Look for IT over here

In a great move, Paypal have released a great new security measure that will go a longs way in preventing fraud.

The security key, which works in a way very simialr to the more common RSA secureID that many peope use at work, the key generates a random number every 30 seconds. This number needs to be input every time you log into your Ebay or Paypal account.

The key costs only a few dollars and is a once off fee – certainly peace of mind to know that there is an extra level of security on your Paypal account.

Want to set up a home surveillance system at home while having a bit of fun?

Here’s a bit of a guide of what to do – or more so what I did and how.

Originally this started as a bit of a project in my spare time, but after some teenage idiots decided to throw rocks and eggs at our place one night, it became more of a security thing as I wanted to catch those bastards!

Anyway, back to the good stuff. Not having a big budget, I decided to do a bit of reading and find how much a cheap setup would cost me.

First of all I needed a dedicated PC that I could ‘break’ and it wouldn’t be a drama. Easy – I have a few lying around here and decided to go with a IBM Net Vista PIII 850 with 256M RAM and a 40 Gig hard drive. It’s nothing flash but a good stable PC. I also needed a video capture (DVR) card and a camera. That’s where Ebay came in.

Ebay have these cheap 4 port capture (DVR) cards that you can pick up for about $10. There are a few different types, and if you pay a few more dollars you can get one that processes more frames per second (fps) at a time.

One thing I did read quite often is that with these cheap cards, if you think you can run 4 cameras at real time, then you are dreaming. One or two cameras is bit more realistic. Don’t forget this was more of a project.

The card I got was called a Pico 2000 DVR card
(Please take note of comment #1 at the end of the post),
and looks like this:

The card comes with Windows drivers, and I can tell you now that getting this card to work under Windows (XP) was a real pain (and didn’t work with the drivers supplied) . I will do a separate article about using this under Windows as it deserves its own post. I ended up using Linux for my project.

Now, the camera – again from Ebay. Search for ‘Nightvision camera’ and see how many results come up. You have a few options here as well. Whether you want a wired or wireless camera, color or B/W, and of course what physical size.

Here’s what I chose (but in a cream case). It’s a wired color camera, with 18 LEDs that does enable a bit of seeing in the dark:

To connect the camera to the DVR card, I will use coax cable and terminate RCA plugs at either end. Not too hard to do if you’re handy with a soldering iron. Note: As you can see there are two connectors for the camera. One is for the video signal, and the other is for power, which comes from a standard plug pack transformer.

Next article, I will get into the OS and software that i used.

Individuals who buy to let mortgages manage the rest often end up in debts. The term investment in unheard of to them. A home mortgage deal is common enough and something almost everyone is dealing with, but these people do everything against the free insurance quotes book.