I’m posting here in IMHO, rather than just shopping on E-bay, because I want your first-hand opinions and experiences as well as your product recommendations.
[Mods, if this goes in Cafe or somewhere else, feel free to move it - but let me know where.]
So here’s an annoying situation: There’s a dog in the neighborhood that barks constantly* when it is left outside while the owners are away from the house. This could be five minutes or five hours. The neighbor has been given warning letters but has done nothing to address the problem. The county Animal Control laws and relevant municipal noise abatement codes require evidence of the problem before they’ll come out and investigate. Another neighbor is getting involved because the dog has been keeping his kids awake late and then they’re getting up grumpy and being brats at school. He has started keeping a start-and-stop date/time log, as have I, but we’re both realizing we’re not keeping very good track of the matter because we’re at work more often than at home. Another suggestion from the Animal Control website is to provide recordings – which is where your recommendations come in.
Ideally, what I’d like to do is point a camera at a clock face and just have it record video and sound. The dog’s barking will then be recorded for hours. The objective would be to mail-in a formal complaint along with a flash drive or three full of video files that are trimmed to stop when the dog shuts up for the day (night). At the end of each day I’d have to spend a few minutes finding the time when the dog stopped barking (i.e. one of the owners finally came home) and trim off the useless recording.
The problem is that my ancient BlackBerry Bold doesn’t have enough battery power or memory capacity for storing several hours worth of sound & video, regardless of how boring and static it may seem. So I thought what I need is a way to capture the video and sound and have the data transmitted directly to a laptop or tower computer connected to a huge hard drive or on-line data storage site.
That could mean I’d need a device that’s bundled with stream-capturing software, which would reside on a computer that would process and store the captured video & sound. Or it could mean I need an old Ipod and a USB cable. I have a feeling I’ll be buying a used set-up, since I don’t really want to spend more than $150 for this loathsome project. So what kind of devices are out there to handle all these preferences?
–G?
*Okay, so it’s not really constant, as that would be a drawn-out howl. It barks repeatedly, at a rate of about 45 times per minute, for several hours at a time.
