Live Stream from the Namib Desert | Hacker News Reader

Live Stream from the Namib Desert

bookofjoe2.blogspot.com

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Fellow fan of the Namid Desert waterhole here!

As it happens, I made this wrapper for it

https://waterhole.genmon.partykit.dev

This single-serving waterhole:

- makes the YouTube stream fill the browser for an Immersive Experience(TM)

- shows how many people are watching in real-time

- provides ephemeral chat with other people present

I know at least one team at an unnamed big tech co who would all have it open on their second screens for shared ambience + chat...

(If anybody from YouTube is reading, I have a ton of idea about how ambient live steams are the Next Big Thing and how to lean into that.)

Consider contributing to Peertube!

https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube

This came out last month: https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/live-updates/

Seems like YT is mostly focusing on the interaction between streamer and audience (which makes sense because streaming is big with young ppl rn).

I understand "ambient streams" to be more like a setting for a group chat or chat room, where you're interacting with friends or strangers only, there's no focus on a single creator/streamer. Like hanging out at an interesting location instead of a featureless room.

> I have a ton of idea about how ambient live streams are the Next Big Thing and how to lean into that.)

Are you me?

It's crazy that these giant screens spend most of their time as black rectangles when they could be windows to the world (with very tasteful/quiet/no-motion advertisements).

Happy to pitch to Netflix, Roku, or other streaming services and/or TV manufacturers. :-)

I’d rather have my blank screens than ads.

Advertisements?

When this thread is about a live stream showing wild animals and raw nature, your thought processes goes to advertisements?

I hope you're being incredibly sarcastic, otherwise... Just yuck.

Unless we're advertising for the majesty of nature, for whom there are no entities that would pay (big bucks at least).

I think GP meant that the ambient content could be accompanied by a “tasteful” static sponsored message. Imagine a black stripe at the bottom that said “Sponsored by Home Chef”

Given how much ads on the web escalated in intensity though, I don’t think anyone would buy sponsor spots like that though.

We understood what the GP was thinking in terms of ads. The objection is that any form of advertisement, regardless of how tasteful it might be presented, is the polar opposite of the intended purpose of tranquil windows into nature.

People like these kinds of live streams because it offers a relaxing form of escapism. Dumping even a static ad only serves to add distraction from that atmosphere and thus undermines the very point of having the live stream open in the first place.

I think I agree with you tbh. Then again I go pretty far out of my way to not see ads, other than billboards and maybe those on the sides of buses and bus shelters! To me it’s worth paying not to have them. So I bet a screen would be no different for me.

My old Sony TV, just a cheap model, had a (custom for Sony) “Lofi Girl” ambient screensaver it would go into if you configured it to, with quiet music. It was one of my favorite features.

I tried to find this on Youtube... I'd love to see and hear it if you can find it. Sounds interesting.

I wish I could! The sad part is I no longer have the tv either, so I haven’t seen it in years. My son threw a remote through it :(

Edit: At least I found evidence it existed:

https://www.reddit.com/r/bravia/s/C3Kc1nHWq6

On the topic of ambient livestreams: https://lofi.cafe

Also see this site which is pretty cool: https://onlinesafari.tv

I saw a fox

Nice :-)

Fyi the page is not rendering well for me on an iPhone Pro Max (latest iOS 26, Safari browser.) It's basically cut in half...

you can now turn this into your screensaver on macs!

https://github.com/hauxir/macos-live-screensaver

Just following the chat for a few minutes, people posted links to a couple of other locations:

Okaukuejo waterhole in Etosha National Park: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeMUdOPFcXI (at the time of posting, a herd of elephants are enjoying the water)

Kalahari Desert: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ME0dPuBtzug

The elephants wandered off, and now a bunch of giraffes are drinking from the pond. Some of them even spread their legs wide to keep their feet from getting wet. Very relaxing to watch.

I got 2 rhinos on my very first visit. Extremely cool.

> Some of them even spread their legs wide to keep their feet from getting wet.

I always interpreted the spreadeagle pose of a drinking giraffe to be a way of bringing their head closer to the ground. Do they sometimes not do that?

Yeah, you got it.

The Namib is also home to this rather strange but extremely adapted plant: Welwitschia – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welwitschia

People tend to think that deserts are lifeless wastes to be readily exploited because who cares, right?

