You may be wondering why the banner on this site has changed (and keeps changing..), well its part of something I’ve been messing with for a while and finally got working today

The banner is taken from a live webcam thats pointing at the sky out of my window, every 10 seconds it takes a snapshot and appends a small slice of it to the left hand side of the banner. It looks particularly cool during sunsets as it fades across from blue to orange then on to black

Technically speaking its a f**king mess… The webcam is a lego-quickcam connected to a Linksys NSLU2 (which for reasons of noise and power usage is using an old iPod for its storage) running Debian linux and the Motion software. Its also running lighttpd to serve the webcam stream. The grunt work of image composition is done by my other server running a Python program I created to rip MJPEG streams from streaming cameras and do all the composition work.

Bit of a mess eh? But it works, so I’m happy On some days when theres a north-south cloud movement it actually acts like a slow scanning camera in that you get a very stretched image of the cloud forming from left to right.

Its given me some other ideas for image-based hacks too, PIL is a kickass library for in-memory image manipulation. Ideally it’d support creating animated GIF’s so I can do some time-lapse photos of the sky, dare say I can hack around it though