Bird feeder + Webcam + Recog Software = Cool data

It's been snowing for a few days and our garden is amazingly full of birdlife this afternoon. A few attempts with the SD9 to capture a decent pic have left me annoyed and frustrated. A quick surf for some bird photography ideas pops up a Make video for a webcam bird table recipe.

It may have to wait for slightly more clement weather, but I have to build one of these, push the feed through some image / face recognition software and play with recognising the robins from the finches. Flow that data into some tally software and I can build some cool bird table traffic data that even Bill Oddie would be jealous of.

Handy link addition

Resistors, I knew all about them 15 years ago. Shout a stream of colours at me and I'd be shouting it's rating back at you before you'd had time to check your book yourself. Nowadays my brain is too full, too tired, or (more likely) too lazy. I'm also too lazy to pin something on my wall as a quick reference. Well, actually I'm not - I'm just too lazy to actually get around to making one, printing it off and THEN pinning it to the wall.

Thankfully a nice, colourful, reasonably pretty printable calculator just went up at the make blog. The maker has a pretty sweet fluffy blood cell on his blog aswell. Trust me - it's cute.

Link>> (via>>)

Inspiration

Not one of my own, but this has sparked a couple of ideas for me so I thought I'd share the link. MAKE blog has a link to a computer chip trivet. Just the thing for me to rest my red hot baking trays on after a hard saturday morning bakeathon.