Preparing for Tornadoes–Get a Weather Alert Radio Now!

We’ve all been heartbroken by the devastation caused by this year’s tornadoes. Those of us who live in tornado alley are familiar with having tornadoes close by- possibly too familiar. But make no mistake; what we’ve seen this year is not normal, and the risk of deadly tornadoes is greater this year because of current weather patterns.

The best way that you can protect yourself and your family from severe weather is to buy a weather alert radio. I tell all of my friends this, but I think that many don’t really know what a weather alert radio is. A weather alert radio is a critical tool in staying informed of severe weather, and television, computers, and regular radios are not an adequate replacement.

When the National Weather Service (NWS) issues any weather watches or warnings, they send out a coded signal that includes the type of watch or warning, how long it is in effect, and which counties are affected.

Weather alert radios are silent until the NWS issues an alarm. Once an alarm is received, the radio sounds a loud alert (I can hear mine throughout the house) and displays information about the weather event. For example, if a tornado watch is issued, the weather alert radio will immediately sound an alarm, display an amber light, and display something like “Tornado Watch” on the display. Most will also tell you how long the event remains in effect in hours and minutes. Warnings will sound the same alert, but they’ll be accompanied by a red light.

The first weather alert radios were “dumb” radios. You couldn’t program them for certain counties or certain types of events. This resulted in frequent alarms and many people simply turned them off because of that. Modern weather alert radios are able to use the NWS SAME system. This is the system that encodes information such as county name(s), length of the alert, type of alert, etc. into the alert message. That may sound complicated, but what it means to you is that you can easily program the radio to only sound alerts for your county, and you can also program it to not sound warnings that you aren’t interested in. My radio will only go off for tornado and thunderstorm watches and warnings, and only for my home county.

Why You Shouldn’t Rely on TV or Other Sources

When you’re watching the local news station during severe weather, the weather person is focused on avoiding any silence. Therefore, he or she will spend a lot of time reporting on factoids such as how much rain has fallen in certain cities, talking to reporters or viewers via phone, etc. When the NWS issues a weather alert, it has to be received by someone off-camera, passed off to someone who can speak to the weather person, communicated to the weather person, and then the weather person has to find a convenient opening in the broadcast to inform you about it. In my experience, the TV weather people often inform you of alerts several minutes after the alert has been issued. Several minutes may seem inconsequential, but keep in mind that folks in Joplin, MO, yesterday said that they had about 5 minutes of warning when the devastating tornado struck. Those few minutes can very well be the difference between life and death!

One more important factor; weather alert radios contain a battery so that they’ll continue to operate when the power goes out. If you rely on TV and the power goes out, unless you have a power generator or a battery operated television, you lose your ability to find out what’s going on.

Perhaps most important of all is that severe weather doesn’t always happen when you’re awake. I’ve often been awakened in the middle of the night by my weather alert radio, and many of those warnings came when severe weather wasn’t expected. Severe weather can happen any time, and having a radio that will alert you to it day and night is vital.

Where To Get a Weather Alert Radio

In our area, the best place to pick up a weather alert  radio is Radio Shack. You can pick one up for about 50 bucks. Make sure that you get one that can use the SAME system. It will be marked as such.

Now stop reading and go get one! I’m leaving now to pick up a couple for my neighbors. You should do the same.

Things that Gets Under my Skin – Literally!

Anyone who knows me knows that I love to rant. I don’t classify myself as a complainer. I am a ranter. There is a difference. A complainer is made miserable by that about which he or she complains, and the complaint is made in an attempt to make others share in that misery. A ranter finds humor (and sometimes delight) in that about which he or she rants. I’m a ranter, and what follows is a list of some of the things about which I love to rant.

I realize that by posting this, I’m opening myself up to being corrected by many of my readers. If you find a mistake in my post, please let me know!

Literally?

Why do people not understand what “literally” means? Literally means that you are not speaking metaphorically or figuratively. Therefore, it makes no sense to say, “He was literally on cloud nine.” It also doesn’t make sense to say, “The explosion was so huge that it literally blew them to kingdom come!”

For some reason, many people use “literally” as a way to emphasize something. Don’t do that, because it makes you seem ignorant . . . literally!

I’ll Be Around About

I work for a large technology company, and the vernacular in my company is filled with buzz words. One of those is “around”, which is used interchangeably with “about”. In other words, people will say, “Does anyone have any questions around what we just spoke about?”

