Video Camera

If I had to come up with a list of silly things to do on the Internet, Web cams would rank near the top. Come on, now -- who really wants to see minute-by-minute shots of your office, your living room, your cat, your guppies or the inside of your fridge?Which goes to show how much I know. Thousands of otherwise sane people have succumbed to the exhibitionist lurking inside and set up Web cams in their living rooms, bedrooms and offices. They poke Web cams out of windows to gather the sunrise or just watch the grass grow.

I was looking at a friend's new computer with Windows 98 and noticed that the program list, the one that appears when you click Start/Programs, was not alphabetized. Try as I will, I could not get these to sort "correctly." Is this a bug or a feature of Win98?The reason that the Start menu doesn't list programs alphabetically is because one can put each entry wherever one wants it simply by dragging it to the desired spot, a feature not in Windows 95, where alphabetization was the norm. The plus side is that you can list programs that have similar functions together even if they have different names, for example, putting Adobe Acrobat with Xerox Text Bridge.

TYSONS CORNER, Va. -- Dave McCall holds up a football-sized chunk of asphalt that looks as if it might have been collected fresh from a pothole out on Leesburg Pike. He points it at a couple of somber Mexican security men, potential customers passing by his booth.Their surprised faces appear on the little Sony video screen nearby."You put this on the street in front of a building, and nobody's gonna notice it. Nobody," McCall tells them, rotating the asphalt so that the pinhole video camera hidden inside pans the exhibit room at the Sheraton Premiere Hotel.

He already kept a gun. He made constant calls to the district police station. But when the crowds of drug dealers and prostitutes on his Southwest Baltimore corner became too thick to avoid, the police suggested that Rick Miller look into a new weapon: a video camera."

Police logScaggsville: 9300 block of Gorman Road: A burglar entered a home through an unlocked side window Saturday and took a shotgun and a video camera.North Laurel: 9100 block of Bourbon St.: A 1979 Buick LeSabre with Maryland tags CXB-516 was stolen Saturday or Sunday.Pub Date: 6/11/96

HAVRE DE GRACE -- It is early May of this year, a spring day in Baltimore. Leonard Kerpelman, to whom controversy clings like lint to a cheap suit, has ventured onto the campus of Frederick Douglass High School with his video camera.His mission is an innocent one. His wife had graduated from Western High School, as Douglass was then known, in 1946. But more has changed in 50 years than the name of the school, and soon Mr. Kerpelman encounters some of the less-appealing sights and sounds of the new era in which we live.

Three men were arrested on narcotics charges Tuesday morning after police stopped their car, authorities said.Officers Brian Fleig and Anthony Tortorici saw a 1984 Ford Tempo with 15-day inspection tags heading west on Route 100 about 12:35 a.m. They stopped the car near the Oakwood Road rTC exit and asked the driver and two passengers to get out of the car, police said.One of the men jumped over the guardrail and tried to escape, police said. Officer Fleig caught him and found a bag of cocaine hanging from his left pocket, police said.

FlexCam is now available for desktop videoThe concept of desktop publishing was introduced with the Macintosh. Since then, combining other words with "desktop" has created even more categories of computer productivity.Take desktop marketing, for example. Since the introduction of CD-ROM, you can get a single disk that contains the names and addresses of everyone in the United States. A marketing person's dream, and for others, a privacy nightmare.One interesting desktop field is desktop video.

POLICE LOG* Town Center: 10500 block of Little Patuxent Parkway: Someone broke the passenger window on a 1987 Nissan 300ZX between 8:45 a.m. and 11:30 a.m. Thursday, and stole several items including a $25 purple gym bag, an $80 pair of purple Nike shoes and two T-shirts valued at $10 each.* Hickory Ridge: 6500 block of Freetown Road: Someone stole $235 in cash, an $800 video camera and a $780 video camera from the coaches' locker room at Atholton High School between Feb. 18 and 4 p.m. Wednesday.

Havre de Grace police officer Neil Crouch has a new partner that weighs in at less than 10 pounds, hangs above the --board and captures evidence on film.The latest addition to the 23-member city police force -- a video camera -- goes everywhere Officer Crouch goes in his patrol car and will be used primarily in traffic cases, especially those involving suspected drunken driving.The department added the camera three weeks ago as part of an experiment, following other law enforcement agencies in Maryland and elsewhere.

SAN JOSE, Calif. - -Steve Jobs' appearance marked the only real surprise at Apple's press event Wednesday in San Francisco, an otherwise low-key affair in which the company announced some modest updates to its music products. Preshow rumors to the contrary, Apple didn't unveil its long-expected tablet computer, didn't introduce a new streaming video service and didn't kill the venerable iPod classic. Oh, and the Beatles still aren't available in the iTunes music store. Instead, the company added a video camera to its midrange iPod nano line, cut the prices on some other models and rolled out an update to its iTunes software and store that, among other things, adds digital liner notes to certain music albums.

