I'll share something I did the other night. This is something I'm sure you can do for any operating system but I think it was a good idea anyway. Out back we have a pond with 8 large fish that are about a foot long. The pond is one of those massive hardshell things you get at hardware stores that's the size of your average Honda. Well, we noticed 3 fish were missing. Since I haven't been using my 8.9" netbook that much, I decided that was a good test machine. I installed Motion, which is an application that takes pictures when it detects motion. It works GREAT. It had taken in the market of 3,700 pictures throughout the night. By holding down the right arrow key it paged through the pictures like a real-time movie, so it was easy to sift through within a matter of a minute or two and see if anything showed up at the pond.
Unfortunately, nothing showed up. But it was a neat idea. This has given me inspiration to look into ZoneMinder, which is an open source CCTV solution. I hear of people who hook up wireless IP based webcams to it without a hitch. Makes me think deploying video surveillance in an already wireless-saturated building might be extremely, extremely easy.
But hey, moral of the story is, another great use for Linux is to set up video surveillance to see what pesky raccoon is eating your massive goldfish!
