This is my first IoT project. It's pretty simple, but I've been very happy with the results thus far.

About this time last year, someone got into our garage and rifled through my wife's car.

I have a camera in my garage, and a Phillips Hue motion detector. Using the Hue's excellent API, I have a perl script that checks for motion every couple of seconds, and starts capturing from the camera via RTSP if it does. That video is then staged, ready to be uploaded to a digital ocean droplet if I click on a link in the mailgun-powered email that's then sent to me and my wife, along with a preview GIF of the video, created through the same ffmpeg process that pulled the capture from the camera.

Here you can see me getting home from work.

A few days after the vacation, daddy (me) finally finished copying all the photos from the digital camera to the big external hard drive. Left it lying in the living room, in the corner where all the tech stuff frequently lies. In come my boys, and I'm not sure why, they start plugging power supplies around. Unfortunately the one from the laptop fit into the hole on the external disk, but had a different (higher) voltage. Result: 1 fried hard drive, containing all the baby photos and videos of said boys up that time.
I still believe that it's only the circuit board that is fried, and the data is still all there. I still have the hope to find a used disk, replace the board and all will be back.

I was browsing websites in search of a nice digital camera because my wife saw one but it's long since been discontinued. So I found this one article about a few current ones. I open it, it shows the typical GDPR consent request about cookies with a prominent button 'ACCEPT ALL,' and a less prominent button 'MANAGE PREFERENCES.'

But tapping the button 'MANAGE PREFERENCES' did not show any preferences to manage! WHAT THE HECK? There was only a list of 'partners' whose cookies I need to accept. A long list. A very long list. I stopped counting at 500.

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? WHAT REASON COULD A WEBSITE POSSIBLY HAVE TO REQUIRE COOKIE CONSENT FOR MORE THAN 500 PARTNERS?

Fucking capitalist internet.

Sus!
yesterday I bought a cool domain in namecheap, I was very lucky to find short and good one for my case.

Today (at weekends!!!!) I receive a letter:
>Hello **redacted name**,
>
>We are contacting you from the Namecheap Risk Management Team regarding your '**redacted name account**' account.
>
>Unfortunately, your Namecheap account was flagged by our fraud screening system as requiring verification and was locked.
>
>Please follow the instructions below to get your account verified:
>
>- take a color photo of the credit card used for the payment at **redacted link**
>
>Please make sure all of the edges of the credit card are visible, and that we can clearly see the card holder's name, expiration, and last four digits of the card number. The screenshots or images of the card cannot be accepted for verification. >If the submission does not meet these requirements, we can either request to submit the details again or permanently suspend your account.
>
>- provide a valid phone number and the best time to call you (within normal business hours, US Pacific time).
>
>If we do not hear back from you within 24 hours, we will be forced to cancel your orders.
>
>We apologize for any inconvenience that may result from this process. This extra verification is done for your security and to ensure that orders are legitimate. This industry, unfortunately, has a high rate of fraudulent orders, and this sort of >verification helps us drastically reduce fraud and ensure our customers remain secure. Such documents are used for verification only and are not provided to third parties in any way. Account verification is a one-time procedure, after your account >is verified, you will never face this issue again.
>
>Looking forward to your reply.
>
>---------------
>Dmitriy K.
>Risk Management
> Namecheap, Inc.

what if I did not notice it in 24 hours? It is the weekend for god's sake! People usually rest until monday.
They would what, cancel order and scalpel it to super high price?!
I have some doubts if the request is trully having anti fraudulent origins.

What if I used digital visa card? How was I supposed to photo it?

And the service they provided for photoing accepts only photos from web camera. I was lucky that I bought recently web camera with high enough amount of pixel power and manual focus. What if I did not?

That's all really SUS!
The person can not notice the letter within 24 hours time frame until the morning, when it would be already too late.

Hi guys,

can somebody recommend me a digital camera, which can be controlled programmatically by computer aka. Rasberry Pi?

I want to try some image processing algorithms and time lapse on live video. The price should be around 200-300$ and it is really important that I can program it.

So I have this habit of copying all my family pics and kids videos onto portable hard disks. Have a 500GB Western Digital since 2012 and another WD 1TB since 2016.
Had one portable HDD failure before that back in 2010, but that contained only old projects code {when I didn't know git} .
So any advice you guys have for me on managing backups of these life memories? I mean I don't trust cloud storage - Google Drive, DropBox etc. And don't want any 3rd party poking into my stuff. That's why these items go straight from Camera to HDD.
What should I do to prepare for another failure? And is there any kind of RAID available in the form of portable solution?
Is it a good idea to change HDD every 5 years or so?