Work in Progress

The Bad News

This might be the longest period of time I have not a functional webcam on my site. I started with one over 25 years ago, and have installed at least one in every bedroom I’ve lived in since. I have 6 cameras ready to stream here, and I occasionally do turn them on via YouTube or Facebook or a different streaming option, but they stream all the time and use valuable bandwidth I feel guilty about, especially since 99% of the time, nobody will be watching.

I currently live on a remote farm and the Internet is Starlink satellite which doesn’t support forwarding my ports. It has been a challenge I continue every now and then when the mood hits. I investigate options to figure out a free method of on-demand streaming that doesn’t send anything if nobody asks for it.

If I stream to YouTube it doesn’t allow constant always-on, or on-demand streams, and if I use any audio in my room like the TV or radio, I get banned for copyrighted music. I just want an old-fashioned webcam display tool but they’re fairly difficult to find free solutions.

The Good News

In any case, I did solve the secondary problem which was to figure out a freeway to not use IFTT to get my lava lamps controllable from the web. Although technically I no longer have lava lamps and because there are no webcams, so you can’t actually see it being operational. You have to trust me when I say these buttons do in fact turn on and off my makeshift lava lamp.

It is a $3 multicolour sealing glow light that I got from Temu. When you click the ON button it turns on and when you click the off button, it turns off. If you don’t click off, I shuts itself off after 15 minutes. I may change that to 5 minutes because the thing lights up the ceiling and flashes in 3 primary colours quite annoyingly.