Webcam upgrade

Near the top of the to-do list is major revamp of the farm website. It’s looking a bit tired and it’s a pain to maintain. It’s the old 80-20 rule - 80% of the work on the new site is complete, but the last 20% is taking 80% of the time.

One of the time-consuming jobs has been to improve the webcam. It’s been 'sort of' running on the old site for months (www.prados.com.au), but it’s been less than reliable. A couple of weeks ago I finally got around to ripping out all the old Windows based camera software and putting in something a bit more flexible and reliable. For anyone with a techie interest it’s now running on an old desktop pc that was being thrown out at work using Zoneminder under Ubuntu Linux and a cheap Chinese capture card. Bottom line is that so far, so good. It’s been rock-solid and the quality is quite acceptable. Most importantly I have a live camera feed into the maternity paddock that I can view on my mobile phone – I love it when technology just works.