The last few days, I’ve been notably absent from my computer. Why? Well, one of our cats got poisoned by MenuFoods, and she finally came back from the hospital. Her kidneys were sort of in the not-completely-dangerous range, but she didn’t really want to eat.
That means we really needed to know when and if she ate. With two cats in the house, that’s not easy – just the fact that food vanishes doesn’t mean a thing. So we put my MacBook to good use – it has a built-in camera, and we had it watch the food area. Of course, you don’t want to watch 24 hours of food bowls every day – we needed a solution that only kept the interesting parts.
Enter EvoCam – a little shareware tool that allows you to place motion sensing areas in your video feed. It then saves the recordings to disk. Or, if you feel the need to know all the time, even uploads snapshots to a web site – an excellent tool if you have to leave the house yet want to know what’s going on. Unfortunately, that meant my laptop (or, really, my outboard brain) was tied up.
RocketFish Webcam
This weekend, I went shopping for an OSX compatible web cam. iSight was out of the question – too expensive. Most other cameras don’t even mention Mac system requirements, until I ran into a cute little camera from Rocketfish. It works excellent with EvoCam, but I haven’t (yet) gotten it to cooperate with iChat.
So our cats now live in a total surveillance state 
The good news is that both are eating again. Seems like we’re slowly getting into the safe zone with the whole food issue…
P.S.: Our little kitty became a TV star when the local CBS station reported on the whole MenuFoods issue. She was cute enough that they even took her picture for the national site. I’ve uploaded a [video of her](http://www.robertblum.com/movies/Angie at the Hospital.mov) – she’s the second cat, black & white.
Do standalone iSights even get sold any more? The Apple Store online doesn’t seem to carry them.
No – I checked out a local Apple repair shop. They usually have fairly decent deals.
i am slow reading feeds these days, i am very happy your kitties are feeling better.
So am I, penny. She still needs regular subcutaneous fluids, but apart from that she’s all her old self. And since she’s a really sweet cat, she voluntarily lies down and holds still for the subQ fluids. The vet is in awe
I recently purchased a rocketfish camera like yours and can’t get it to work with iChat. Did you have to do anything else with it?
Since the rocketfish camera is a USB device, it won’t work with IChat since IChat only recognizes Firewire cameras. You can get around this by using IChatUSB which allows USB cameras to work with IChat. I tried it and the Rocketfish camera works fine.