“Around” doesn’t mean “about”.

Look, listen!

All of the talking heads on the new channels are guilty of this one. If you want someone to listen to what you have to say, don’t say “look”. Say “listen”.

“Look, the democrats know that they need to get as many votes as they can.” What am I looking at? I was so busy looking that I didn’t hear what you said.

Your wrong. It’s you’re.

If you want to use an abbreviation for “you are”, it’s “you’re”, not “your”. I see this all the time, even in professional publications.

I’ve had it! Comma!

The proper use of a comma eludes most people. A comma is not interchangeable with a period. In other words, it’s not correct to write the following.

“Thanks for telling me about that Jim, you’re right as rain.”

If you are starting a new sentence, you need a period and an initial capital. By the way, it’s even more problematic to write this.

“Thanks for telling me around that Jim, your literally as right as rain.”

Trailing Capitals

Proper nouns should be capitalized, but you should not capitalize the word after a proper noun. In other words, the following is not correct.

“Jim is editing his Facebook Post because he’s going to the Iron Man 2 Movie.”

Capitalize the proper noun, but don’t give the following word the same respect. It doesn’t deserve it.

This One is Particuly Bothersome

If you’d like to express that something is true to an exceptional degree, you should say that it is “particularly true”. It is not “particuly true”. The laziness that pervades our culture is particularly evident in the pronunciation of particularly.

There is Hundreds of These

We love contractions. That’s fine, but if a contraction is used incorrectly out of laziness, it’s worth a rant. Using a contraction meaning “is” when referring to a plural form of a word is particuly particularly annoying. For example, the following is not correct.

“There’s billions of stars in the sky.”

I know it takes a little extra effort, but the correct usage would be as follows.

“There are billions of stars in the sky.”

“Yeah, no, you’re right, right?”

If you want to refute a statement or an idea, it’s perfectly fine to say “no”. There’s no reason to preface “no” with “yeah”. Consider the following exchange.

“You have an iPhone and you don’t think it’s evil, do you?”, he said.

“Yeah, no, I love my iPhone.”, she said.

So, I Hate This One

Don’t start a sentence with the word “so”.

“So, I was going to the market to buy some fish.”

Interestingly, the people who do this are often the same ones who save time by using “there’s” instead of “there are” and “particuly” instead of “particularly”. Leave off the “so” and spend the time you save correcting some of your other speech patterns.

Poor Prepositions

The grammatical rule “don’t end a sentence with a preposition” has stuck so persistently in people’s minds that it has now morphed itself into “leave off the preposition.” The following is incorrect.

“He couldn’t picture the lady he was told.”

If you want to avoid ending the sentence in a preposition, say this.

“He couldn’t picture the lady about which he was told.”

However, it is perfectly correct to say this.

“He couldn’t picture the lady he was told about.”

There are plenty of others!

If you are also annoyed by these annoyances, let me know. I’ve got plenty of others to rant about!

Jim

Bad Company: Laptop Memory Upgrade (laptopmemoryupgrade.com)

I’m working on a project for work that requires me to deal with extremely large projects in a development application I’m using. Performance was very slow and I found myself needing to upgrade the memory in my laptop. I needed more memory quickly so that it wouldn’t impact my work, so I found a company online that would ship my memory same-day. That company was Laptop Memory Upgrade (www.laptopmemoryupgrade.com). I ordered 2GB of memory and paid $20 to have it shipped to me overnight.

The next day my memory arrived. I installed it into my laptop, but when I powered on the computer, I got nothing but 4 beeps. Some research uncovered the issue to be related to one of two things; bad memory or a poorly seated memory module.

I removed both memory modules and reseated them after cleaning the slots. A power-on of the computer still resulted in 4 beeps. At that point, I tried each memory module individually, allowing me to identify one of the two modules as the culprit. I tried installing that same module into each slot of the computer. In each case, if that module was installed in the computer, it wouldn’t start.

I contacted Laptop Memory Upgrade (LMU) and explained to them that one of my memory modules was defective and I needed a replacement. The tech at LMU said that I should mail the defective module back to them and gave me an address. I told them that I didn’t think I should have to pay to return a defective module, so they agreed to send me a mailing label. Great. So how about getting my replacement? They agreed to ship me a new module. I asked them when I would receive it. The answer: 3-5 days!

