WindowSwap: View someone's window somewhere in the world | Hacker News Reader

WindowSwap: View someone's window somewhere in the world

window-swap.com

442 pointsrosstex69 comments

> We need all the window views we can get. So, please send yours to qunaliaa@gmail.com. A 10-minute, horizontal HD video of your window and frame, with your name and location for credits. Horizontal, vertical, square, round or decorative, all kinds of windows are welcome!

Oh, I guess it makes sense now that I think about it, but I really thought the views were live at first. Watching what I thought were live feeds felt super cool. :(

Huh. I recall coming across a Tor onion site with links to various security cam systems. Nothing exciting, just live video of lobbies, elevators, parking lots and garages, etc.

Back in the 90s a friend had modified his Realistic brand radio scanner to pick up cell phone frequencies. Nothing was encrypted back then. One of the calls we heard was of a computer generated voice repeating the phone number, the "internal temperature" and then a thirty second audio feed of what sounded like machinery. Every time I tried calling the number, it was the same thing though the temperature varied by a couple of degrees now and then. Never heard any voices or much variety in the machine noises. No idea what it was other than some local factory.

The condo building I lived in during the 2000s had its server with all of the video cameras hacked. Probably the most exciting thing anyone could see was the fitness room with people exercising. We had no idea if anyone actually bothered watching the feeds or if it was just part of a botnet.

Huh. Remote equipment maintenance?

Then there's this: https://gizmodo.com/these-secret-cold-war-radio-stations-are...

It's strange when you come across those.

Are you sure it wasn't just a plain old website? There was one posted here a few years ago (and I thought the site went down but it's actually still going):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13272112

I'm pretty sure that it was an onion site.

But Insecam is amazing :)

I have recently scanned addresses within a radius of my town and there's still a lot of cameras with default credentials or with no password at all. It's getting better over the years, but not quite.

Quite a lot of Ultimaker 3D printers in there, that wasn't the case a couple of years ago. And factory floors/production lines in general. Remains fascinating, and awkward.

With the right search words you can find plenty of those on https://www.shodan.io/

edit: I found this one [1] just by searching for webcam. Seems to be from some factory.

[1] https://i.imgur.com/WevJodh.png

That’s a camera trained on a 3D printer, not from a factory. Quite popular with hobbyists to monitor the progress of prints.

Oh damn, I thought so too... :(

You might be interested in https://www.earthcam.com/ - they host a large selection of live webcams from different locations around the world, many at a pretty decent HD resolution and frame rate.

Here's a live view of Midtown Manhattan for example: https://www.earthcam.com/usa/newyork/midtown/skyline/?cam=mi...

Or the Seattle Space Needle: https://www.earthcam.com/usa/washington/seattle/?cam=seattle...

Love that site, still feels like the old days of the Web to look at the huge list of webcams

I'm quite disappointed too. Wish you didn't have to go to the submit a window page to know its not live. I was ready to give access to my nest!

People keep saying it's disappointing, but give it one minute of thought. Being prerecorded is the only reason it's interesting and has any content.

Almost nobody is going to set up a dedicated webcam to constantly stream the interior of their window for some novelty website. And the few webcam streams you would see would be low quality, not capture anything interesting, accidentally capture the baby wailing, etc.

But a 10min iPhone recording to capture the top 10min of their window in a day? That's a decent idea.

It does make sense, it just felt cooler when I thought it was live.

I too thought it was live. Until I saw a sunset of a location one time zone away at 2 pm. And then one with rain in my current city with it being sunny presently.

Since it's not live, maybe submissions should trim the part where they are adjusting the camera in the correct direction (not to be too critical). While it would certainly reduce the number of submissions to be live, this is hacker news. I'm sure there would still be a handful of interesting locations.

If it was live it would just be a matter of time before a penis appeared on screen. :(

Yep, I felt like I was rolling the dice every time I hit next.

Your comment reminded me of Omegle

I will bite, why would anyone send their name and location to a random webservice? Taking the time to record and upload a 10 min hd video as well. What is the benefit?

Enjoying the idea, trusting that it’s intended in good faith as an art project or similar, and wanting to participate.

You can also give a fake name and a very loose location

The name is for credit, I assume you can give a fake handle or no name at all. As for the location, again I assume you don't need to send your full address if you don't want to. City will probably suffice.

Ah, I also thought it was live and couldn't understand why they stopped after a while :)

Some are much shorter than 10 minutes. I saw one in Shanghai (IIRC) that was 10-20 seconds.

Some of them are in locations that are easily identifiable by landmark buildings, which seems a bit scary/creepy.

All I get are static images. No videos at all.

Let's think this through. Imagine you are a super evil criminal, who is just looking for an opportunity to commit a crime. Now you see a video that allows you to identify the house from which it was recorded. So you know there is probably a person who visits HN and who recorded a video from his desk. Now what? How can you possibly use this information in a bad way?

