Doing repair to "Twirl-a-squirrel".

At one time, the “Twirl-a-squirrel” had taken a fall. One of the battery holders had broken at the time, but I did a bandaid fix on it which kept it working.
Now is the time for a permanent fix. You can see it above the green feeder in this video.



This thing is worth the 40 bucks it costs. It is great fun to see a squirrel get on the feeder and go for a ride. The great thing, is you can use any kind of feeder. Once you hang it and turn it on, it calculates the weight of the feeder. When a large critter gets on, it spins for about 10-15 seconds. Long enough for the squirrel to decide it better let go.

Here is an old video of such a ride:

Software for streaming video

I continue to correspond with the developers of EvoLV streaming software for the Mac. It appears that some bugs have been cleared up. It no longer seems to be hogging memory. That was causing the program to crash, especially when a viewer came on or left.
If you notice any weird things happening on the video, please send me a line to let me know.

New window feeder

I picked up a new window feeder. I am hoping for a closer view of the birds once this feeder gets visitors.
I got (stole) this idea from seeing Spike's great site at bluebirdlovers.com.
It has turned out that the birds found the new feeder. However, I did remove the other feeder to force them to look for this one. It's worked out well.
I will be monitoring this myself as I will be busy most of next week, so hopefully all will go well.
Also, this weekend, John and I set up the bee hive to get ready for spring. You can see a few pictures at beehivecam.com.

URL Stuff

I did a little housecleaning on the websites today. If you arrived here via trajnet.com, you may have been confused by arriving at the birdhousecam website. I thought that having a separate site for trajnet was kind of a waste. The bird site and weather site are what gets what little traffic I have. They are all on the same server, so I just pointed trajnet.com to the bird site.
In a couple of months or so, the beehive site should become active. I'm looking forward to that, even if I do end up with some bee stings. Maybe it will be good for my arthritis. Hmmm, pay me a buck and I'll let you get stung too.
Anyway, I hope I explained a thing or two here.

Streaming software

Since using EvoLV software to stream the video, I've experienced some crashing to the program. I have been in contact with the programers and they have been working to solve the problem.
Yesterday they sent me an updated version to test. The problem was that in some instances, viewers disconnecting would result in either a freeze up or the program ceased. The new version looks like it has taken care of that problem. If it continues to show it is corrected, they will release a new version.

Changed video streaming

Evological.com released their new streaming software that I've been waiting for. Now I do not have to go through Stickam.com to get great streaming. This uses Quicktime, so you may have to download the driver for QT if you haven't already got it.

Some updates

This morning, I updated the "technical setup" page. Actually, I also renamed it to "How it works". A few more pictures were added and I hope it makes it clearer how my sites work.

Also, I have a new website coming this Spring. I will be starting beekeeping in a few months. We have been getting the required supplies and have everything to start except the bees. I have them on order and in early Spring will start. The website is already up and you can see it here. If everything works out, I will have a camera on the hive to have a close up view of the activity.

Save the link and visit after winter is over.