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.