IP cams are great. They keep an infrared eye on your stuff while you’re not around and find out what keeps pooping on your driveway (a cat it turns out). But sometimes things can get a little out of hand.
So here’s a list of things that will trigger the IP cam motion detection you didn’t think of:
- Cats parading on your driveway like they own the place.
- Spiders shaking their arachnid booty in front of the camera while doing their webbing thing.
- Spider webs moving in the wind, up close. All f-ing night.
- The occasional bird.
- The occasional insect in mid-flight. Sometimes even a mot at night caught in the infrared beams.
- Trees and bushes shaking their leaves and branches cause it’s windy as hell.
- Shadows of trees and bushes shaking their leaves and breanches because it’s windy as hell and sunny too.
- Rain showers. Possibly in combination with freaky winds blowing it horizontally in places you didn’t think rain could get at.
- The sun playing peekaboo with some clouds, causing abrupt changes in light levels.
- Car headlights lighting up random bushes, walls and other stuff as they pass by your house.
- Reflections of cats in the cars shiny exterior (what a great excuse for not washing your car).
- Reflections of moving clouds in a puddle on the concrete at the right lighting conditions.
So watch out where and how you send those automated alert emails from the camera. GMail for example doesn’t like it when you send hundreds of emails a day using one account. They find it rather spammy. When this happens, they can block you from sending any more messages that day. This really blows if you have an urgent mail to send. Other mail providers have similar rules.
Uploading the images to a remote FTP server is another option. But make sure you have plenty of space there, and download those images regularly if you don’t want to run out of space.
Photo by Armend Krasniqi, cc-licensed.