I explained to the tech that I had paid $20 to have the memory shipped to me next-day and that it was urgent to me that I get it quickly. He insisted that they could not get it to me sooner. I explained again that I paid for next-day shipping, and since they shipped me a defective product, I felt that they should ship me the replacement next-day. He refused. I then asked him to please ask a supervisor to approve next-day shipping. After a while, he came back and said that his boss would only approve two-day shipping.

I explained to him that I wasn’t satisfied with that and really needed the memory the next-day. I told him I would gladly accept delivery in the afternoon, an option which is much cheaper. He responded by saying that if I didn’t want it via two-way shipping, I could just mail the memory back to them and they would give me a refund. At this point, I was prepared to do that because I was so dissatisfied, but then he told me that if I did return the memory, I would have to pay for the shipping and they wouldn’t reimburse me for the $20 I paid to have it shipped to me to begin with.

I agreed to take the two-day delivery, but I told them that I was not satisfied and would not use them again when I needed memory. The response: “Ok. [Support ended.]” It was obviously not a big deal to LMU that I was dissatisfied.

In today’s tough economy, businesses can’t afford to conduct business this way.

  Bad Company: Laptop Memory Upgrade
   Grade: F

Bad Company: The Blu-ray Blues (LG Electronics)

Like many folks who have a big screen television, I want to make the most of my viewing experience by watching Blu-ray movies instead of DVDs. As I typically do, I spent a lot of time on Amazon reading reviews before I bought a Blu-ray player. Eventually, I decided to buy an LG BD370 player, primarily because it has the ability to stream Netflix movies.

As soon as my new Blu-ray player arrived, I bought a few Blu-ray discs so that I could enjoy my new high-definition bliss. One of the movies I bought was The Matrix. While watching it, I noticed that the audio and video were out of sync. The audio arrived about 1/2 second after the video, transforming The Matrix into Keanu Reeves vs. Godzilla. In other words, everything looked like a dubbed foreign horror movie. The same problem occurs in many of my other Blu-ray discs, DVDs, and Netflix streamed content. DVDs and Netflix streaming on my Xbox 360 is perfect and DVDs are perfect in another player I have, so the problem is limited to the LG player.

As I often do when I encounter problems with products I purchase, I went online to try and find some solutions. I found many reports of people encountering the same problem with my specific Blu-ray player. I found a long list of troubleshooting techniques to try and resolve the problem, none of which succeeded for me or for others. Next step: contact LG.

I opened a tech support incident with LG. After I described the problem, the LG tech asked if my HDMI cable was HDMI 1.3 certified. I knew why he was asking me that. The HDMI 1.3 specification provides the ability to fix lip sync issues introduced by devices taking longer to process video than audio, the most common cause of sync issues. In such cases, the audio is played sooner than the video. However, in my case, the audio is played later than the video.

All of the above is really a moot point because the cable I was using was an HDMI 1.3 cable. However, because it didn’t have “1.3” printed on the cable, the LG tech insisted that I replace it. I purchased a new, high-quality 1.3 certified HDMI cable. (Incidentally, this cable didn’t have “1.3” printed on it either.) When I tested with that cable, the same problem occurred.

I contacted LG again. When I explained all the details, I was told that the issue would require further research. They asked for my phone number and I was told that they would call me back within two days to tell me what to do next. (Incidentally, each time I contacted LG during all of this, I had to go back through the entire history. Frustrating!)

Three days went by and no call, so I contacted LG again. I was told that I hadn’t been called because they were investigating a new firmware update. When I explained that I had the latest firmware installed already, I was told that there was a new version of firmware specifically designed to correct my problem and that hadn’t yet been posted on the LG site. Great! She told me that they would send me a CD in the mail that would update my player and fix the issue.

Several days later, the CD arrived in the mail. I put it in my player as instructed, but there was no prompt to update the firmware as I had been told there would be. I contacted LG again and I was told that the CD was damaged and that they’d need to send me a new one. I explained to the tech that I was able to read the CD fine on my computer, so I know that the CD isn’t damaged. He insisted that it was. When I told him that I was able to copy files from the CD just fine from my computer, he got angry with me and hung up on me!

I called back. While I was on hold waiting for the next tech, I looked into the firmware version that was on the CD that they sent me and discovered that it was an old version of the firmware that was one version older than what was already on my player! When the next tech came online, I informed her of my discovery. Her response was to tell me that I needed to downgrade to the old firmware to fix my problem. Okay, I have no problem with trying that, but the player won’t let you install an older version.

