Couple weeks ago I managed to find a place in Budapest to buy Xbox web camera with reasonable price. I do not have Xbox but I have a Apple PowerBook laptop and I was looking for a web camera which would work with both iChat and Skype.
The camera itself works well and the image quality is good. But the problem is that it does not have a suitable stand to be put on the laptop's screen. Because of this chatting is little bit awkward as I cannot look at the screen and the camera at the same time. So, it was time to be innovative...
I do not have a proper workshop here so I just used materials I found from home. I cut a square piece from some left over corrugated cardboard. Then I made two small cuts (a little bit smaller than laptop's lid thickness) and now this square piece looks like letter H. Then I bent it a little bit so those small cuts are facing down. If you think brown cardboard is ugly, you are right. I recommend to think about some nicer material.
Add some bluetac, glue or similar to attach your web camera to this stand and you are done. Just place your enhanced web camera over the screen. Now chatting is almost like in new MacBooks with their built-in iSight cameras. But with basically zero budget upgrade.
I thought until this point that my hosting provider was decent. It is one of those cheap ones but at least it works and I get mostly what I expect. But last weekend things got wrong.
My blog used to be on a server located in Germany. That server broke down and they could not fix it until late Monday night. Meanwhile, DNS entries were changed to point to another server in the USA. But that one did not have my files previously so I got one month old backup. Sort of stupid and embarrassing looking. Then the German server started to function again so they my www.hietavirta.net lead to that one and hietavirta.net pointed to the USA. Also my emails ended up randomly to both servers, so I had to check my account with two different settings. I was able to get some replies from support but the public announcements were lagging behind and were not accurate.
Anyways, now my hosting provider quit cooperation with German guys and my blog is now on a server in the USA. The lesson was that you know how trustworthy your hosting provider is only when something goes wrong.