Taking pictures with your MacBook every time the lid opens | Hacker News Reader

Taking pictures with your MacBook every time the lid opens

benjamin-meyer-home.blogspot.com

76 pointsicefox35 comments

This would be a neat way to catch a laptop thief.

that's what I was thinking. make it send the pics to a web archive whenever it finds an open connection. then you'd almost want your laptop to get stolen

You could create a honeypot netbook and take it with you to places like Starbucks and just leave it out when you go to the bathroom,etc.

Do this, follow it up, expose the thief, make a blog of it, and the advertising income from the blog will probably recoup the laptop cost.

That's pretty close to entrapment.

Prey actually does it as part of their reports on stolen laptops: http://preyproject.com/

Probably not with PhotoBooth though :)

Before reading the article I thought it was going to be about catching thieves.

I just recently submitted an app called iTried to the Mac app store which was kinda built for this (http://bit.ly/hEDJTw)

iTried listens for screensaver stopped events, and then takes the picture. I disabled tweetpic'ing the picture when submitting to the app store, but will re-enable in an update.

But wouldn't a slightly smart thief be able to beat it by using a small sticker on the webcam?

I know a smart lady who (after reading about webcams on compromised machines being used to take snaps without the knowledge of unsuspecting users) used a simple fix; stick a bindi(http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bindi.jpg) on the webcam.

Became far less interesting the moment he started posing for the pictures, IMO. There's tons of photos on the web of geeky types mugging for the camera. It's those moments of unguarded excitement, waiting for your MBP to finish waking up from sleep that are novel.

At least in my opinion.

When you open the lid of a MacBook mine have always been ready and running, there is no waiting for them to finish waking up like on Windows.

Haha, I know, that was just a bit of artistic prose. Still, I think unposed photos would have been more interesting.

Here's a bunch of shell scripts I hacked up take pictures when certain events occur on linux. Could be extended to handle the lid opening or coming out of sleep, although I have a feeling that xscreensaver detecting may already handle most of that case (because I think the screensaver gets activated, or at least the screen is locked, automatically when the lid is closed).

https://github.com/thwarted/picsofourlives

Very neat idea! I know you didn't try posing the same way for every picture, but I wonder if you couldn't put together a video that shows every picture in sequence with your face centered to prevent too much jarring movement?

I've always wanted some way to tap into iPhoto's face recognition since mousing over the thumbnail in Faces view creates a neat effect with the subject's head always in about the same place. Even better would be the image matching tech used on TinEye. For example, find a picture of the moon (or click http://www.tineye.com/search/45a444e7e4f564f58321c60347db9a8... ) then use the "compare" link for various matched images. TinEye rotates and scales all the images to match up as closely as possible, which lets you view some neat moon wobble effects... that kind of tech could be very cool if it was able to do the same with your myriad face photos.

This would work well for DailyBooth, a la scrobbling for last.fm.

I used to do the same thing, but a little differently. I used SleepWatcher as well, ( http://www.bernhard-baehr.de/ ), but set it up to run the following script, which uses isightcapture ( http://www.intergalactic.de/pages/iSight.html ) to do it all in the background:

   NOWDATE=`/bin/date +%Y.%m.%d-%H.%M.%S`
   /usr/local/sbin/isightcapture ~/login_images/$NOWDATE.png
   /usr/bin/scp -o ConnectTimeout=5 ~/login_images/$NOWDATE.png me@myserver.com:~/login_images

Where I have an SSH fingerprint for me@myserver.com installed. This let me back up the images to a server, for convenience and security.

Edited for code formatting.

That is pretty much the solution I had for the first week before I switch to photo booth whos main advantages were: - I could compose a photo with objects and or just remember to be in frame and smile - I could easily delete a bad photo with just a click. - I could take several photos right there and then if I wanted.

I have a daemon that snaps my photo every odd 30 minutes. I was the first thing i built after getting a new laptop with an isight 4 years ago. Should I leave nothing else to the world, there will at least be tens of thousands of crummy jpegs of my face scrunched before a monitor when I die.

Mine are far less cutesy than his because the only indication that a photo is being taken is the little green light activating for a split second. But more authentic i think.

I'm going to do this, but instead of having photobooth open, I found a command line app to capture an image from the isight: http://www.intergalactic.de/pages/iSight.html

Really cool, I always look at these 1 pic a day programs and think I should do that sometimes, and the longest I've done is ~1 week.

What I think would be cooler is if you could randomize it a bit. Privacy concerns?

The was the core idea of getting it when the laptop opened. By having it always go off I had no effort (or choice) about getting my photo taken. And it paid off as I kept at it for years.

I'd personally want to do a daemonized process so I and anyone else would be none the wiser, with a randomized delay of under a minute after the lid was opened.

Regarding privacy? I doubt anyone would get into any sort of trouble with it. If it's your laptop, you can install whatever you want on it, even rootkits and keyloggers.

Check my comment earlier with shameless self plug for iTried (http://bit.ly/hEDJTw) :)

Pretty neat hack! Were you conscious of the script each time you opened the lid? I imagine I would forget about it after the first week.

The first day or two it just took the photo in the background without me knowing about it. But too many of the photos were really bad (deleted most of them). I was moving or my head was cut off or out of frame. I was willing to trade the 'security' of hidden photo gathering and instead just had it launch PhotoBooth and immediately take a picture. That gave me three seconds to compose myself and if I couldn't do it in time I could just click the capture button and take another one. Occasionally I would get annoyed at it, but it was over quick enough.

You could just add a growl notification, might get annoying over time though

If you read the linked article, aside from the very beginning, he uses Sleepwatcher [1] to trigger an Automator script that launches Photo Booth and does the 3...2...1 countdown.

[1] http://www.bernhard-baehr.de/

[2] http://www.apple.com/macosx/what-is-macosx/apps-and-utilitie...

[3] http://www.apple.com/macosx/what-is-macosx/apps-and-utilitie...

Sorry, I should have been more clear. I was wondering if he remembered that the script would launch PhotoBooth before he opened the lid each time. I expect he'd have just grabbed his MacBook and opened the lid and then remembered that it would take a picture.

As it happens all of the time I really don't forget. And if it takes a really horrible photo I can always just click the little X and delete it so no harm.

He mentions an automator workflow and sleep watcher, doesnt really give any explanation on how he really did it.

I tried playing with recording and automater, but it wasnt happen about photo booth.

Okay I got taking a photo with automator to work. I launch photo booth then used a mouse click macro to trigger a photo capture. Then I quit it.

jones.freeshell.org/TakePicture.zip

Pretty neat. Is there any way to do this on Windows? I'd like to try a similar experiment with my Thinkpad

My IdeaPad shipped with Lenovo Veriface which authenticates you based on your picture. It also stores a copy for 24 hours I believe, which you could automatically move before they get removed.

It'd be cool to rig this to upload your facebook profile pic automatically everyday.

Very cool. I will try to remember this when I start using my laptop more often.

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