At this point, she said that I would have to return my player to LG since it was defective and wouldn’t update any firmware. I explained to her that it did update firmware fine. When I turned it on for the first time a couple of months ago, it informed me that there was new firmware and it updated it just fine. The problem was with lip sync. She said, “Then you need to return it to us to fix the lip sync.” I told her that my confidence and trust level with LG wasn’t high and that I wasn’t confident that they could fix it. She said, “Look, if you want it fixed, that’s what you need to do. Do you want it fixed or not?”

I agreed to send my player to LG for a replacement. As of right now, I’m waiting on the replacement unit. However, I can assure you that I will never buy another LG product. During this issue, LG has outright lied to me, been rude and disrespectful, and hung up on me! (I assure you I have been polite and courteous to them on each interaction.)

 LG Electronics
  Grade: F

Update: 2/24/2010
I received my Blu-ray player back from LG today. The serial number was the same and the marks left by the feet of an AV switch I had sitting on the original unit were still visible. However, the problem does seem to be resolved. Apparently LG replaced the system board in the player. This leads me to believe that the problem is not correctable in firmware. It seems as though there may be a problem with one or more hardware components.

If you are having a problem with your LG Blu-ray player, I recommend that you send it to LG for repair. It’s obviously a problem they’re aware of, but it requires significant effort to get them to agree to fix it.

Changing Gears

I started this blog as an exercise in writing. I’m largely a writer by trade, and the best way for a writer to improve his or her skills is by writing. As it turned out, I have plenty of writing projects to keep me busy at my trade, so I’ve decided to change gears and dedicate this blog to consumer information.

All of us have dealt with poor customer service or faulty products at one time or another. When problems happen, the company involved deserves an opportunity to make things right. When they don’t, I’ll let you know in The Striped Cat.

Jim

My Adventures in Home Video Surveillance

I live in a peaceful neighborhood for the most part, but like most neighborhoods, we have our share of mischievous teenagers. Recently, the neighborhood kids have started experimenting with setting off acid bombs and dry ice bombs. One of the more recent attacks took place at about 1:30 in the morning in the form of 4 acid bombs blowing up on my front doorstep.  If you’ve never heard an acid bomb go off, you can’t truly appreciate the volume that they produce. I mean to tell you, they are LOUD!

After having these things set off twice near our house, I’d had enough. I was determined to put together a decent video surveillance system and catch these hooligans. In hopes of helping others who might want to do the same thing, I decided to document my experience.

The Camera

After doing quite a bit of research, I outlined the following requirements for my camera. The camera needed to:

• Be on my network so that video could be streamed without it being plugged into a computer.
• Provide sufficient video quality to aid in identification of any individuals in my yard.
• Not look obnoxious. In other words, no big cameras mounted on the outside of the house.
• Be able to record video at night in darkness.
• Be of high-quality so that I never need to worry about it working.
• Not require wiring for the video signal. AC wiring for power was fine.

I looked into webcams that would suit these needs, but most of them required that they be hooked up to a computer. My computer is a laptop that goes with me wherever I go, so hooking the camera to a computer was a deal-breaker. Other cameras required a lot of wiring and mounting on the outside of the house, something that I really didn’t want.

After a long search, I decided to purchase a Sharx SCNC2607 camera. I wasn’t familiar with the brand (Sharx Security), but the reviews on Amazon were very good and many raved about the excellent support that Sharx Security offered. In the beginning, I was a little hesitant to spend $300 on the camera, but after using it a lot for the past week, I am so happy that I chose it.

The Sharx camera can be wired into your network by just connecting a network cable from it to your router. However, it can also join your wireless network so that you can put it anywhere. You do have to plug it into the wall for power, but that’s handled by a typical AC adapter and isn’t an issue.

You can access the video from the Sharx from just about anywhere. Naturally, you can access it from any computer on your network right from your Web browser (you just browse to http://scnc2607 on your home network and it pulls up the camera), but you can also access it from any computer on the Internet! You can also access video from your phone (any phone that has a Web browser), and there’s an iPhone/iPod touch application called Eye See U that you can buy for $1.99 that allows access on your iPhone/iPod touch from anywhere. All of this is made possible by the fact that the Sharx streams several video feeds directly from the camera, no computer necessary.

