Wednesday January 2, 2002
Rob sent a link to making your own homemade Trail Camera which looks like fun. Essentially you modify an IR sensor (like those ones that turn on yard lights with movement) such that it triggers a flash camera. They include lots of tips, links, and in depth information. Hunter hardware hacker heaven.

I think this is the only way we'll ever figure out what's rustling around our back yard late in the night. Two in the morning and Zeke goes blasting out the door at full bark, echoing off into the woods until voice fades in the distance. Eventually he'll return, five to ten minutes later, but with stories only repeated in secret, leg twitching dreams.



!pilF I've flipped browsers. A few weeks ago I tried the latest from AOL...er, Netscape and was pretty disgusted at how much AOL garbage got spewed all over my machine, not to mention that the browser is just shy of totally sucking.

IE reluctantly won me over a year or so ago. Not out of any respect for MS but mostly because it did what I wanted to do and I spent less time swearing at bugs or longing for another netscape update.

I was happy to hear that Opera is running on the Mac (Carbon no less) and not too badly for a beta. The windows version kicks IEbutt (once you register to turn off the ads) and has some really handy and interesting features.

The BEST feature, of course, is that Opera on both platforms sports a Google search box built right into the toolbar.



Documenting life iconically(?) with the Personal Injury Warning System.


Today's better mousetrap department uncovers The Liberator, a replacement for bells on your cat in the attempt at providing birds with an early warning system. What bird wouldn't flee when faced with a "threatening tonality" triggered by a sudden change in cat inertia?

This won't do any good for our cat->bird problem. Smudge merely waits for a bird to fly into one of the windows and then munches down on the stunned victim. We've filled our windows with threatening bird of prey silhouettes without any reduction in bird bonkings. Maybe a fine, transparent fish netting hung a few inches in front of each window? It might start a whole new bird sport: window net bungy bouncing.