So… There have been some thefts around the office. Someone got hold of a set of keys and has been using them to get things like ID badges, laptops, purses and cameras. Very not good. A couple of years ago, when we got our current office, we had the locks changed so that there would be fewer people with access to our stuff. According to Security, there had been somewhere close to 50 keys made for the old lock, of which only a dozen were accounted for. The new lock only has five keys, and we know who has those.
Unfortunately, that’s no guarantee that someone won’t simply jimmy the door. It hasn’t happened yet, but we would be in a world of trouble if it did. So I’ve set up a bit of additional security in the form of a program called “EvoCam.” It’s a little $20 shareware program that can monitor video feeds and it’s worked for catching thieves before.
You can set up sensor areas on the video feed, basically telling the computer when to take a picture, depending on what changes in the video image. Of course, we’d prefer that they not actually take anything while here, so I’ve set up two sensors. The first one takes the picture, the second one triggers a recorded announcement via the office sound system, informing the intruder that their picture has just been taken and e-mailed to security…
For the announcement, we had quite a variety of sampled sounds from movies and TV shows… When I was testing it out last night I set it up to use a sample of a Battlestar Galactica Cylon saying “Scan for Identification.” Then I discovered that it has a setting for reading text using the OS X built in voice synthesizer. I played around a bit and settled on ‘Ralph,’ a voice which sounds a bit like a cross between Stephen Hawking and James Earl Jones. It’s great with the sub-woofer over in the corner. Hopefully anyone coming into the office in the middle of the night will be leaving to change their trousers in a great hurry…