one that's just something of a consistant observation I've made over time.
The first is that some of these girls are absolutely stunning. I don't mean just pretty, not bad, or someone you wouldn't kick out of bed in the morning. I mean utterly breathtaking. Why do they need to do this for a living? For sure, some are romanian, where the economy is in a terrible state, and the chances of finding a job that'd pay anything near what these girls earn are about zero, but not all of them. Many are american, where the oportunities for women with those kind of looks should be pretty limitless. I guess I know the answer with one of them... she's an actress, or a wannabe actress, so she's able to bring in big money on the cam at night, while attending auditions and whatever in the day. That's one out of how many? Beats me.
So anyway, the observation I've made while frequenting these places.
Obviously, these girls are all doing what they do to make money, but some are vastly more successful than others, and the secret of their success doesn't appear to have anything to do with how pretty they are. Strangely enough, it appears that success in these places comes down to respect... the respect shown by the girls towards the guys frequenting their rooms. That sounds kind of odd when 90% of the guys are just demanding they get naked and stick whatever up wherever, and showing no respect to the girls whatsoever, but it's true.
Here's what I mean.
You can go into many of those rooms, and the girl is sat there in her underwear, looking bored shitless (which is understandable) and pretty much ignoring all the guys there. They don't speak beyond "Hi" and "No... buy a show!". Sure, many of the guys are low-lifes with no manners, but to show such a total lack of regard for the amusement and entertainment of the punters, to basicly show that they're considered nothing but a meal ticket, it's bad business, and those girls, however pretty they may be, don't get much in the way of trade.
On the other hand, you can go into some rooms, and the girls are sat chatting away with the guys, lots of banter, and genuinely get to know the people who visit their rooms. They may indeed be bored senseless, and consider most of the guys as sad and pathetic, but the difference is they don't show it... giving every impression of having fun and enjoying what they do. Maybe they're faking every aspect of the show they put on, but at the end of the day, they make an effort, and it pays off... they make a LOT of money.
Now I'm really not concerned with the moral aspects of what these girls do. Who's to say if it's right or wrong? I honestly don't care. What I will say though is I have a lot of respect for a woman who can go naked on cam for all the world to see, do god knows whatever to herself, make a lot of money while doing it, and still behave like a civilised human being when so many of the people around them are acting like a bunch of fucking animals.
Oh... and for the record, no, I've never paid to watch. That probably doesn't make me a favoured visitor in those rooms, but I do make them laugh with certain obscure observations, and that can't be a bad thing when you're bored out of your head.
Labels: webcams
Steve 5:57 PM [+] (0) comments
Saturday, February 08, 2003
As reported recently in this blog, the Camarades webcam community were taking the MyOwnCam webcam community to court over alleged abuse of the camarades email system, using it to lure users away from Camarades and onto MyOwnCam.Well, it seems they came to an out of court settlement, though from the perspective of webcam users who'd like a little choice in what comminuty they use, it's really not much of a settlement at all. Basicly, MyOwnCam have handed all control of their site over to Camarades. I'm not sure if Camarades will make any actual use of their new aquisition, but having just visited the site, it seems they're simply shutting the operation down. The site still exists, but there are no active cams.
It makes me rather sad, as though MyOwnCam did have server load issues, it's always good to see new sites appearing to fill a space in the market when the big boys get greedy. That being said, it was pretty stupid of them to use such easilly combatted tactics, though I do wonder where they'd have stood legally had the case actually gone to court.
Labels: webcams
Steve 1:16 PM [+] (0) comments
Friday, January 31, 2003
Oh this is funny.Camarades, the webcam community I use to host my webcam is taking myowncam (a cam community I've also used in the past) to court, claiming myowncam sent emails via the Camarades users cam pages, to entice them onto their own service.
Well hah!
