By Chad Anctil
The security camera setup was my wife’s idea, due to the amount of packages she got on a weekly basis, and the ever-increasing threat of ‘porch pirates’ in the neighborhood. It wasn’t an expensive setup, just a couple hundred bucks, all connected to the home WiFi, but the cameras had a nice clear picture, and there was a feature to identify what the camera was seeing, so we would get little alerts that popped up on our phones, like ‘animal detected, back yard’ or ‘package detected, front porch’.
When we first got the cameras installed, we would always look at the feed whenever we got an alert. Usually it was nothing – someone walking by, or a squirrel in the backyard. Sometimes it would be something cute, like a bird perching on the camera housing. One time the backyard camera alerted us to a bumble bee that was just hovering in front of the lens – really adorable stuff.
Eventually the novelty of the system wore off, and we only checked the feed occasionally. We knew anything in the backyard was just going to be squirrels or birds, or sometimes the occasional neighborhood cat. Once in a while we would catch a chubby raccoon or a skunk looking for a snack, but it was rarely that interesting.
The front porch camera was more diverse, however, capturing neighbors walking by or school kids headed to the bus stop down at the corner. Of course we always knew when the mail or packages were delivered, the system worked great for that and we never had to worry about getting valuable packages stolen; that gave my wife great peace of mind. For myself, however, what I came to love about that camera was the dog walkers.
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Visions of a Dark Horizon 