Last night, I bought a tiny little pink keychain camera, just because it was so cute. I didn’t expect top quality or anything, but thought it would be cool to carry around for those times when I see something interesting and don’t have my regular camera with me (since I don’t exactly haul it around everywhere I go). Anyway, for fifteen bucks, it’d be hard to go wrong if it took any kind of picture at all. Plus, it’s tiny (2.25″ x 1.5″ x 0.5″), and it’s pink. I call it my Li’l Pink Spycam:
I did connect it to the puter (USB) in Linux, but it wasn’t automagically detected by whatever (some plugin for Nautilus??) automagically detects my Kodak, so I thought, “Hell with it, I’ll futz around tomorrow”, and installed it under Windows. The pictures I took in here last night were bad, but they are with any camera because this house was obviously built for Morlocks. This morning, it did a much better job, and especially outside even though it’s an ugly, dull grey day. This is the house across the street where live the nice old people who just mind their business and don’t bother anyone:
Inside not so good, but still better than I’d expect from a $15 camera. P didn’t even know I’d taken his picture because I had my stealthy Li’l Pink Spycam!
I did a little googling, and it turns out that this cheap li’l camera actually IS supported under Linux, by gPhoto. I didn’t have gPhoto installed (never bothered), but apt-get fixed that up for me in a hurry, and I also installed gtKam for a GUI. Plugged the camera in, fired up gtKam….lo and behold, there was my li’l pink spycam, all ready to have its pictures downloaded. It uses the Portable Pixmap File format, but that’s no problem for GIMP to turn into a JPG. Hell, it was more trouble getting it recognised in Windows; I had to install a driver for that, it insists that it needs IE, probably for its ugly (and unnecessary) photo album software, and according to what I’ve read, the Win driver is crap and corrupts if you look at it funny. I don’t care, though; I’ll uninstall it from Win now that I know it works in the OS I prefer to use. Fifteen bucks well-spent; it’s cute and I can carry it with me just about anywhere. 🙂 I wonder whether the webcam feature will work under Linux as well? Hmm….