I can't comment on the validity of this claim, but I do know this, after a long time of being totally free, Camarades changed their policy, put stupidly oversized popups onto their users pages, and made it impossible for users to view any other cams without paying for full membership. Obviously, a LOT of their users, myself included were unimpressed with this, and went looking for alternative webcam hosting.
Now... I run a webcam community portal page that's listed number one on google when searching for webcam communities, and on that page, I list myowncam rather highly. Small wonder people moved to myowncam from Camarades in their droves.
The situation as it stands now though is somehwat different from what it was. Camarades have seen the error in their ways and gone back to being free, while myowncam is suffering serious server downtime and slowdowns, so users like myself have gone back to Camarades.
Still... I intend to offer my support to the people running myowncam, as Camarades heavy handed tactics, which they've displayed before, being all too ready to take smaller entities to court to maintain their position in the webcam communities arena, are to me somewhat uncalled for.
Labels: webcams
Steve 6:25 PM [+] (0) comments
Saturday, December 28, 2002
So I was sitting in a *cough* `adult` webcam chatroom earlier. Not for the view, obviously, but for the enlightening conversation. Anyway, there was this one point where the girl was rather going for it, zoomed in on her hand, and another girl in the room commented "nice ring."Maybe I just have a warped sense of humour.
Steve 5:48 AM [+] (0) comments
Wednesday, November 13, 2002
Ahhhhhh... that's better, and quite a first. I went to bed quite early by my standards (11:30pm) and actually managed to sleep right through the night.Today's gonna be quite a busy day. Before going to visit my mum this afternoon, I have quite a few web page updates to do on both of my main sites, mainly concerned with links to the webcam. Up untill a couple of days ago, I've been using the software and hosting provided by Camarades.com, but have been increasingly annoyed with their changing policies and commercialisation. They no longer offer a totally free option, and as for the popups... one is tollerable, but to add another, full page sized popup... it's going too far. SO... I've switched over to MyOwnCam.org. They're very much like camarades were in the beginning, ie providing software and a web page to host it, completely free. The software may not be quite as slick, and the page design is far more basic, but it still allows you to customise your own page. Also, they provide that funky little status button, so people can see if your cam is online before even clicking the link. See it over on the left? The popup cam feature is a bit odd. It opens the cam into a popup window, which is great, but then does a strange thing and reloads the whole of this blog page too. Still... with no huge advertising pages to annoy viewers (though the tripod ones still appear as it reloads this page) it's quite an improvement. After saying all of that, does anyone out there ever look at my cam anyway?
I'll be starting a new online project fairly soon, though nothing too clever... just something I've felt like doing for a while. Entitled "The Octopus Files", it's basicly gonna be a weblog portal site. Thing is, so far I've seen two different types of blog portal, those that actually review the blogs, and more often than not completely miss the point and offend the writers themselves, and those that are just a huge collection of links, with no clue as to what the content is like. The Octopus Files will be different, though the idea is very simple... let the blogs speak for themselves. With each link will be a small (and hopefully representative) excerpt from that blog, so that people can get some idea of what it's like. Stay tuned for more info as and when it's available.
Labels: webcams
Steve 7:46 AM [+] (0) comments
Tuesday, September 24, 2002
Sat here listening to my 8 hour Bowie compilation, bopping away, with nothing to write, but wanting to write something.Y'know... it cracks me up sometimes. On my webcam page, it clearly states that I'm entirely straight, but I still get the occasional gay man/boy coming into the chatroom with hopes of something or other. I don't mean the type who're just there for conversation... I have several gay friends who drop in to be sociable, with no intentions other than to chat, and they're great company. It's the other type... being flirtatious or suggestive. It's.. I dunno. The idea of a gay person hitting on someone they know is straight, I find it rather offensive, but more than that, I find it confusing. Why do they do it? Is it something to do with me having long hair? Like "Oh, this guy's in touch with his feminine side. Bet I can turn him."
Huh! Sorry, but not a chance.
I dunno. Maybe it's not a gay thing at all, like the guy in the bar, hitting on the woman who's obviously not interested, but won't take no for an answer. Whatever... it's ignorant and rude.
