Showing a sunrise/sunset realtime 24/7 with the use of unsecured CCTV cameras | Hacker News Reader

7 with the use of unsecured CCTV cameras

driesdepoorter.be

324 pointsdriesdep90 comments

Checked out the artists blog and found this: https://driesdepoorter.be/quickfix/

It's a art installation that allows you to buy likes on Instagram, Facebook, etc. Really interesting idea, shows how disposable those things are. It's amazing what people will do in order to get a couple of rows in the likes table of a social media website.

Thanks for sharing! I'm btw the guy behind this project. When Quick Fix is showed in an exhibition a lot of young people try it. Some try it for 1 dollar and come back later with 10 dollar. Since a few months Quick Fix is a lot asked for those 'Instagram museums'. I hope it shows how easy it is to blow up the numbers on social.

Wait, so you mean places like the Museum of Ice Cream and the likes, with installations somewhat obviously targeted at people who want to photograph and post them, want to have this available on-site? I wonder if the people don't realize the irony or if they are beyond the point of seeing anything "wrong" or strange about paying to inflate their like counts.

I think it's pretty cool of the organisation. In first place they place it as a critique. It's shows a bit of the darker side of social media.

It's just a cheap version of an endorsement deal. Michael Jordan, $80 million/year. Museum of Ice Cream, $5/like.

I think it tells us something about nature of "art", what it is and what it used to be. Just not sure what.

It's funny how easily can "unsavoury botting and spamming" become an "art installation". Also makes you wonder what exactly is difference between "art" project linked above and like/follower vending machine (https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/xw8yv3/russian-vending-ma...).

i see art is some amounts of aesthetic rendition and an encapsulation of an idea. Rembrandt might lean more into the former, while e.g. found objects (dada etc) and something like this are more the latter. "bad art" only exists in as far as failing to pose an interesting question and/or reach an audience aesthetically.

personally i think this project does a great job of posing questions about what it means to be successful on social media.

That is a beautiful way on how to look to art!

Look carefully at the inside of the coin slot...

If you left this for a few months, the whole case would fill up with coins, and that arduino certainly isn't going to work so well immersed in coins...

Hahaha to be honest you are right!

> ouple of rows in the likes table of a social media website

Don't get me wrong, I very much enjoy this kind of obstinate reductionism and we don't remind ourselves enough that this is what driving lots of our interactions online.

However, I will just add a slight counterpoint in that my bank balance is, at the end of the day, "just a bunch of rows" in a database and, to be perfectly honest, that is somewhat meaningful. :)

When I think of art that combines tech and art - this is the kind of thing that comes to mind, I really like it.

Some of the things you see attempting to combine technology and art is a serious con [0].

Don't get me wrong, the space mentioned in that link is famous (and notoriously difficult to get in to on a regular day). Some of the recordings were quite well tuned, but they basically set up a multispeaker system and played some noises on loop. People were meditating to the relaxing highway noises being played in a former power plant. It gets to some people's heads i guess. The event description would make you think it was a drug experience.

[0] - http://singuhr.de/en/projects-2014/2020-2/eleven-songs/

Thanks! For me it's super important that people can understand my art super easy. Art doesn't need to be difficult.

And Rothko just put paint on canvas.

I’m not sure that technical complexity is the best benchmark with which to measure an art project, regardless of whether it’s an “art x tech” project.

Great point. Ouch.

FWIW, I did a complete 180 wrt Rothko. Once I bothered to learn why others thought Rothko's works are important, I'm embarrassed by my prior dismissal.

yeah, i guess so.

Look, I can appreciate art, when the intention and meaning is legitimate - that is up to the audience to judge for themselves. When it's random crap being monetized as art (very pretentiously), I can't get behind it.

Lots of angles to attack "art" but monetization isn't one that applies here.

This is extremely hard work to sell, time-consuming to create, and doesn't scale in any way that's compatible with an industry unpinned almost entirely by scarcity.

Think about how much this would cost to prototype and build, and how much time the artist put into conceptualizing and creating it. Then think about the tiny subset of people who would want to (and had space to) live with pieces like this—no matter how cool they are.