The Sharx camera has pretty powerful motion detection and alarms built in. It allows you to specify up to four rectangular regions of the screen, each with its own motion detection sensitivity and threshold settings. Using this functionality, you can usually obtain a setup that is perfect for your needs. When motion is detected, the Sharx can send a picture (or a series of pictures) to your cell phone, email, or an FTP server. This is another incredible feature of this camera because it means that most people won’t even need to add any additional software to have a complete DVR system for the camera. Even better, the Sharx does all of this without a computer whatsoever. One more really cool feature. The Sharx has a microSD card so that you can record video to a microSD card and pull it of the camera later.

While getting the camera set up, I did have a few questions. I filled out a form on the Sharx Security site and asked them to contact me. Shortly after that, I received an email that simply said, “How may we assist you?” I asked my questions and Sharx Security always answered promptly and thoroughly. In fact, they went out of their way to provide me with a ton of technical information about how to access the camera’s video stream using many different methods. Each time that I emailed them to ask more questions, they answered very quickly and were extremely friendly.

A couple of days later, I noticed that the sun was shining directly into the camera as it came up in the morning. I emailed Sharx and asked them if this would cause damage to the camera. In typical fashion, I got a response quickly and they told me that given my setup, there should be no damage. They went even further to say that if the camera does get damaged because of this, they will accept it as a learning experience that will allow them to update their documentation and that they would gladly replace my camera if damage occurs.

I cannot recommend the SCNC2607 or Sharx Security highly enough. The camera is excellent quality, and the quality of support is top-notch. Finding that combination these days is extremely rare.

The Software

As I pointed out before, the Sharx comes with software that will suit the needs of many folks, but I had some specific requirements that necessitated a more powerful software package. Here are the requirements I needed for my DVR software.

• Allow me to automatically record motion during the night.
• Allow me to specify precise areas of the video feed that should not be checked for motion because I have a lot of trees and don’t need recordings of the tree branches moving in the wind.
• Archive video footage on my Windows Home Server and allow me to easily review that footage for any events of interest.
• Run as a service on my Windows Home Server so that I don’t have to worry about whether it’s running or not.

(The Sharx SCNC2607 meets many of these needs all by itself, but I needed a bit more power in the area of motion detection masks and archival of video footage.)

The Bad

I decided to purchase a copy of Blue Iris, a software package that seemed to fit my needs. After running Blue Iris for a couple of days, I realized that my server was filling up with video files that didn’t appear to show any motion. It turns out that the trees in my front yard were blowing and setting off the motion detection, but I had masked those trees in Blue Iris. I pulled up the software and checked my motion detection masks, and I was quite surprised to see that all of my motion detection masks were gone!

I recreated my motion detection masks, clicked OK to apply those changes, and then I went right back in to check them again. Once again, they were gone. This is a pretty serious problem because the whole point of these masks is to tell the software to ignore motion in a certain part of the camera’s field of vision. For example, if you have a flag waving in the breeze, you don’t want the software to constantly record because of the flag’s motion. Instead, you want to mask out the flag and tell the software to ignore it. Blue Iris has that functionality, but it just plain didn’t work!

To work around this problem, I decided to lower the sensitivity of motion detection in Blue Iris with the hope that my trees wouldn’t set it off. After doing that, I noticed that I wasn’t getting a bunch of recordings of blowing trees, so I assumed that the workaround resolved that problem. However, after a while, I realized that I wasn’t getting any recordings at all!

I went outside and stood in front of the camera waving my hands and jumping up and down. I thought, “Surely this will set off the motion detection of Blue Iris.” I went back inside, and much to my surprise, Blue Iris hadn’t recorded a thing. Blue Iris has a feature that shows blue on the screen where it sees motion, so I turned that on. As I was watching the screen, Blue Iris showed huge blue marks indicating it was seeing motion all over, but it simply refused to record anything. In order to get it to record, I had to turn the sensitivity almost all the way up.

Blue Iris has a motion detection meter so that you can see where the motion that is detected compares to the detection sensitivity. Unfortunately, the meter doesn’t work at all when you run Blue Iris as a service, a problem that Blue Iris support admits but has no resolution for. During all of this, I also realized that the date and time that Blue Iris adds to your video footage wasn’t there anymore. I went into the settings for that and turned it back on, but Blue Iris kept removing it as soon as I looked at the properties for my camera.

