Today is the first day my new dog is home alone, and I fully expect to come home to some… presents.
So this morning, I was thinking. I have a webcam that I don’t use. What if I hooked it up so that it was pointing to living room? Would I be able to monitor the dog from work?
Of course, I couldn’t do anything if he does something. It’s not as if I could yell at him (“No! baddog!”). So it wouldn’t be practical in that sense.
But maybe just maybe it would prevent surprises. “Ah, there he goes, crapping in the corner. Mmmhm. Well, I know what to expect now! Good thing I have my boots on!”
My home PC is hooked up to a cable modem, so it’s always connected anyway.
Ok. Pros? Cons? Completely nuts?
And of course, it would be rather temporary, since he won’t be pooping in the apartment forever. I hope.
Can’t see any reason why not. You should also be able to fix up that you set up voice chat with your home computer, put up the speakers, and then you really can make a noise any time he tries to make a delivery.
Put the webcam on the dog! Get one of those mini wireless cameras they sell on ebay and mount it on a specially modified collar, plug the receiver into a video capture card and you have DogCam - what the dog sees, the world sees, live, when the dog licks his… ah maybe not such a good idea after all…
Seriously though, has anyone ever done this before?
Haven’t done it, but I have heard of doggy day-care where the organisation has webcam set up so that owners can check and see what their pups are up to while they’re at work.
Not necessarily. You can setup access so that a password is required. You may have to google for the technical help though. I wouldn’t know offhand how to do this.
I have a webcam on my dog when I’m not at home and I used to use it for the exact reason; when potty-training my dog, I wanted to know what his habits were. Like, I found out what time he had to go #2 and adjusted my lunch time one hour earlier to come home to walk him. I used InetCam.com to stream it to the internet onto their server. What I had to do was:
Plug in the camera and install its driver.
Download software from InetCam
Tweaked the program to the configs I wanted.
Stream it and it works!
All I had to do was access a personal web page on the InetCam website.
Downside: the webcam can only face one spot and isn’t the clearest thing in the world.
Upside: peace of mind.
Good luck with your new dog. Sounds like you’re gonna be a real good doggie parent.
I was thinking more about video streaming and trying to think of free streaming options. And capybara beat me to that yahoo messenger idea. I did pay for the inetcam software (this was two years ago and I love it), but now yahoo messenger has this webcam thing. I viewed a friend through it once, but the image was a bit poorer. But, you might want to play with that, if you have two yahoo accounts. I’m not sure how you would “send” the “view webcam” message to your work PC, unless you keep that PC on at work. Because it does one of those “send” and “accept” thing, IIRC. But I’m sure it’s possible. If you want something a little more sophisticated, go with the website. That way, you can even share the video with family and friends.
BTW, I had my puppy kept in one corner of the room in an area that was only big enough for his fluffy dog bed, his bowls and his puppy pad. I discovered that my he slept all day and was very boring to watch. He only got up to pee and poo on the puppy pads, drink some water, sniff his bowl. This lasted less than 2 minutes and then he immediately went back to sleep. Today, he’s trained to go #1 outside and #2 on the pad, 'cause I don’t walk him in the cold and rain and he’s also very small (very easy clean up–just flush). I figure, if you don’t want to puppy-pad train him, then I guess the area of confinement shouldn’t include the puppy pad, but just the bed and water bowl. Whoops, I’m rambling and will stop now.