Even if a piece like this sold for $50k (which would put this artist in > 95th percentile of earners), take $25k off the top for the gallery, subtract out cost of materials and take into account maximum annual output and, factoring in value of his time, we're talking modest middle class money. Nevermind the endless schmoozing and strategic friendships and events and studio visits it takes to drum up any gallery/institutional/collector relationships...

Kudos to the artist, keep fighting the good fight!

This thread wasn't about the article's piece of art, more about the example provided by me as being a gimmick disguised as art. As stated in the root comment, I like the piece the link is about as it's far more authentic. (Obviously this is all opinion)

The example I happened to provide though definitely scales. The line was a 3 hour wait and the entrance was not free (granted - covid capacity and all that).

If there's anything to be annoyed by here it's probably the writing in many art publications... much like the back label on a bottle of wine, the art industry has developed a writing convention for descriptions and artists statements that can get a bit nauseating at times. It's a matter of style and presumably doesn't stand out to people in the arts who read these all the time.

Neat project, but I was really hoping there might actually be a video feed of the current sunrise and sunset. It seems like a missed opportunity for the subject matter and medium.

Hosting live video in a scalable way is a much harder challenge than just showing it once somewhere. But it would have been cool to have a summary video of one day/night cycle, travelling around the world, maybe at 10x-100x acceleration. A one-time video also probably creates less legal issues as you can review and cull the footage (IANAL).

Can't you just put it on Twitch/YouTube?

Hmm yeah good point. Thought that you'd need to have at least $n many subscribers to be able to live stream on youtube but seems they've lifted the restriction since.

There is a limit 12 hours for verified youtube account. 1 hour for non-verified. Perhaps twitch.

There's always options like https://joinpeertube.org/ or https://webtorrent.io/

Last time I checked, peertube doesn't do livestreaming. Has that changed? Based on the name, can I assume that webtorrent also does not?

"But it would have been cool to have a summary video of one day/night cycle, travelling around the world, maybe at 10x-100x acceleration."?

How does livestreaming works through torrent? What about latency?

> Hosting live video in a scalable way is a much harder challenge than

Totally. It requires figuring out and setting up arcane software such as Darwin Streaming Server, or Nimble Streamer, something like Quicktime Broadcaster, and Apache2, and also requires massive hardware resources, like a server for broadcasting, a server for shooting, and a webserver... that could be anywhere from one to two entire machines. That the WWW works at all is somewhat of a miracle. What webdevs do is more like brain surgery than anything else. ><

Not the artist, but...

That is most certainly done on purpose and as part of the installation: you have to be present at -this- specific location to consume something that is 'at a random other location'.

Lovely construct, I like the tension between the limited (viewer location) vs unlimited (camera location).

Anybody have a suggestion for good outdoor cameras, ideally that can be powered by solar, for similar application? I've been looking for cameras for something similar, but every one I review is either not weather proof or requires some kind of mobile app IE: intended for security camera type use. I've got a use case where I want to be able to stream particular outdoor videos to an audience without requiring a lot of account setup or client-side requirements.

Look at outdoor cameras targeted at the commercial market, e.g. from Hikvision and similar brands. Solar is probably out of the question due to power requirements, but if you can run one Ethernet cable, there's a lot of cameras available that run from PoE and stream over RTSP, which can be proxied to YouTube (or AWS, etc) without much trouble.

Cost will be considerably higher than for IoT residential junk, however.

Hikvision cameras are good, however they encode video in their own proprietary format (at least when I last checked) so you will have difficulties streaming them to anything that is not their make.

They use ordinary h264, the wonky encoding is the proprietary storage container format. For streaming you can just use bog standard RTSP.

Interesting. I am no way an expert in video encoding, but is there a way to get it streamed to the browser? I have a bunch of hikvisions but so far I am using it either through their Android app, or an ancient Firefox plugin.

If it provides an RTSP stream, you should be able to just log into it via a browser, either using the ip directly or putting rtsp:// in front. I'm using Amcrest cameras at home, seems like a lot of models work similarly.