When I got a positive answer to my request to photograph the annual holiday lighting of the historic Washington Monument in Mount Vernon and the spectacular display of fireworks that accompanied it, I was both excited and a little apprehensive. The pressure was on to record this Charm City ritual for the front page on deadline, and to shoot video for The Sun's Web site. I set up a tripod for the still camera in an 11th-floor room at the Peabody Court Hotel at the west side of Mount Vernon Square, an often-used vantage point for photographing the monument.

At 7:30 last Sunday morning, the 10-story Mercy Medical Center parking garage that filled nearly a block at the northwest corner of Calvert and Pleasant Streets in downtown Baltimore vanished behind great billowing clouds of ivory dust to the accompaniment of a jarring series of percussive blasts. A few minutes later, when the air had cleared, the garage was gone, reduced to a massive heap of broken concrete, twisted steel and mangled wire destined to be cleared to make way for construction of a new hospital building.

Leaning against the wall of a vacant rowhouse on Mosher Street, Devonte Smith fiddled with a palm-size video camera. A few blocks away, men and boys offered drugs for sale. Calls for "Redline" and "Ray Charles" - names for competing heroin products - echoed in the streets. But Smith wasn't focusing the camera on the dealers. He was looking for the enforcers. Smith is part of a loosely formed group of men who decided over the summer to keep video cameras with them so that they could monitor what they call overly aggressive police behavior.

Q: I have an AMD K6-2 450 mHz computer and recently signed on with EarthLink to be my Internet service provider, mainly because it was offering a free video camera. The camera's CD-ROM software was installed without incident, but when I plugged the camera in to the USB port, a "Video camera is not functioning properly. No such interface supported." message was displayed. Can you help me? A: Your elderly computer's operating system is the culprit and I can only hope that you have the installation CD for the Windows 98SE (Second Edition)

SHANGHAI, China -- One day last spring, administrators at Shanghai Fuxing High School wanting to make a point about good behavior to their students played a video in the classrooms called "uncivilized phenomena of the school." The purpose of the video seemed innocuous enough. In instructing students what not to do, it showed students kicking a soccer ball in a school corridor and climbing into a classroom through a window. Near the end, in a sequence subtitled "intimacy during the evening study session in the classroom," a boy and girl were shown hugging and then -- with their faces blurred -- apparently kissing, violating the no-dating policy that holds at most schools.

In the back yard of his Walkersville home, Ray Matlock sits in a gazebo as two Siamese cats spar. They'll be all right, he says. They make him smile, even today. The midday is perfectly weathered: a sneak of full fall in the air, football weather. Matlock wears a Ravens visor and talks so softly you wonder if he is always this soft-spoken, or whether the death of his boy has knocked the words out of him. A 1968 Oldsmobile is in the garage; his son had restored the classic. The car is a surviving point of pride.

BEING AMONG the swarthy, I have been careful to shave when traveling, especially since September 2001. When you have dark hair and your father was from an island and, most summers, you brown up like a Jimmy Dean sausage - when you are about as far as humanly possible from looking like an Australian butterfly champion - you are self-conscious of security agents in public places. It doesn't fill my every waking hour. But it's there. I would never describe myself as being of "Middle Eastern descent," but I've been told I could play the part.

Though never a fan of the tiniest gadgets, I found Panasonic's SV-AV100 D-Snap Video Camera ($1,000) appealing. It is so small and lightweight (.34 pounds) that it fits in the palm of your hand or a shirt pocket, yet the movies it shoots are pretty good - which is to say only a tad less gorgeous than those recorded by camcorders onto Mini-DV tapes. The D-Snap records MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 videos to a tiny SD memory card. The MPEG-4 images have lots of artifacts (glitches in fidelity caused by compression)

KINGSTON SPRINGS, Tenn. - Before the Army troop truck moves an inch, Darren Takayesu is already rolling. With an eye to posterity, he turns on his digital video camera and trains it on the other soldiers piled into the 5-ton with him. "I want to say hi to Mom," one of the soldiers says. The truck lurches into the baking heat, and now Takayesu speaks into the camera. "Here we go," he says, his face glistening with sweat. "Making history, oh yeah." It was July 22. Takayesu and his unit of the 101st Airborne Division were about to get a small piece of a huge moment in the Iraq war: the raid in Mosul that killed Saddam Hussein's sons, Odai and Qusai.