I love my pets. Like most geeks who are pet owners, they are a HUGE part of my daily life. Unfortunately, pets will do what pets will do. Despite my two dogs being reasonably well mannered, the smallest of the two has been set up as a prime suspect for eating the cat food.

What does this have to do with tech? Actually, a lot, considering how I am going to deal with the situation. Much like troubleshooting an IT issue, I will be using technologist tools to overcome the fact that I cannot simply move the cat food dish and hope the problem takes care of itself. We wouldn’t do this after a network breach! Just change the settings around and hope for the best. No way! Nope, in addition to adding some security to the situation, it also pays to create a honey pot or in this case, a motion activated webcam to catch my dog in the act.

As one might suspect, my little French Bulldog couldn’t care less about being caught in the act of eating my cat’s food or my American Bulldog’s grub, either. But catching her and seeing firsthand how she is getting in to the room with the food will help me design a better way to block dog access.

Now I have looked at a number of programs for Windows, OS X, and Linux. As Linux is the OS on most of my computers, I ended up staying here. First I did some experimenting with ZoneMinder — it’s extremely powerful, and nearly pro-grade in its abilities and options. And yes, I did get it working with three of my webcams and utilized zone-based motion detection with alerts sent via email. But in the end, it was just way overkill and took too much to make sure the sensitivity was how I wanted it. This is best suited for someone looking at home security, anyway.

This then brought me to a simple command line based program that then works off of a HTTP server called Motion. Despite the fact that there is no GUI and everything must be set up via simple edits to existing config files, it looks like a smarter match. Anyone who has ever played games on Windows is familiar with cfg files that look a lot like this.  Most of this is all ready to go. Other aspects are easily adjusted after you understand that all you are doing is using this to edit a conf file. It’s actually easy for any computer power user who is willing to read a bit.

And there we have it. I will be using Motion, an old nettop headless computer running Ubuntu, and one webcam to catch my dog in the act. Once set up, the nettop will either email or SMS me an alert. From there, I can examine the visual evidence and make the decision whether or not my little dog will have her cookie privileges removed for a day or so.

[Photo above by matthartley / CC BY-ND 2.0]

[awsbullet:Cesar Millan]