I was ask if I knew of a way to grab a image from a web page over the course of a day because a friend will be standing in front of a webcam but we didn’t know when.

so as we all know the answer is yes with Linux

First, we need to get the image. the filename is the same but is refreshed once a minute. This will use wget to download the image and name the file like “2009_05_29-15_29_32.jpg”
then all we need to do is setup a cron job [I cheated and used gnome-schedule]

wget http://www.jach.hawaii.edu/weather/images/ukirt.jpg -O /home/alex/Desktop/ukirt_grab/"`date +%Y_%m_%d-%H_%M_%S.jpg`"

Now I listed the contents of the directory by date and output that to a file.

ls -1tr /home/alex/Desktop/Lee > /home/alex/Desktop/ukirt_grab/files.txt

Last, Use mencoder to make the movie.

mencoder -nosound -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4 -o /home/alex/Desktop/test.avi -mf type=jpeg:fps=20 mf://@/home/alex/Desktop/ukirt_grab/files.txt

Hack · Linux · ukirt

My [geek] way of being creative. using a impressive app called Locale and the twitter plugin, I have given My G1 an outlet and a way to reach out to the world.. did i just start skynet??

liveDroid [twitter.com]

android · G1 · phone · skynet · twitter