Another problem I had with Blue Iris is that it would constantly lock up on my machine. The timing of this was seemingly random. Sometimes it would lock up as soon as I launched it. Other times, it would let me work in it for a while before locking up. I emailed Blue Iris tech support about this problem, but all I got back was a blank email response. Eventually, I discovered that others were having the same issue and the resolution is to disable the Watchdog feature of Blue Iris. (This feature reconnects to the camera if the connection is lost.) After disabling Watchdog, Blue Iris no longer hung, but that was yet another major feature of the software that just flat out didn’t work at all.

Finally, I was so frustrated that I decided to uninstall Blue Iris and reinstall it. I was thinking that maybe something with my install was bad. Once I uninstalled, I reinstalled it. Upon launching it, Blue Iris asked for my registration key. I entered it only to be met with a dialog box telling me that my key had already been used and that it had been deactivated. In order to use Blue Iris, I was asked to email their tech support and wait until they reset my key. (I can’t begin to tell you how much I hate this kind of thing.) I emailed Blue Iris at about 9:30 in the morning, and by 4 in the afternoon, I still hadn’t heard a word from them.

By the way, the reason my key was invalidated was because I had installed Blue Iris on my laptop in order to connect to the Blue Iris service running on my Windows Home Server machine. (That’s typically the way a client/server architecture works.) As it turns out, Blue Iris’s idea of a client/server architecture is that you must run the service and the client on the same physical computer. If you attempt to run the client on a second computer, they invalidate your registration on the original computer without telling you.

At this point, I was so frustrated that I emailed them again and politely (really) asked for a refund. A short while later, I got an email back saying “Our licensing scheme doesn’t allow us to refund your money.” I emailed back and forth with Blue Iris several other times in order to provide them with details on the problems I was having. Eventually, Ken (apparently the owner) at Blue Iris told me that he wasn’t going to refund me because his payment processing company, RegNow, would charge him $10 for refunding me. I asked again for a refund (and I was very polite with him each time), but the response I got was sarcastic and he still refused to give me my money because “the software works for most people.” Unbelievable.

Why do I go into all of this? Because I’m hoping that if you’re reading this, you won’t make the same mistake I did and buy Blue Iris software. It’s a piece of junk that isn’t backed up by the owner/developer. His service was even worse when compared to Sharx Security’s incredible support.

The Good

I ended purchasing a surveillance DVR package called LuxRiot. LuxRiot is an incredible piece of software, and unlike Blue Iris, they completely understand how customers want to use the software. LuxRiot licenses the server that runs as a service on my Windows Home Server. That server does the motion detection, monitoring, alarms, and recording. The service is controlled by a client, and that client can be installed on as many computers as you want. Therefore, I install the client on my laptop and the server on my Windows Home Server and I’m good to go. (Blue Iris could really learn something from these guys.)

LuxRiot’s configuration options are much more detailed than Blue Iris’s and everything just works. Even better, LuxRiot includes an archive viewer that lets you review the archival footage that it has recorded. You can easily see where motion occurred right on the timeline, and you can quickly jump between motion events using buttons on the toolbar.

The image below shows how LuxRiot deals with showing archival footage. At the bottom of the window is the timeline. Dark green indicates time, light green indicates where footage was recorded, and brown indicates where motion occurred. Notice that the truck is highlighted by a box in the video window to indicate that it was detected as motion.

 

By default, LuxRiot’s motion detection mask is applied using a grid of 32x32 squares on the video surface. However, you can choose to change that resolution if it doesn’t fit your needs. It allows for adjustment from 4x4 blocks all the way up to 256x256 blocks of resolution! You can see how that feature works in the image below.

By the way, LuxRiot uses the motion detection sensor on the Sharx SCNC2607 to detect motion, and it does an excellent job. In fact, motion detection from the Sharx camera is far superior to what Blue Iris offers. The Blue Iris software doesn’t have the ability to take motion information from the camera, so I wasn’t able to use the Sharx’s motion detectors with it. LuxRiot, on the other hand, will use the detectors on the camera or in software. Very nice!

One Final Problem to Solve

After all of this, I had one final problem to solve. Because the SCNC2607 is an indoor camera, I have it aimed out the window. That works great until nighttime when the IR illuminators come on. IR illuminators send out a beam of infrared light (just like your TV remote control) that is invisible to the naked eye, but the Sharx camera can see it very well. Unfortunately, the Sharx can also see it reflecting off of the window, so at night, I had nothing but a bright white image.

