Webcam Woes

One of my other sites I started about 6 months ago is Webcam Cancun . The site previously used the feed from the house of my good friend Brant who runs the Entertainment Plus card here in Cancun. Brant moved house a couple of months ago and the feed became unreliable and finally packed up altogether due to firewall conflicts. Not wanting to offer an imageless webcam, and also to avoid getting dropped from the many webcam directories the site is featured in, I decided to go out and buy my own webcam.

The selection at Office Depot (the biggest computer store in Cancun) was, not surprisingly bad. All the computer equipment here seems to be at least two years behind the rest of the world and often at twice the price. However, I finally settled on a model that I thought was best of the bunch and might do the job. It was designed for personal messaging over AIM or Yahoo etc but what the hell.

It didnt take long to configure, I installed it on the desk top upstairs (I nearly always use the laptop downstairs when I’m online – it’s too hot up there). I then found some software on the net that would upload a picture every 10 mins to the server. I had also bought a usb extension lead as I knew the lead that came with it wouldnt reach the position I wanted to locate it and various glues and random pieces of plastic to attempt to make some kind of waterproof housing.

I hooked it up on the upstairs balcony at the front of the house, but the picture quality was terrible, I thought maybe it was due to the sun. We get less sun at the back of the house but my new lead wouldnt stretch that far so back I went to Office Depot to buy another extension cable.

On returning I discovered that two extension leads hooked together dont work at all, so for now I’m stuck with my poor quality image from the front of the house. In saying that though, the image is not that bad at sunrise and sunset. I’m looking to borrow a better quality webcam in the short term and in the longer term will almost certainly buy a decent camera from the US.

Dont forget to check it out Webcam Cancun.