I was quite relieved to realise they weren't live. That means you can watch it in peace knowing that the service won't be abused and someone has reviewed the footage.

Great idea, strangely calming.

Not normally interested in novelty sites like this but I think it's absolutely wonderful. I live in a leafy Seattle suburb and am constantly smug about how lovely it is here. Most of these were at least as pretty.

> I live in a leafy Seattle suburb and am constantly smug about how lovely it is here.

Submit your window to the linked site, so others can enjoy it too if you didn’t already :)

My major takeaway from this: 1. Big cities are really boring! 2. Street level has more going on, but some people have to live with quite a lot of noise, higher up is quieter. 3. The world is a much windier place than I realised.

Great idea though.

I've been streaming the birdfeeder on my balcony on youtube. mostly for fun and my mom. It makes a new stream every morning at 6am PST8PDT time, https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0hyjYFftwe8vKnpERMS8ug

The finches that visit mostly come around in the morning and before noon, with some around in the afternoon.

Neat! What sort of camera setup do you have for this?

It's a raspberry pi with a logitech C920. The software is just some shell scripts + gstreamer to do the actual streaming. It goes to a server and then to youtube from there, so that I can have a much less laggy version of the video for my own use when positioning things or otherwise working on it.

can you add a button to get a link to some of these so you can go back to them?

for instance this is a nice sunset going on at the moment

https://player.vimeo.com/video/431141355?autoplay=1&title=0&...

but had to go extract it out of the code

oh, these aren't live, just recorded videos? even recorded, these are interesting.

10 min recordings.

Yeah, it is an exponentially more difficult problem when done live - aka Bill O'Reilly Rule.

On the point of buttons that "Open a new window somewhere in the world" button really needs moving to the bottom right corner. Despite being transparent it's blocking and spoiling the views.

Try this in the JS console:

  $('#btn-window').setAttribute('style', 'left: 95%; right: 5%; transform: translate(-50%,0%);')

The following seems to do it:

  $('#vimeo-frame').getAttribute('src').match(/^(.*)\?/)[1]

Beautiful project. I once had an idea to do some similar but with real time live camera feeds. And some sort of subscription/marketplace where people with amazing views would get paid to share their amazing views, and other folks would subscribe to that realtime 24/7 feed.

Some surfers use services like this to check if the wave conditions are right before they go out.

A friend had a startup that did this for nightclubs so you could see which club was really going hot and which was dead. He got a couple of places to sign up but think ultimately it failed to gain traction because no nightclub wants potential customers to know ahead of time that it's dead inside.

You could achieve this by selectively showing what it was like last Friday night at 1am instead of a live view at 8pm when nothing is happening but people are deciding...

There another site that adds live radio to canned video

https://driveandlisten.herokuapp.com/

Was here on HN a couple weeks back

This gave me such strong feelings of location nostalgia. Thanks for resharing.

This is so relaxing to watch. I think the lack of a 'bookmark' function actually makes me linger on certain windows longer; I know that if I hit 'next' I probably won't be able to come back to that window.

They are 10-minute recordings anyway, so you won't see anything new... That being said; there is a workaround until it gets implemented: Right click the video and select "Inspect". You will see the link to the Vimeo hosted video file.

awesome work! we're gonna submit one tomorrow!

it would be cool if you tagged the videos by time of day and showed daytime/nighttime ones based on the client's local time (or preference)

I think that will work best if you display all the windows on a map and let the user select the location.

Love this. Best internet idea in a long time. The pre-recorded video is key.

I am recording one right now!

Found someone who was playing Beatles in the background, half a world away, overnight in Dubai... (I know it's not live but it was still dark). Nice to have the sounds/ambiance as well as the video...

Not being familiar with London, this is probably a popular spot, but just watched The Old Guard on Netflix last night and noticed James Sandham's window and 1:48:12 in the movie are the same.

I would enjoy a "slideshow" or auto-advanced feature that automatically moves to the next window when the video finishes or after some fixed period of time.

Not working on Safari.

Works perfectly fine on my Safari v13.1.1 on MacOS 10.15.5

Not working on iOS 13.5.1 Safari on my iPad. The thumbnail shows for a brief moment and then the page goes blank

Click the next button. Somehow on safari the first window is broken.

Nice! Too bad I didn't find a way to save/share a good one (some mountain landscape, etc.); maybe that's not the point?

All I get are static images in mobile devices. No video. :(

All I get are static images in mobile devices. No video.

This is so neat! Thanks for this!

This thing makes me so happy.

This is so cool..

Loved it!

not working on firefox, x-frame blocked...

Huh, I'm also on Firefox and it worked.

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