Picture Frames and Captions with ImageMagick

This article discusses some of the caption and border effects available with the ImageMagick image processing package. ImageMagick is freely available for Linux and Windows. It offers a huge number of image processing options, so many in fact, that using the program can be a little tricky.

The following examples were evolved from the ImageMagick online documentation, plus a good deal of trial and error to get the details right. I used Linux, but the same commands should work under Windows. Continue reading

Simple Webcam on Raspberry Pi

The Raspberry Pi’s low power consumption makes it well suited to the role of always-on server. This post describes how to attach a simple webcam to a Raspberry Pi and have it take a snapshot every few minutes, and how to view the pictures on the web. Just like a traditional webcam.

My Raspberry Pi was purchased from New It in the UK. It was installed with Debian 7 (“Wheezy”) by applying the image “2014-01-07-wheezy-raspbian.zip” downloaded from the raspberrypi.org downloads page. The following procedure was then performed without any further pre-work (other than enabling ssh in the basic setup). Continue reading