welcome to hencam.co.uk!
This year the chickens have laid 148 eggs so far!
latest news: sad news... the end of the cam?
posted by Neil, 3 July 2009, 9:09am [more]
Or Neil could incorporate the story of Hencam into his autobiography...'My Life In Runny Poo'.
Thank you so much Charlotte for posting the pictures and letting us know how they are doing. Dennis is BEAUTIFUL!! I'm so happy that he is here and your mom and brother are doing so well. Dennis has the longest hair on a newborn I have ever seen..and I've seen a lot of them. It may having taken a long time for him to get here, but he sure is worth the wait... what a doll!
174 days to Christmas... woohoo:
Sorry I vanished; unexpected visitor! I always wished I'd made a recording of the sound of our Labrador getting the dregs out of a peanut butter jar...there was a radio programme which asked you to identify an animal from sound alone, and I would have loved to have sent it in...:)
While the original reason for this thread is very sad, I think the title should go into "Hencam The Book" as right up there with *Runny Poo.* :P
I just gave Holly the remainder of the peanut butter jar to lick out (love watching her tongue reach down to the bottom to get every speck) and she is STILL laying there, staring at me, waiting for the last little bit of my breakfast. Which I always give her. Which is why she always stares at me. Its a cycle.
We've gone from Father's Day, through Christmas, and into Easter. Typical.
Ooo. I'd love that! Have to wait until I update my passport though. :P Seriously, I need to do that. Never know when you'll need to escape the country.
Dunno. D'you want to come round to my house to play? We've got chocolate...
Rose, the local deer, got into my corn field last night and ate a row and a half of my babies. (My 'field' is only 4 rows wide.) So, I need to go and try and fence it off somehow this morning. A heretofore unplanned task...
Yah. Now what do we do? :P
Hooray, it works!
Oh there's Eva. Sweet girl. She is definitely missed. Thanks for putting up the lovely photo, Reddie.
Good thinking, Batman; the first (human) Hencam baby.
We need to add Dennis on here: July 01, 09. ;)
Hey! There you are!
Oo-oo! Diane! Over here!
Fofl. I just read your post CC. Too funny. And - were we on-line together for a minute or two. I missed you :(
Apparently he was waiting until his hair grew out. :) That's the most amazing head of hair I've seen on a newborn. Although, I'm not exactly an expert on that subject. LOL Charlotte - great posts and pix. Thanks so much.
I save the orange ones till last.
Charlotte, brilliant pics and posts - well done and thanks! Good God, his hair's nearly down to his knees...mind you, the time Sara took I'm surprised Dennis wasn't born with a beard...:) Thanks again, Charlotte, love fom CC (one of the saddos... )...
Love to you & mum, Init..
Yeah, a few did...laptop in living room is fine! On July 6th it is 3 years since we discovered Eva and brought her back home with us. RIP Eva, you're still missed... :( Also coming up in July, it's the girls' birthdays (why does everything happen in July?!) We'll have an update on that in a few days :)
my two brothers GREAT
den ready to go home dennis 1st bath
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What could be better than a webcam pointing at chickens?
Even MORE webcams pointing at chickens of course!
We hope you enjoy our even better big-brother style coverage of the hens!
about the cam:
Hopefully you can see Milly, Tilly and Penny going about their chicken life in the coop! (Milly is the big fat white hen, Penny is the cowardly chicken and Tilly is the ruler of the roost!)
history:I first had the idea for a live streaming online webcam in our chicken coop sometime around the summer of 2005. I did a bit of research and after some failed attempts with a USB webcam (too many wires in the chicken pen!) I saved up and bought an indoor wireless IP cam from ebay for around £100. It was cheap and quite basic, but it did more or less what I wanted, and formed the basis of the early days of the webcam. Unfortunately, as it was an indoor camera, it started playing up after a few weeks outside - I couldn't really complain as it had been out in wind rain and snow! With the help of my wonderful new henpals I was able to purchase a whole new cam system - a proper outdoor CCD camera which was even submersible in water! The upgrade was originally suggested by the Vasalini (of Vasalini's chickens fame) and took place on 12/03/06
The new camera provides a much clearer picture, and the new images are extremely high quality. The system is also running much faster and is a lot closer to the true streaming that I originally envisaged. Of course if you want faster streaming, you have to sacrifice picture size and quality, but hopefully I have struck a happy medium.
The original hencam was an IP cam which connected wirelessly to my wifi network which gave it access via ftp to the webserver serving these pages via my adsl connection. Thankfully the new camera is much more stable and gives a much nicer view.
My bandwidth limit and PC use can slow the hens upload speed sometimes but hopefully this should get better as I upgrade various components of the system. Hencam is very thankful for the help and support of Exa Networks - thanks to them you can see these pages, and their technology has enabled our fastest, smoothest and best high-quality webcam images yet - I hope you notice the improvement! The streaming technology used is cutting-edge, and made possible by those great people at www.camstreams.com - if you need to stream anything, they are the guys to talk to!
The first upgrade I was able to carry out was a large IR lamp in the coop, so you can still see the hens even in pitch blackness! You can watch them sleep, it's amazing how they seem to grab the odd forty winks in little naps through the night.
If you have any technical questions regarding the setup, please feel free to email me and I'll provide you with as much info as possible. I've already helped several would-be webcam users get started which has been great fun!
Thank you to earthcam who made hencam one of their top ten webcams of the week, they are (in their own words) "chosen by EarthCam based on quality of image, uniqueness of content and overall technical achievements in webcam technology" - whoo many thanks for the award! We were listed just below the Olympics!!! :)