I've got Hikvision cameras that I use with OrchidVMS I can pull out the camera RTSP stream with a direct URL like: rtsp://[cameraIP]/Streaming/Channels/101?transportmode=unicast&profile=Profile_1

which will open directly in VLC with a login to the camera

I've used some cameras and streaming setups to pull in the video stream directly, Samsung ones did this quite well.

I've used ffmpeg to convert from that format. If your CPU is fast enough it could probably handle re-encoding just in time for streaming (there are cli flags to do that).

Yeah, I have done that as well, but so far could find a way to live stream it

I worked on a project powering Hikvision cameras over solar and a big battery, I don't know the specs of the panel but I know it can be done.

It's using IPTimelapse to grab photos and generate time-lapses (however we've found the software to be buggy, and we're gonna move to ffmpeg for time-lapses and probably a small script to grab photos).

The website is fully staticly generated which I was happy with.

See: https://cmcameras.net.au

I wouldn't support Hikvision, but there are a number of good options from Axis, Hanwha, Vivotek, and others. They are all generally 7W or less, so solar compatible in most locations.

Look for cameras rated IP66 or IP67 and you should have something that will stand up in typical outdoor locations.

How do people feel about ubiquiti cameras? Just curious.

You might consider making your own with an IP67+ box. I've done that for weatherproofing projects for electronics. (a long time ago the first design was for gps tracking old tractors)

Look into Ubiquiti. I use their UniFi line of products from networking to security cameras in 2 places and I’m very very pleased. Everything runs on PoE. They also sell some solar accessories called SunMAX.

Most of their products require a phone to set them up. My father in law has an AP I setup once 2 years ago and never needed the mobile app again.

This is a great idea! Is there an online version of this installation anywhere? Or a list of cameras you use? Also, love those VFD displays!

I did something similar with the public webcam feed from the top of Mt Hood in Oregon. Made a lil script that posts/tweets a time lapse of the sunrise and sunset each day: https://whatcoloristilikumcrossingrightnow.com/timberlineSun...

Also on Twitter: https://twitter.com/mthoodsunrise

Awesome project! Thanks for the complement!

It would help with the discussion if you'd answer the questions too.

Should be displayed next to this piece that shows the exact place of the sun at any given moment: https://nitzan-ron.com/Pointer

Waw really amazing work! Love it!

I wonder if an empty 787-9 has 24 hours of endurance. Or some other plane. You could fly a plane along a latitude to film a continuous sunrise or sunset.

Obviously, it'd be complicated when you're targeting a particular ground speed, need some support from air traffic control, are ignoring ETOPS, switching to metric flight levels, etc. And it'd be stupid expensive, but still.

Side question: if you're flying west, take off in the morning, but fly faster than the sun moves across the sky, will you see a sunrise or a sunset in the east?

You will see a sunset behind you.

I once departed Stockholm on Jan 1st, flying to San Francisco. The route goes north, across the polar circle and over Greenland, then south towards the US west coast. As we passed the polar circle, the sun set. A few hours later, we passed it again and the sun rose, only to set again as we approached the evening in US. So I got two sunrises, two days and two sunsets that single day, which I thought was so wonderful I still remember it.

You'd need more than a regular 787, given that the circumference of the earth is 40.000 km so you'd have to fly roughly 1600 km/h or more than mach-1... Then again, that is when flying at the equator. Taking off further north/south would reduce the speed required to stay in sync with the rising or setting sun...

Given that the circumference of the Earth for a given latitude is easily approximate to cos(latitude) * 40000 km you can fly around 60 degrees north or south and be comfortably on the cruising speed of a 787 (~800 km/h).

At 60 degrees the planet is nearly uninhabited for vast stretches. Ok, that would not affect sunsets. But at 66.6 degrees sunsets stop to happen depending on the time of the year. Already St. Petersburg (Russia) at 60 degrees north is famous for their white nights. At 30.000 ft it's worse. So not convinced about spectacular sunsets, I would expect continuous twilight.

I live at 64 degrees and sunsets take "forever" and are mostly boring compared to at more southerly locations.

