So, you’ve got an Eye Toy for Christmas, and you’ve been playing with it on your playstation 2. You’ve spent a large amount of time heading the ball at balloons, kickboxing, directing puyo’s, and waving your arms frantically at Billy Hatcher. You probably need to relax, sit down, and have a nice cup of tea. Play Sega Superstars until the early hours of the morning, have a few shots of squished frogs, and drink sme high caffeine tea. You’ll soon find yourself blurting gibberish like “Dude, it’s like, a USB camera, it has to work on a computer too, somehow. I bet you could plug the dance mat in too, and use it instead of a keyboard”. Well hold up, one thing at a time - I had a free weekend with nothing to do, so time to plug in the Eye Toy.

I actually found a really helpful guide for using the Eye Toy under Windows XP after a short amount of Googling. You download the drivers, change a .inf file, and install. Within minutes I was on MSN with my shiny new camera. So, rather than waste my time writing it out again, here’s a link

• Setting up your Eye Toy under Windows XP.

So now I had an entire weekend to do nothing, and no idea what to do next. So rather than enjoy the time off, doing things not involving computers, I did what any geek would do…. “I wonder if it’ll work under Linux”. This one took a lot more Googling, but yes, it does.

1. Check your camera model as per the Windows XP instructions, mine is the Namtai SLEH-00031. Others might work, but I don’t know - try it anyway?
2. Download the ov51x JPEG Hacked Driver source
3. Unzip, untar, and change to the directory
4. Run a make, and a make install
5. Providing there are no errors, plug the camera in, and load the modules by using the commands
   insmod ./ov51x.ko
   insmod ./ov519_decomp.ko

That’s all there is to it really. Now you just need some software to use the camera with. Personally, my linux box doesn’t have a monitor, or for that matter, any form of X. So, for that reason I setup motion to take jpeg snapshots whenever there’s movement. Cheap man’s security camera (especially when you consider the price of the Eye Toy is quite good for the quality it provides).

So, this is really easy to setup under fedora, just install the rpm from motion’s web site. If you’ve got ffmpeg, and ffmpeg-devel already installed, make sure you uninstall your version, and install the recommended versions from the livna repository (check the link above for those details).

Run motion with “motion -s” (so you can see what’s going on) - and you’ll notice images will be saved whenever movement is detected. Wave at the camera a few times, then go and make a nice cup of tea

So there we have it. There’s my guide to the eye toy on your PC. Not the most in depth, but hopefully enough to get you started. I also wrote this a good few hours after the fact, so I’m sure I probably missed something! If I ever come to have to reinstall, I’ll make sure to update here as well (or if anyone points out my glaring mistakes :))

The 24 hour tube strike finished today at 6.30 this evening. The strike was all about something or other, because a lot of the people who work on the tube were a bit miffed about their new schedules. Actually, I do have every sympathy for people affected by a rota that would potentially cause job losses. Until they throw their toys out the pram and strike, that is.

Anyway, the strikes this morning were devastating on a personal level. Delayed the Northern line, closed one of the exits from London Bridge. It’s a wonder I made it to work at all. Don’t even get me started on the journey home. That was a whole different story, news of the strikes had obviously travelled with many people at work saying. “The what? What’s that about then? Nope, didn’t notice it”.

I’m not sure they exactly hammered the point home. But I did get a seat on the fairly empty tube around 6.00. And THAT’s not normal.