Sharx Security points this out in their manual and they give you some pointers for positioning to try and work around it, but nothing helped for me. (Incidentally, this is not a problem with the Sharx camera. It’s a problem with all IR illumination used for night vision.) I emailed Sharx Security for what had to be the tenth time, and I got back a very nice response shortly after with many ideas and details on how to resolve that issue. I ended up purchasing an outdoor IR illuminator that is mounted just above my front door. It looks like a normal floodlight, but instead of visible light, it sends out a beam of IR light once it gets dark enough outside for it to activate itself. When that happens, there is no visible change according to the naked eye, but the view from the Sharx looks like someone is shining a bright spotlight out the front of the house. The picture below was taken in complete darkness (there were no lights at all outside of my house), but the IR illuminator makes it quite bright.

 

The IR illuminator I purchased is the YY Trade IR illuminator from Amazon.  This IR illuminator can be used with any camera that is sensitive to IR in the 850nm wavelength.

With this setup, I now have a comprehensive video surveillance DVR system. Right now, I’m running with one camera. I may add cameras in the future, but for now, I’m happy to have just what I wanted to solve the immediate problem. Thank you, Sharx Security!

Jim

Update:
I discovered last night that LuxRiot also uses a ludicrous DRM system that will disable your registration key as soon as you attempt to install the server on another machine. I decided to use a spare computer exclusively for the LuxRiot DVR service, but when I uninstalled it from my Windows Home Server and put it on the other computer, it wouldn’t allow me to activate without contacting LuxRiot. Unfortunately, it was 9:00PM on a Saturday when I did all of this.

I sent an email to LuxRiot asking them to reset my key, and much to my surprise, they responded a few hours later and reset my key. While I despise the DRM methods they use, I was surprised that they resolved my issue so quickly.

One other technical detail. The Sharx provides an M-JPEG over HTTP, JPEG over HTTP, and an RTSP feed. I obtained much better performance using the RTSP feed with LuxRiot. My settings are shown below.

Privacy and Facebook

Are you a Facebook user? If so, you're certainly not alone. Facebook is the 5th most popular website in the United States, and it's becoming more popular every day. No doubt about it; social networking is one of our favorite pastimes.

The concept of Facebook is pretty simple. You create a profile and then you add pictures and personal information. Other people you know who use Facebook can find you and add you as a friend, allowing him or her to see all of the information you've posted on your Facebook page. You can also become a member of any one of Facebook's thousands of networks. A network consists of Facebook users who have something in common. For example, when I created by Facebook profile, I became a member of the Dallas / Fort Worth, TX network because that's where I live.

What many Facebook users don't know is that the default Facebook privacy settings will allow anyone in one of your networks to see your Facebook page! In my case, since I am a member of the Dallas / Fort Worth, TX network, I can see the page of other members of that network and they can see my page as well. (By the way, chances are you are the member of at least one network and you may not even realize it.)

Wait. It gets worse. Suppose you aren't a friend of mine, but you want to see my page. All you'd have to do is join the Dallas / Fort Worth, TX network (you don't have to live in TX to do this) and you would be able to see my page and the pages of everyone else in the network as well who hasn't taken steps to protect his or her profile. (Actually, you won't see my profile because I've changed my privacy settings.) Want to view the Facebook page of people who live in Indianapolis even if you aren't friends with them? Just join the Indianapolis, IN network and then browse away.

I urge all of you who use Facebook to make a few changes to the default privacy settings so that only friends can see your page.

Changing Privacy Settings

To keep your page private to just friends that you accept, you'll need to change the privacy settings for your account. Here's how.

1. Log into your Facebook account.
2. Hover over the Settings menu in the upper-right corner of the page and click Privacy Settings as shown below.
   

1. Click the Profile link on the Privacy Overview page shown below.

1. Set the privacy dropdowns to Only Friends as shown below.

You'll also want to click the Edit Photo Albums Privacy Settings link shown above (it's right under Photos Tagged of You) and set your photo albums to Only Friends as well. When you do this make sure that you click Save Changes on each page!

After you make these changes, your profile and photo albums will only be visible to your friends and you'll enjoy a much more private experience on Facebook.

See you online!

Jim