Under surveillance of your Mac
Posted on May 26, 2009 by admin
Not so long ago, there was one film on YouTube that was very popular among Polish interent users at that time. It was taken by a candid camera by a student who used to rent a room from an old lady. Every time he came back to his place he noticed that she was nosing around in his room. One day he turned on the camera and left the apartment. His suspicions were confirmed and camera recorded the old lady who was nosing around and expressing rather nasty comments about him and his girlfriend. The film itself was very funny. Also, our Macs can serve as a simple surveillance system.
iSurveill
iSurveill, by Christoph Peter, enables you to record an images and to save them as jpg files at regular time intervals. The program is equipped with a motion detector, user can set the time interval at which the image will be saved, both when no movement has been registered and when the sensor detected a stir in the camera view. The user can also decide whether a preview image from the camera to be displayed or not, and set the program to run in the background so as not to be visible to the others.
Certainly it would work much better in a computer with an external webcam and screen, that can be manually turned off.
The programming environment requires Adobe Air, which can run it both on Mac OS X, Windows and Linux.
You can get it for free at: http://www.chrillo.info/isurveill/
MonitorMyMac
MonitorMyMac costs 25GBP or 40$ for a single user license. The application allows you to save screenshots and images from iSight camera at the specified time. The screen shots and pictures can be uploaded onto the specified FTP server, so you can have access to them almost always and from almost every place, if you have access to the Internet of course. This will allow you to monitor your Mac and place of work. The program is not equipped with a motion detector, but only performs the screenshots and photos at a certain time.
You can get it at: http://www.monitormymac.co.uk/
