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Comment by leblancfg | Hacker News Reader

Great stuff! I'm a little frazzled by the fact that you're leaving 350$ cameras in the woods unattended, though. Figures they're not too far from your home given the CAT5 length you mention, but for anyone interested in building one in a more remote location (IoT SIMs with decent data plans are a thing now!), you might want to consider camouflage, and/or setting up in a tree.

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You'd be surprised how much untouched wilderness there is out there. And generally opportunistic criminals don't tend to be wandering through the wilderness looking for cameras to steal. And even then they're face will be recorded for all they know.

Yeah. There are many trails in the US where you can hike for days without seeing another human.

Maybe if you go in circles. If you cover 20 miles/day, even in places like Alberta or Wyoming, it's hard to go much more than two days without bumping into another one in one form or fashion.

On the trails, sure, but a short way off of even the busiest trails you could go an extremely long time without seeing anyone, especially in areas that don't allow hunting.

For example, this woman died after weeks spent lost just near the Appalachian Trail: https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2016/05/25/hiker-who-died-...

Yeah - we used to have a few of those unfortunate events reported every year when I was growing up in Wyoming. Sometimes even when it wasn't cold (dehydration is a thing, apparently). As young kids, we didn't know anything about anything, and always wondered, "why didn't they walk in a straight line? they were never more than 75 miles away from help."

It's really hard to walk in a straight line in dense woods. A compass helps, but even then you have to know how to use it. It's usually best to find a stream, follow it down to a river, and then follow that down to some sort of settlement (hopefully).

75 miles is a lot to cover on foot, too!

It is! Almost two days on open range! (Which is why dehydration is such an issue)

When I was a kid, we were amazed at the people who apparently got lost on Hell's Half Acre, about 40 miles west of Casper:

  - https://www.google.com/search?q=hells+half+acre+wyoming&num=20&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi2iqHTsOXPAhWCsFQKHegtCo0Q_AUICCgB&biw=1151&bih=818

Broke an ankle or got stuck in a gully - sure, but lost?

Now that I'm officially old, and far less energetic, I'd be willing to believe that they just sat down and hoped that help would find them in time.

> leaving 350$ cameras in the woods unattended

Hunters do it all the time.

I worked on a revamp of the system for controlling those cameras remotely, viewing all your pictures, etc... (the cameras had cell modems) at my last job.

Its insane. Not only are the cameras a little pricey (not crazy), but HOLY SHIT the data plans are expensive. Granted, that's where they make money, but still.

Wha? Not anymore. You can get some really cheap data plans these days. Granted I don't know what the reception would be like out in the wilderness...

you can get cheap dataplans as a consumer, straight from the cell providers. Most of the game cameras do not let you just plug in a sim card.

Most of the game camera companies act as resellers of data plans from places like Verizon and AT&T; so they 100% control the data plan rates.

>IoT SIMs with decent data plans are a thing now!

[Citation Needed]

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What do you mean by decent data plans? I'm seeing plans that are between $10 and $20 usd per GiB. That's definitely not good enough of live video, but I suppose you could release new video every month.

here in California there are people even in the woods.

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