Kitty and sharing

Running battle with the kitten and the Christmas tree.

Didn't get much sleep last night with all the crashing and banging and having to get up to disentangle kitten from tree and decorations. I deeply regret being a skinflint (as always) and not investing in a real, spiky tree rather than the rather aged artificial silver tree we've had for years.

(picture later)

With a real tree, it would have taken up much more room, but it wouldn't have come crashing down, and the kitty could stop up there. I could even had joined. it. I wonder if there's still time?

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My mob are very protective. So it was no surprise when someone suggested that since I have quite a good webcam, it was a pity they couldn't log on to their laptops or phones and check I was ok.

I have no problems with that. It's not like I'm going to get up up to anything. Besides, if I did, I should imagine it would be rather entertaining? It occurred to me that it would be a cool way to keep an eye on the house if I was out.  So I looked for a way to set up a simple web page with a video feed.

I came across a free program called Yawcam for windows. Yawcam has lots of facilities, one of which is a simple editable webpage template with a video feed to that webpage, and will even, if you need, email alerts with pictures if motion is detected in a home that's supposed to be empty.

I can also kick, ban or otherwise get rid of anyone who tries to take a peek I don't want to. The page can also be password protected :)

I won't go into all it can do, for that, you should read the help on it's page. It doesn't do audio, but it's regularly updated.

Programs like Yawcam need their webpage to be published to what's called a fixed ip address. Most home internet accounts have an ip address that varies from time to time. I used a free site called No-Ip (that has extra, paid for features available) that offers a fixed ip associated with a name, for example, myname.zapto.org:8889.

I pointed Yawcam at that and bingo. A simple little web page with a video feed that can watched in a web browser (Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer) on any computer or on a modern phone. I use an App for Android called 'IP Cam Viewer Lite'.

The problem was that I have the one webcam, and I'm logged into Skype too.

I came across a little program called Manycam. Manycam has it's problems on my system - the only one that gives some nasty audio feedback, but since Yawcam doesn't do audio, that's fine.


Manycam allows you to share the output of one camera to different places. Again, its free to use, with many more options in a paid for version. Free was fine for me. In a nutshell, in the setup you set Manycam to the name your system provides for your camera. In the other programs, in my case Yawcam and Skype, I set the camera as Manycam Virtual webcam. The video feed is shared.