I have written a Python script to download a webcam image at a configurable interval. I am currently testing it with the BBC’s three Aberystwyth webcams. Although it should work with almost any webcam. I will use these images to make time-lapse style video.

The script uses the If-Modified-Since and If-None-Match headers in the GET request to ensure the same image is not downloaded twice. The script is capable of regularly downloading images from several webcams. I will be using either ffmpeg or mencoder (from the mplayer project) to create the videos.

Thanks to Matthew Russell (aka horizon5) for help with threading. Thanks also to Gary Steele for his page on creating videos from a series of images.

For those who want to run it themselves, I’ll put it online in a few days to download once I know it works properly and the code is tidied up a little.

On eBay I was the high bidder for a camcorder that I did not want. The auction’s title was “CANON MINI DV CAMCORDER”. The description offered only sparse details about the camera. Lured by Canon’s brand name I emailed the seller asking what the model number was so that I could check the features elsewhere. The email back just said

mvx10i
mx30-7000

After finding the genuine Canon mvx10i has “DV in” by reading an online review I decided to enter a low bid and see how the auction went. Then I googled for “canon mx30-7000″ and found only one result, which was Polish, not being a Polish speaker I didn’t read the website, but wondered why there would be so few results for a camcorder, so I googled for for “mx30-7000″, the results quickly led me to a blog post with a picture of the same camera badged to look like a Sony camera. I then confronted the seller in an email asking which model number was the real one and why the megapixels quoted on the auction description didn’t match the details on the Canon website. His response was.

hi on the lens cap itsays mvx 10i on the screen you pull out it says canon mx30-7000 i realy dont know mutch more about this camcoder as i took it in payment of money owed to me it says 4.1 mega pixels on the front of it. it works and also you can connect to the pc by usb i was owed 120 pounds and it looked like it may be worth the amount thanks

How to spot a counterfeit camera

After looking through ebay some more I have found there are a few other auctions on their selling the same camera but badged slightly differently.

If you look carefully at these two pictures you can see they are the same camera, the only difference is the lens cap and the sticker with the fake brand name. If you’re going to buy a camcorder off ebay, make sure the picture looks nothing like this. In one auction I saw a series of pictures of this type of camera and then one picture of the camera it said it was when they clearly looked nothing alike. You should compare the picture on the auction page to a photograph from the manufacturer’s website.
It is probably also worth checking the feature list from the manufacturer’s website to the feature list, if any is provided, on the auction page. The description of the camera I bid on said it was 4.1 megapixels, whereas the mvx10i has only 2.2 megapixels.

If you find anything strange in an auction either don’t bid or email the seller. If you are convinced that an item on ebay is counterfeit you should report it, this should help protect other less astute buyers and hopefully make ebay a less risky place to buy from.
If you have already bid on an item you think is counterfeit, retract your bid and report the item to ebay. Read this to learn more about retracting bids on ebay.

With that all in mind you should be a little bit safer, don’t be put off by the unscrupulous sellers, there are some good deals on ebay, but, as with most things in life but especially on ebay, if it sounds too good to be true it probably is.

I recently switched to using the Irssi IRC client from XChat. Because the scripts and commands I had become used to in XChat are not available for Irssi I wrote a couple of scripts for Irssi.

Mass Op (/mop) command for Irssi - A script which gives everyone ops on the channel except for people who have “voice” (+v).

XMMS Currently playing script - Says to the channel what you are currently listening to something like

[music | Jefferson Airplane - White Rabbit (Surrealistic Pilow)]

when you enter /xmms

Google-it - A script that says to the current window a url to “Google It, You Moron” based upon specified keywords. For example

/google irssi scripts

produces

http://www.googleityoumoron.com/?go=irssi+scripts

Read this if you don’t know how to use irssi scripts.