Below is a quick note from Tetsu:

We want to give people an open view into our hackerspace, but when we tried a 24/7 webcam with ustream, it was just invasive and creepy. We aren’t there to put on a show for people. We want them to come out and do stuff with us, but people won’t come out if they don’t know someone’s already at the lab.

As a compromise, we provide people a real view into the lab so they can see if people are there, but it replaces their faces with the cartoon face of Ghost in the Shell’s Laughing Man for anonymity.

Yes, it doesn’t catch every face. Yes, it catches faces that aren’t there. Yes, it’s never going to anonymize clothing, which may be more identifying than the faces. But, the way I see it, at least we’ve established a precedent at the lab that we have to face increased surveillance and increased pressure on normal people to install surveillance systems, so we may need to take extra efforts to establish norms of anonymity while staying up-to-date in tech.

Also, if any of you Hack-A-Day readers want to come by the FAMiLab sometime and are concerned about anonymity, I will personally alter your faces out of every photo before upload!

Over at FAMiLab we have on loan a Sony IPELA SNC-RX550N networked camera. It is a very nice piece of hardware; supports pan, tilt, and zoom via a Java applet and web interface. We’re often wondering if there’s anyone at the lab already, so I rigged up a little proof of concept that takes a snapshot from the camera and runs an OpenCV algorithm against it to count the faces in the photo. It worked pretty well, despite a few false positives, so I went ahead and finished it.

The code is up on my personal GitHub account, and you can snag a copy and play with it. I’m using the Python extensions for OpenCV along with a couple libraries to do the Twitter and Imgur integration. For Twitter I’m just using the python-twitter library; for Imgur I actually forked the code that Devon Meunier wrote for pyimgur and fixed a couple bugs.

Check it out, and let me know what you think. It’s very rough code, so bear with me.

famicam: http://github.com/abyssknight/famicam

pyimgur: http://github.com/abyssknight/pyimgur

Helix Forensics Toolkit

Just a really nice toolkit, and free to boot. We had a professor come in and give a speech about forensics and he cited Encase as well as other industry standards. I wanted to learn a bit more about the tools, but I don’t have $2500 for a license so enter Helix, the free live CD for computer incident and forensic analysis.

Geocaching

I recently received a GPS receiver for a Christmas gift and I wanted to see what I could do with it. Well, Geocaching.com is a community of people who set up “treasure hunts” of sorts called “caches” that users can search for using GPS coordinates. I’ve done one so far, and I must say it’s great fun.

Firebug

Firebug is a Firefox extension which allows you to edit CSS, XHTML, as well as watch/debug live code in your browser. I really can’t explain how helpful this is, but it hasn’t replaced my Web Developer Toolbar and HTMLTidy plugins yet. The most useful piece thus far is the Net monitor that shows just how large your page is, and when AJAX processes start and stop.

Thank you for your patience, more updates soon.

ScatterChat

If you currently use the plugin, please give me a heads up. If you’d like to be notified of updates, feel free to let me know and I will send you an email each time I make an update to the plugin.

Thanks for being patient, and let me know if there are any bugs/wishes and I will try to get them fixed/added as soon as I can.

MBL Plugin for WordPress 0.4.2

• WordPress Widgets
• Color Selector
• Communities Integration
• Better integration with template system
• More options and control over look and feel

Anyways, this is just one of the very few personal entries I make here.