Crap Cam: May 2010

Not Good Pictures, but Maybe Interesting Ones....

Crap Cam is a small digital camera designed to go on someone's key-chain. It does not take good photos, and in many environments it cannot take any photos. Sometimes under normal inside lighting everything is orange. Outside, everything looks like a still from 1980's Soviet television or sometimes they sky is green and the sun is a black dot. It has a viewfinder that is impossible to see through and does not correspond to what the camera sees anyhow. In spite of this, there are possibilities, maybe even good ones. However, they have not been figured out yet.

Monday, May 17, 2010

Crap Cam is Dead; Long Live Crap Cam

Hello All,

Crap Cam has been in reruns for quite some time now. I have had problems uploading images from the old computer starting in the beginning of April. Long before this I bought a back-up Crap Cam. It too did not work, except for the picture of itself that you see here. And yes, it's pink, or at least it was until I colored it black with a marker. In the past month I have gone a lot of places and done some cool things. I have also done some really banal things at home, both of which created photo opportunities. I have tried to take pictures, and I have tried to re-install drivers, as well as more superstitious attempts to come up with the right combo of cords, batteries, and voodoo to make it work. This past week I finally gave up carrying Crap Cam with me, and I saw photo opportunities everywhere I went.

Thanks to experimentation, good friends, and a stroke of good luck I now have a Linux machine and I decided to take a chance and see if I can make it work, and yes it does! Of course I am still learning a new operating system, complete with strange file formats and new software interfaces, and Crap Cam now only works on our old Gateway that we bought in 1999. With the help of my good friend Matt Fleeger I have a labor intensive, and non-portable way of saving photos again. With continued help from him and a bit more effort I am hoping to make this easier. I never wanted Crap Cam to become "a thing", but here we are. I also said that I would not write on this blog, but here we are.

The old gray Crap Cam is dead. Long live the new black and hot pink successor. It's good to be able to take photos again. In some ways new Crap Cam takes better photos, and yet in the first fifteen photos I am already seeing some new forms of photo weirdness. After all, this is a picture of a dog taken in normal indoor light.

Anyhow, its great to be able to take photos again.