If you've ever actually lived in or explored a desert, you quickly learn that they are full of life. More than most urban landscapes.

Why especially on HN?

Can confirm, have ventured all over the deserts of my homeland, and every time I do, I am filled with awe at the temerity of life on the brink of hardship.

It is a spiritually rewarding activity to look out over a landscape, be still for a while, and notice the absolute abundance of life, as robust as ever.

Even in the dustiest Earth voids, there are colours and growth. It pays to look for it.

The Mojave Desert has some of the most beautiful life (plants and animals both) that I've ever seen. I think the lack of a green canopy just misleads people - it looks like a sea of yellow-brown in a satellite image, and even in person, you have to look closely to see the life. But that just makes it more special IMO.

The word "Namib" means "place where there is nothing" in Khoekhoegowab, spoken by the people who live right next to the desert and assuredly explored it.

Where are you getting the gloss? Wiktionary has a definition "wasteland", but also derives it etymologically from a verb meaning "walk". Is there an element that means "nothing"?

I was told it by my driver when I visited the desert during a trip to Angola. Where he got it from? No idea.

Wikipedia states that your interpretation is not 100% certain. It says that there is also believed to mean "vast place," which is not in dispute.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namib#Etymology

So, a vast nothing

This reminds me of the dead sea, it's far from dead, there are life forms in it. It's called the dead sea in Arabic as well (maybe this is the source of the name? Don't quote me on this one)

They are empty places. The biomass per square area is a pittance compared to any other habitat. Water is life. Places with less water have less life. Not all places are equal.

Places with less water have less life.

This is only true if every piece of life requires the exact same amount of water. Which is false. Your argument easily falls down simply by noting that a river has less life than a rain forest.

> Your argument easily falls down simply by noting that a river has less life than a rain forest.

Is that true? What is your source for that?

A chicken farm has more biomass per square meter than just about anything else, but I wouldn’t advocate replacing the Mojave with a chicken farm. There is simply more to it than that.

I love that YouTube lets you jump back up to 12 hours on live streams so that you can see what happened recently/overnight etc.

And you can jump back 5 days(!) with ytarchive: https://github.com/Kethsar/ytarchive

This also works well for safari lodges. They worked out you can just put a pond there and elephants etc will come while guests are having breakfast. Reliably present fresh water in a dry area = animals

My wife and I honeymooned in Botswana many years ago. On our first day in the bush we watched a pride of lions on a kill. Our driver radioed into camp, "fill up the water pans, the lions will be thirsty tonight." Sure enough, late that night the lions came in and drank at the water pan about five feet from the front of our tent. Mind-blowing experience to be lying in bed watching them right there.

We've since explored quite a bit of Southern Africa. The Namib desert is incomparably cool.

Lodges will also add salt to ensure animals keep coming back:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mineral_lick

In my opinion this is one of the most productive uses of the Internet.

It can really help to have this running on some spare screen while trapped in the deep, deep depths of cubicle hell.

Even the wind is soothing.

Another great Namibian destination is the "Ocean Conservation Namibia" channel, where one can witness the rescue of ocean life (mostly mammals, i.e. seals) from the plastic trash of humanity.

https://www.youtube.com/@OceanConservationNamibia

This has been a constantly soothing device in my life for a few years. There is something so cathartic about seeing the little pups being chased down to have their bindings removed.

FAQ about this waterhole, the camera, animals etc. https://gondwana-collection.com/waterhole-camera/faq

Speaking of Namib Desert, yesterday I was in a nature museum and saw the Namib beetle, the fog collector beetle!

https://imgur.com/a/UbIefte

I love nature, and I am seriously thinking of changing careers completely away from technology and getting into a nature-related field, or at least something to use my technology background but spend most of the day with animals and in nature. I just don't know the whats and hows of that change yet. I would definitely take a job even if it's not paying that much in that direction if I found one in a heartbeat!

Fun thing about these beetles is they do their territory call by knocking their abdomen against rocks or hard surfaces making a distinct TokTok sound.