I'm aware of that, haha, I live nowadays right by the 60N latitude (Stockholm, Sweden) and came from Brazil at around 23S, I've experienced both types of sunsets and I'd say I find the ones at higher latitudes to be much more spectacular than the short ones closer to the equator.

So let's say a trip onboard a 787 around the +-60 latitude during spring/fall equinox is completely doable for chasing the sunset :)

There is a Belgian TV show called "Into the Night" which explores a kind of similar concept, where they have to stay in the night time or else bad things happen so they fly a plane around. I won't spoil it for you, but it's subtitled & available on Netflix.

Great show imo

Snowpiercer is the inverse: People have to stay in sunlight to survive, so they build a nuclear-powered train that runs around the world's equator.

they use a concord once to watch a solar eclipse longer https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=concorde+eclipse+flight&atb...

You'd need a secret Russian nuclear plane for that.

Definitely doable. And with air refuelling capability you don't even need the endurance. Just have the tankers ready for you where you need them.

btw, I also made Die With Me, the chat app you can only use when you have less than 5% battery. https://driesdepoorter.be/diewithme/

This is a little ad ;)

I totally remember this one! I kept an old android phone on like 4% battery and kept putting it on and off the charger to stay chatting with people. Good times.

Your portfolio is fantastic. Really smart/clever stuff. Usually I feel like the "technology" based art I see in galleries is just trash. But this is a real solid counter point :)

Would be amazing if somebody made a search app that worked like this: "find me a sunset/seagull/mug/plant/<object> from anywhere in the world"

It would use image recognition models that kept flipping through unsecured cctv/ipcams until the picture matched the search.

At that point you might as well make it useful and search all cctv for the face of some suspect. And of course with zoom and enhance features too.

(memes aside, I am sure this tech already exists given how popular the idea is in tv shows and movies)

Shodan meets tensorflow?

Sunset is easier since it only requires knowledge of the camera location. No fancy stuff needed. Finding objects would require the full video feed being analysed.

Location of the camera doesn't guarantee that a sunset is visible.

True, everything is based on time & location of the camera. I manually curated the cameras and made sure there is around 50% sky in the image. Also if the camera is not pointed perfectly to the sunset/sunrise you will most of the time see it based on the colors. A next step I want to integrate is that it will select the camera based on the amount of orange/red.

What a beautifully designed hardware controller, so much attention to details.

Super thanks! Makes me happy that people see that :)

This is gorgeous.

It's obvious but I'm kind of humbled by the idea that you could just watch someone start their day and someone end their day at any given point of time or space on this Earth.

Feels distinctly Buddhist in some way.

I remember years ago seeing an ad for a mobile phone with one guy watching the sun go down saying "Is it there yet?" and then the other person seeing it come up and saying "It's here".

Just tried to find it, but my google-fu skills aren't working, or I just imagined it. Either or both are distinctly possible.

Oeee sounds very interesting!

This was a real ad. i remember it too :) no clue who for.

Slightly different than what you're describing, but same concept: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbtvTuivJu8

This reminds me of “The Little Prince” who could watch 43 sunsets per day due to the tiny size of his asteroid. Now we can do it too

I want streamable, high quality, normal speed VR sunsets so bad.

I know how you can get a high quality, normal speed sunset every day of the year, for free!

You don’t even need a VR headset.

Step 1 - don't live in the arctic circle :)

Unfortunately, that's at the root of my desire. Where I live, the final :30-1hr of the sun going down is obscured by mountains and trees, which means I may occasionally see a glimpse of some pretty clouds, but often not much.

Sunsets are one of the most relaxing things in the world to me so I'd eagerly pay a subscription for such an offering that let me do this on demand.

Hey driesdep, I love the look of this!

Meta question: are there any tips, pointers, tutorials, or classes you can recommend to make that beautiful metal enclosure you've built? It's a thing of beauty.

I think I'm just good at Google and trying stuff out :)

That's a really slick hardware piece, awesome work on that front.

Super thanks! <3

Brilliant. I can easily see a product like this, customizable, for sale. I bet there would be thousands of customers in the world interested in buying something like this. Big margins too.

Very good idea :) Let's go!

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