

Taking pictures with your MacBook every time the lid opens - icefox
http://benjamin-meyer-home.blogspot.com/2011/01/1-10-photos-every-day-starting-in-2006.html

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dfranke
This would be a neat way to catch a laptop thief.

~~~
Tycho
that's what I was thinking. make it send the pics to a web archive whenever it
finds an open connection. then you'd almost _want_ your laptop to get stolen

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pyre
You could create a honeypot netbook and take it with you to places like
Starbucks and just leave it out when you go to the bathroom,etc.

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Tycho
Do this, follow it up, expose the thief, make a blog of it, and the
advertising income from the blog will probably recoup the laptop cost.

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notJim
Became far less interesting the moment he started posing for the pictures,
IMO. There's tons of photos on the web of geeky types mugging for the camera.
It's those moments of unguarded excitement, waiting for your MBP to finish
waking up from sleep that are novel.

At least in my opinion.

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icefox
When you open the lid of a MacBook mine have always been ready and running,
there is no waiting for them to finish waking up like on Windows.

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notJim
Haha, I know, that was just a bit of artistic prose. Still, I think unposed
photos would have been more interesting.

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thwarted
Here's a bunch of shell scripts I hacked up take pictures when certain events
occur on linux. Could be extended to handle the lid opening or coming out of
sleep, although I have a feeling that xscreensaver detecting may already
handle most of that case (because I think the screensaver gets activated, or
at least the screen is locked, automatically when the lid is closed).

<https://github.com/thwarted/picsofourlives>

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alanfalcon
Very neat idea! I know you didn't try posing the same way for every picture,
but I wonder if you couldn't put together a video that shows every picture in
sequence with your face centered to prevent too much jarring movement?

I've always wanted some way to tap into iPhoto's face recognition since
mousing over the thumbnail in Faces view creates a neat effect with the
subject's head always in about the same place. Even better would be the image
matching tech used on TinEye. For example, find a picture of the moon (or
click
[http://www.tineye.com/search/45a444e7e4f564f58321c60347db9a8...](http://www.tineye.com/search/45a444e7e4f564f58321c60347db9a894b9d0750/?sort=score&order=asc)
) then use the "compare" link for various matched images. TinEye rotates and
scales all the images to match up as closely as possible, which lets you view
some neat moon wobble effects... that kind of tech could be very cool if it
was able to do the same with your myriad face photos.

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kluikens
This would work well for DailyBooth, a la scrobbling for last.fm.

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sil3ntmac
I used to do the same thing, but a little differently. I used SleepWatcher as
well, ( <http://www.bernhard-baehr.de/> ), but set it up to run the following
script, which uses isightcapture (
<http://www.intergalactic.de/pages/iSight.html> ) to do it all in the
background:

    
    
       NOWDATE=`/bin/date +%Y.%m.%d-%H.%M.%S`
       /usr/local/sbin/isightcapture ~/login_images/$NOWDATE.png
       /usr/bin/scp -o ConnectTimeout=5 ~/login_images/$NOWDATE.png me@myserver.com:~/login_images
    

Where I have an SSH fingerprint for me@myserver.com installed. This let me
back up the images to a server, for convenience and security.

Edited for code formatting.

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icefox
That is pretty much the solution I had for the first week before I switch to
photo booth whos main advantages were: \- I could compose a photo with objects
and or just remember to be in frame and smile \- I could easily delete a bad
photo with just a click. \- I could take several photos right there and then
if I wanted.

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kjell
I have a daemon that snaps my photo every odd 30 minutes. I was the first
thing i built after getting a new laptop with an isight 4 years ago. Should I
leave nothing else to the world, there will at least be tens of thousands of
crummy jpegs of my face scrunched before a monitor when I die.

Mine are far less cutesy than his because the only indication that a photo is
being taken is the little green light activating for a split second. But more
authentic i think.

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annon
I'm going to do this, but instead of having photobooth open, I found a command
line app to capture an image from the isight:
<http://www.intergalactic.de/pages/iSight.html>

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tejaswiy
Really cool, I always look at these 1 pic a day programs and think I should do
that sometimes, and the longest I've done is ~1 week.

What I think would be cooler is if you could randomize it a bit. Privacy
concerns?

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uxp
I'd personally want to do a daemonized process so I and anyone else would be
none the wiser, with a randomized delay of under a minute after the lid was
opened.

Regarding privacy? I doubt anyone would get into any sort of trouble with it.
If it's your laptop, you can install whatever you want on it, even rootkits
and keyloggers.

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mh_
Check my comment earlier with shameless self plug for iTried
(<http://bit.ly/hEDJTw>) :)

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gnok
Pretty neat hack! Were you conscious of the script each time you opened the
lid? I imagine I would forget about it after the first week.

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runjake
If you read the linked article, aside from the very beginning, he uses
Sleepwatcher [1] to trigger an Automator script that launches Photo Booth and
does the 3...2...1 countdown.

[1] <http://www.bernhard-baehr.de/>

[2] [http://www.apple.com/macosx/what-is-macosx/apps-and-
utilitie...](http://www.apple.com/macosx/what-is-macosx/apps-and-
utilities.html#automator)

[3] [http://www.apple.com/macosx/what-is-macosx/apps-and-
utilitie...](http://www.apple.com/macosx/what-is-macosx/apps-and-
utilities.html#photobooth)

~~~
gnok
Sorry, I should have been more clear. I was wondering if he remembered that
the script would launch PhotoBooth before he opened the lid each time. I
expect he'd have just grabbed his MacBook and opened the lid and then
remembered that it would take a picture.

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icefox
As it happens all of the time I really don't forget. And if it takes a really
horrible photo I can always just click the little X and delete it so no harm.

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Sadranyc
Pretty neat. Is there any way to do this on Windows? I'd like to try a similar
experiment with my Thinkpad

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joelhaasnoot
My IdeaPad shipped with Lenovo Veriface which authenticates you based on your
picture. It also stores a copy for 24 hours I believe, which you could
automatically move before they get removed.

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obiefernandez
It'd be cool to rig this to upload your facebook profile pic automatically
everyday.

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snes
Very cool. I will try to remember this when I start using my laptop more
often.

