OCC 2026 - Day 5
----------------

Good news and bad news.

The good news is, the twenty year old Axis 207W Network
Camera mostly works!  I was able to successfully reset it
back to factory settings, and connect to the admin interface
from my laptop over a direct-attached network cable using
the non-routable IP address 192.168.0.50.

I had to poke around a bit before I remembered how to get it
to generate still photos, since all the settings appeared to
be for streaming video . Along the way I learned that (of
course) the camera runs some version of Unix. The admin
interface provided an option to activate a built-in FTP
server, which I did, and after connecting via FTP I could
see the standard Unix file system.

Eventually I came upon a brief section in the docs that
answered the question of how to get photos off the thing:
the camera has a built in web server, and if you send a GET
request to the correct URL, it will return a grainy still
image. Exactly what I was looking for. It would work great
for this project, since such things are easy to script.

And now the bad news. The part of the camera that does not
work, unfortunately, is the camera part - which is to say,
that part of the camera that takes photos. Apparently some
time in the past 20 years the sensor was damaged, to the
point that all it can sense are variations in light
levels. In a dark room, it will generate a jpeg of a dark
grey rectangle, and when the lights are turned on, it
generates a light grey rectangle.

Aargh! I begin to think the gods really don't care about my
project one way or the other, and it's all just randomness
and chance.

So, is the NAPLPS/ASCII Photo Booth dead in the water? Not
quite. I think there is at least one other thing I can try,
although I'm bummed I won't be using the Axis camera, which
as we now know is itself an old computer and so totally
suited to the theme of this event.

Is the Axis camera destined for e-waste? Permacomputing
philosophy would argue against it.  Perhaps I can do
something else with what remains of the camera, for next
years' OCC.

Fri Jul 10 09:50:30 PDT 2026