Well, Project Gutenberg has another installation in their Encyclopaedia Britannica digitization effort. This one includes a number of cool (well, I think they are cool subjects) including Calculating Machines and Calendars. There are also nice maps of Bulgaria, Burma and Cairo. Check ’em out.

The Encyclopædia Britannica,Volume IV – Part 04 of 04

[tags]Public Domain,Project Gutenberg[/tags]

Well, I decided somewhat on the spur of the moment to get a wireless webcam for a monitoring application, and I must say, I’m overall pretty disappointed with the Linksys WVC54GC. First of all, it’s a sucky webcam. It is simply nightblind: it can’t take a decent picture in illumination which is even slightly dim. My home office is virtually invisible. It’s like those old first generation camera phones that are thankfully becoming a thing of the past. The idea that this could be a security device is laughable, unless the crooks trying to gain entry are careful enough to bring a couple of flood lights to illuminate their faces.

But the really disappointing thing is the software: it’s simply not designed to interface with anything except a Windows PC. It downloads an ActiveX control to watch the video. Bleh. No, more than bleh. BLEH. Luckily, I found out that you can actually watch the video stream using VLC. Down below is an image capture from VLC running on my MacBook.

Save your money. Don’t buy this webcam. There must be better ones out there. I’m gonna sleep on whether to return this camera tomorrow. It’s simply that bad.