As kids we used to have great fun knocking rocks together around sunset to get them to call back. Kinda like beetle bird calls.

bookofjoe is one of my fav hn community members, didn't realize he had a blog - unsurprised to find it's fantastic. Thanks for being great, Joe! :)

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=bookofjoe

Hey, thanks! Very kind of you. Full story re: bookofjoe blog:

1) I started it on Typepad in 2002 and it continued with multiple posts 365 days/year until September 30, 2025, when Typepad shut down after 30 days notice.

Sporadic archives here: https://web.archive.org/web/20020915000000*/bookofjoe.com

2) After Typepad gave notice, I explored various options (Ghost/Squarespace/WordPress/Wix/Medium/Substack/Blogger) but all but Blogger were too complicated for my TechnoDolt©®™ capabilities, thus I moved to Blogger in early September (https://bookofjoe2.blogspot.com/2025/09/im-shocked-not.html) and have become settled in there, now posting (as I did for years on Typepad) 3 times daily (8am/12noon/4pm) 7 days a week.

A barn like in Philly used to put this up on their TV at night if there wasn’t a game on and it was really popular. It was always cool to see large animals show up.

That should say bar.

Closest to a religious experience I could have had. Thanks!

Nice to see this. I live in Swakopmund, not too far from the Namib Desert.

Not a live stream, but another nice channel from Namibia is Ocean Conservation Namibia: https://www.youtube.com/@OceanConservationNamibia/videos

I can spend hours watching them rescue seals.

How does this kind of watering hole work? It doesn't look like it's just a hole where rain ends up

This one is artificial and is kept full by a solar-powered well system (according to the stream description).

Do you know when you look for a restaurant on google maps and you see a "Popular times" map of people density throughout the day + live updates like "Less busy than usual"? Would be fun to build such a thing for this

how often does it rain there? I seem to have joined the feed just as a shower started

Same. What are the odds?

Same

It made me think of The Who - Love, Reign O’er Me.

  Only love can bring the rain
  That makes you yearn to the sky
  Only love can bring the rain
  That falls like tears from on high

The rainy season is during the summer (Northern Hemisphere's winter). Outside of those months it doesn't rain very often! I've spent two winters (June-August) in Namibia and can't recall much, if any rain. But now that we're approaching summer there, I imagine there's a little more rain. The Namib desert (which is a small percentage of Namibia, to be clear) is one of, if not the, driest deserts in the world.

Oh I suscribed to a bot on the fediverse that posts screenshots from this live!

Here's the url: https://puntarella.party/@NamibDesertBot

Does anyone know what type of camera the stream uses? Or recommendations of an outdoor camera/microphone that could accomplish the same thing? I'd love to do this sort of thing in our rural backyard

Ask the moderators in the Comments section

I'd like to know as well, so that I can set up a caterpillar cam.

I was kind of expecting to hear Toto in the background. https://maxsiedentopf.com/toto-forever/

Reminds me of Africam. Back in the day my kids were very young and we would check it out every morning to see if we could see animals live at the watering holes, probably back around 2005-2008 or so?

Direct link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydYDqZQpim8

And here is a live stream from southern Kenya:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsOU8JnEpNM

and a whole bunch of others:

https://greatplainsconservation.com/live-african-wildlife-we...

This is very cool. Does anyone know how it works in reality (not theorycrafting)? What is internet connectivity and what is power and so on?

There’s a solar well so I assume this is solar powered too but what about network?

Edit: I shouldn’t have used Google. ChatGPT had the answer in seconds https://gondwana-collection.com/waterhole-camera/faq

Solar power, wireless point to point network

I've been feeling so pessimistic about software and the Internet lately and this is an excellent reminder of how magical and enriching it can be.

Hi, we’ve never met but I dig the energy you put into your work that I’ve seen (books, dart etc). An idea I’ve had, but not brought to fruition, is that of using SmallTalk to produce a document of some kind — that is, the result of the work would be a portable executable image that could be read and interacted with and so on :)

Sort of like a self-extracting archive. Do it! :D

Yes! The legendary Book Written In Itself!

>It is powered by solar-panels and the data is sent via Wireless signal over 35km of dunes to the nearest service provider. Initially a live stream was sent to a website and changed to YouTube in June 2021. A microphone was installed in August 2021 to enhanced the experience watching the game. The camera was replaced in December 2021.

I am more interested in how all this is technically achieved.

Interestingly, I see that the watering hole is available on Google street view: 24°04'29.7"S 15°53'14.7"E

Oh this is really soothing - and my cat is really intrigued by all the bird and other noises!

