Our hedgehogs' names are Rosie, Mia, and Rochelle. Mia currently appears on the cam. They are African Pygmy hedgehogs. All three are very similar in appearance - gray on the top and off white on the bottom with dark brown eyes. Aimee can tell the difference at a hundred yards, but Richard still has to flip them over. ;)
Puffer appeared on the cam until she left us in December, 2001. Puffer was an albino, and was therefore off white all over with pink eyes.
Gilda appeared on the cam until she left us in June, 2002. Gilda was more similar to Rosie, but somewhat lighter.
John appeared on the cam until he passed away in November, 2003.
Bunny Foo Foo also appears on his own cam.
Q: How do I make a LED illuminator?
A: Look here! http://www.twoengineers.com/Richard/leds.html
Q: Where did their names come from?
A: Gilda was named after comedienne Gilda Radner, because both Gildas make Aimee laugh. Puffer, who was quite timid around people, got her name from her habit of puffing up and pointing her spines at everything. Rosie is named
after Rosie the Riveter. John an Rochelle are named after the people that cared for them in their first hours and days while we were out of town for Christmas.
Mia got her name (an acronym for Missing In Action) by escaping from us soon after we got her.
Q: What type of equipment does the Hedgehog Cam use?
A: The hedgehogs are illuminated by a bunch of
infrared LEDs
purchased from Radio Shack. The Hedgehog Cam is a infrared video camera purchased from SuperCircuits, attached to the NTSC input of an ATI All-In-Wonder Pro video capture board which is driven by Bill Oatman's SpyCam 6.10 software. The platform is
Micro$oft WinBlows 98SE running on a 200mhz Cyrix PC with 64MB ram. SpyCam captures an image every fifteen seconds (or so, WinBlows willing) and FTPs it to the web server, which has no
Micro$oft products on it, thank you very much.
We also have a crappy little USB webcam that floats from pet to pet. Feh.
You may notice that the cam is often down (you can still see the web page, but the image stops updating). Guess why! That's right: Windows. >:( We'd like to convert the cam to Linux, or anything else that will run on the hardware we have. If anyone would care to suggest ways to purge
Micro$oft products from our setup,
please don't be shy! ...Unfortunately, most Linux documentation takes the form of "Since you already know how to do this, there's really no need to actually explain it. But here's a bunch of extreme technobabble you already know by heart!"
Q: Why is the Hedgehog Cam in black and white?
A: The hedgehogs are most active at night, which means that we have to use special infrared equipment to photograph them in the dark (unless we had been content to show them always rolled up in little balls sleeping). Infrared light is invisible to the human eye, and the hedgehog eye, too, as far as we know.
The colors we see are caused by objects absorbing various portions of white visible light, and reflecting the rest. All of this light is absent in infrared light. This means that "colors" as we know them don't exist under infrared illumination. Various objects reflect various amounts and wavelengths of infrared light. This permits an image to be created, but there isn't any color information that would make sense to us. Therefore, the most commonly used infrared photographic techniques produce black and white images.
Click to see color images of
Gilda
and
Puffer and
Gilda again and
Puffer again and
Puffer again!!.
Q: What's up with the Penguin background?
A: His name is Tux. He's the Linux penguin! He's cute, isn't he? If you continue to use nothing but
Micro$oft products, Tux will be very sad. You don't want Tux to cry, do you? Of course not.
Q: I get a broken link symbol instead of the picture. What's wrong?
A: Every once in a while, the picture gets messed up for a little while. Wait for 1 minute and try again. If that doesn't work,
email us!
Q: I'm having trouble viewing the cam. What can I do??
A: Shazbat! We thought we'd taken care of that. The first thing you should do is
email
us and tell us what sort of problem you're having and which version of which browser on which operating system you're using. We'll try to help you even if you're using Internet Exploiter. ;) If we knew what was wrong, we'd have fixed it already. However, the most likely culprit is Javascript. Try turning it off. ...But email us even if that works, okay? Thanks!
Q: Hey!! Why didn't you &@$#*s answer my email?!?
A1: To make life difficult for spammers, we use mail filters to discard every message that does not contain the word "hedgehog" in the subject, so if you sent us a message about "Heggies" or "The cam," we never even saw it. :( We're happy to hear from you about things other than hedgehogs, but those cases we suggest a subject such as "Not about hedgehogs."
A2: We're busy. Sometimes we don't have a chance to answer immediately. Sorry!
A3: We offer this page voluntarily and without pay -- at our own expense, in fact. We welcome constructive suggestions on how to make the page better, but if you flame us because we didn't do something the way you wanted it done, to heck with you. >:( We also reserve the right to ignore questions that are answered in this FAQ.