Still, if it's the price for running a very public webcam, it's worth it, for the sake of the really decent visitors who come to the room.
Steve 3:35 PM [+] (0) comments
Tuesday, August 13, 2002
What an odd thing. It's common knowledge that I run a webcam, even when I'm asleep. I'm completely used to being watched, and in some strange way, I enjoy it. Now, the cam software I use allows me to see the ip numbers of the people watching, and I've gotten to recognise quite a few of them... mostly just friends and people I know who're checking to see if I'm online, or who're in the chatroom. A few watch for quite some time, while most just for a couple of minutes. What gets me curious is when I see a new ip number that I don't recognise, and that person watches for several hours. There's one there right now, it's been there for a long time, and I've no idea who it is. It's not someone who's simply left their browser up and forgotten about it, 'cause I blocked them for a moment to cut the video feed, and then unblocked them again... they came right back.It's just odd, 'cause I don't know why a person would watch for so long. I'm dressed (well, mostly) and not doing anything interesting, just reading a book before writing this post. It's not unsettling, and doesn't bother me or anything... just makes me very curious.
Labels: webcams
Steve 12:35 PM [+] (0) comments
Wednesday, August 07, 2002
Yesterday was fun. Went to see MIB 2 with a friend, and found it funny, though not quite as funny as I'd expected. Probably more down to me being tired than any deficiency in the film.We then cam back here and went surfing various webcam sites. If webcams are your thing, this one is great fun. It's based on some New Jersey beach, wich is no bad thing, but better yet, you can pan, tilt, and zoom the cam around from your browser. The zoom function is pretty impressive, as we found we were able to zoom in REALLY close, enough to see the pattern on the bikini of a woman 50 odd yards away. *evil grin*
Speaking of webcams... regular readers may remember that a couple of months ago, I reported that AOL were switching to google as their default search tool. They've now done it, and with great results for some of my pages. Searching there for 'webcam communities' now brings up various of my web pages in the top 4 slots, better than even google itself, which only puts two of mine at the top. Quite a result :-)
Speaking of search engines (this is getting very train of thought)... google has finally indexed this blog, and the weird search results are coming in again, so expect to see a little window down there on the left listing the weirdest, some time soon.
Steve 11:22 AM [+] (0) comments
Monday, July 29, 2002
An interesting observation I've noted about webcam viewers, or at least, the ones who frequent the webcam community my cam is displayed on. While they'll happily sit and stare at a streaming webcam for hours on end, even when the person isn't doing much, they don't appear to be interested in anything but watching.How do I come to this conclusion? Well, I've had my cam up now continuously for the past 3 days, accumulating a couple of thousand hits, and guess how many people have followed the link from the cam page to this weblog? None. I don't get that. I actually simplified the design of the cam page, as there was a lot of stuff on there, since observations I made while designing my website suggested that your typical cam watcher doesn't actually care to read much... so now there's just a small amount of text, and a small collection of links. Response? None. How odd.
Actually, no, I tell a lie, I did recieve on email from a guy who's noticed something I mention on my page... that people love watching someone sleeping on cam. He does that too, and gets massive hits. That's straying from the point though.
I guess I don't get it, 'cause it's not how I am when I go wandering through webcam communities. Sure, I like watching people, getting a little peak into thier lives, but if I see someone who grabs my attention, I like to read as much about them as possible. What do they do? What do they like? What do they think? If they have a chatroom, I like to go in and say hello. So what gives? Am I the strange one, or are these people treating webcams like tv? Instant gratification, with zero interaction. *Does Homer Simpson impersonation*... "Can't think now... watching." This would appear to be voyeurism taken to extremes.
*Shrugs* Maybe I'm just disappointed that people are happy to watch me, but don't find me interesting enough to actaually look any further. Yeash... I could get a complex.
Labels: webcams
Steve 5:13 PM [+] (0) comments
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