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For set­ting up a low cost home sur­veil­lance sys­tem, noth­ing beats the Pana­sonic Net­cam BL-C131A. I keep the cam­era on the win­dow sill, but had to prop it up on top of a book so that the focus was on what’s out­side and not the win­dow sill itself!

I tried a mini tri­pod, sure it solved the height prob­lem, but some­how didn’t feel sta­ble espe­cially when I pull up the blinds and the cam­era fell a few times. Luck­ily, no damage.

After some search I found this per­fect tool! The cam­era can be attached to any tri­pod and this one comes with a clamp so I could secure it to the win­dow sill. No wob­bling and I don’t have to worry about the cam­era falling off each time I pull up my blinds.

Seri­ously a good buy!

This is the coolest part of own­ing a BL-C131A!  You could be in the other end of the world and yet get a live stream from your net cam!  You can even pan and tilt the cam­era remotely!  You can even do this with a Black­berry or an iPhone (or any phone that sup­ports html).

I ini­tially resisted writ­ing a howto for this, but look­ing at the num­ber of queries, one might be in order!  I have to admit, the doc­u­men­ta­tion from Pana­sonic is extremely con­fus­ing!  If you are not a net­work guy, you could get con­fused.  Ip4, Ip6, UPnP..!

So let’s get started!  I’m assum­ing at this point you already have the cam­era setup and work­ing from your local area net­work (home). If not, check out my pre­vi­ous post. (more…)

The Pana­sonic BL-C131A comes with a win­dows setup CD to con­fig­ure the net­work cam­era.  But you really don’t need a PC to con­fig­ure this cam­era.  This is a howto on how to con­fig­ure this sur­veil­lance cam­era using a Mac.  This tuto­r­ial will work with a PC as well, in case you lost the setup CD!

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Leave my Obama sticker alone!

When car thieves stole my GPS, I was pissed. When they struck again and stole my Obama car mag­net, I knew I had to do some­thing.  Who knew crooks had polit­i­cal affiliations!

Prior to this inci­dent, I knew noth­ing about sur­veil­lance sys­tems. But this gave me an oppor­tu­nity to research this area and apply my new found knowl­edge to serve one pur­pose — watch over my car! This, and sub­se­quent posts are a brain dump of what I learnt about low cost home sur­veil­lance systems.

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