Edit/warning - Wow the thunder is loud!

The ibexes there had a "good time" just when I entered which makes me think. What if other animals can watch us have sex and we have no idea? Imagine whales on the other side of the world know it without us having a clue

I dunno why but it felt a weird to see rock pigeons outside of a city. (2025-10-17 17:00~)

Wonder how many South African's instinctively also clicked into this. :)

Fascinating! Saw a porcupine at 0013, a fennecs at 0027 & 0257, joined by a springbok (thanks ChatGPT), sassy zebras at 0320 (you can see their social behavior!), a jackal at 0740,...

Soothing experience :)

Look around where the camera is:

https://maps.app.goo.gl/1xod6tQmdjNPnsda8

created an android tv screensaver for this

https://github.com/hauxir/androidtv-live-screensaver

I love this "genre", here's a few more live cams from nature https://sci.app

I've been following this stream since I discovered it as my post-NYE activity around 4 am at the beginning of 2024. It's been a joy since then.

This is awesome. What is used to connect the remote spot to the internet? Who is paying for the traffic from the site?

It’s run by a travel agency called Gondwana Collection. The watering hole is at the Namib Desert Lodge [1] so it’s not really remote, they just use whatever internet provides wifi for guests. The watering hole is set up to attract wild animals for the tourists to see so that’s often who runs them. The livestream is a cheap way for them to attract guests.

[1] https://gondwana-collection.com/accommodation/namib-desert-l...

Timestamp: 2025-10-17 17:43:40 The most interesting part of the video. He took a dump near the water and cleaned up.

awesome, would be nice to stream this to a screen on the wall in my home office ... even with low volume sound. project for the weekend :)

We did this in a project where, due to reasons, we used a windowless, dull, claustrophobic meeting room for 6 months. Every now and then our daily was interrupted by the sight of an elephant on the screen

would be nice to stream this to a screen on the wall in my home office

I once toured an elementary school in one country that was "twinned" with another elementary school in another country.

One of the classrooms (4th grade, maybe?) had one wall that was entirely a projection from a camera set up in a classroom of the other school. The other school had the opposite setup.

The effect was of one large classroom, though the projected one was naturally a little dimmer, fuzzier, and de-saturated. But I was told that even though there was no audio link between them, the children of the different classrooms got to know each other on sight, and formed social bonds.

I had exactly this thought looking at this camera's feed. Put it on a huge screen in a classroom BUT only turn it on as a reward. Otherwise no one would ever get anything done.

I have regularly done just that! a projector on a big wall, and a portal to the namib desert... 100% recommend

see my other post with the full-viewport waterhole, that was what I used to get rid of YouTube chrome.

How about time shifted so you are at the same time of day as the video? That would be nice.

Amazing and thank you for sharing!

This is awesome!! thank you so much!!

you can now turn this into your screensaver on macs!

https://github.com/hauxir/macos-live-screensaver

Less youtube is my next big thing. My screen time is too high.

I had this problem for a long time, the only thing that worked was installing an ad on that removes recommendations. The only thing I use youtube for today is intentionally following ASL (starcraft broodwar) in korea.

The ad-on makes the home screen completely white/empty, meaning I just get reminded constantly ohh, yeah I am not supposed to use youtube unless there is something particular I want to watch.

You can do this without addons. I turned off recommendations and history, so I get nothing in my feed and YouTube wont even give me a queue of shorts to scroll through. I have to be very intentional on YouTube now and it has cut my usage down a ton.

I have had this set for a while now and anytime I see someone elses youtube page I am horrified.

Probably the first setting I would recommend for anyone to enable.

Where you do this?

I suggest this: <https://lawrencehook.com/rys/>

I guess that only works if you are logged in?

It’s very surprising that YT even have this option, as it’s not really in Google’s best interests to allow people to unhook themselves.

I'm in the exact same boat. I spend too much time on YT and only thing I really want it for is ASL. I'll probably try the plugin.

I use "Code Injector" extension which is available for firefox and chrome. You can add custom javascript and css to any page. I usually inspect the page, find the classes or ids of the elements I want to get rid of, and do a display:none on them.

Yes, the easy custom solution for any site, if you know a little js and html.

Can you get rid of ads by this method?

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