Entry level IP cameras are dropping in price and are easier to install than you think.  Unlike webcams, IP cameras are standalone devices the don’t need a continuously running computer to allow them to operate.  Plus, you can access images from your IP camera anywhere, including mobile phones.

Nik Rawlinson of CNET writes “How to set up a cheap home security system using Dynamic DNS” and outlines, in great detail, the steps you’ll need to follow:

1. Site your IP camera
2. Sign up to free Dynamic DNS forwarding
3. Set up your router

That’s all you need to start monitoring your cats from work.

Home IP Camera Suggestions

Here’s a few affordable indoor IP cameras that are great for home, office, or vacation home use.  …

If you’re fabulous enough to have received an intive to the exclusive Google+, the latest social media splash, you might also like to know that their Hangouts feature offers an easy way to set up simple home surveillance monitoring.

Google+ Hangouts offers face-to-face video chats with several of your friends at the same time.  But what if you were just using two of your own personal accounts with one of the account’s webcam trained on an area of interest? 

That’s what a Lifehacker reader did and explained the process and results of using Google+ Hangouts with a webcam to keep watch over your house:

You can use Google Hangouts as an on demand remote camera viewer. First, create a second Google Account, and put …

If you’re looking for a simple and cost-effective (read: Free) way to keep an eye on all of your stuff using computers and webcams that are lazily laying around the house doing nothing, then check out the Windows based iSpy security software.

Free and Open Source

iSpy is a free, open source, camera security software that can be used with your own computers, webcams, microphones and even IP cameras. Besides costing you nothing, iSpy software has the same functionality as  high-level IP camera software systems:

• Event Management: Set up alerts and scheduling and get instant, mobile notification when motion or sound is detected.
• Recording and Viewing: Continuous, triggered, or scheduled recordings. View recordings locally or remotely (Searching recorded video via different search

There’s a DIY surveillance camera project outlined at Making of the Autonomous Surveillance Camera that aside from acutally working, can email you photos of the room it’s watching when you ask it to.

Here’s how it works:

It uses cellular network for communication. The device checks pre-defined email mailbox once an hour. If a new email is received the camera takes a picture, saves it on a SD-card and emails the image to its owner.

This produces still images on a time delay but, it can provide you a little peace of mind if you need to check on your home. You can build your very own camera with:

1. A modem
2. JPEG camera
3. SD memory card
4. Micro-controller and integrated circuit

Watch the video to see …

It’s been a rough winter for a lot of people around the country.  Snow, ice, and challenging commutes can put everyone on edge.  

If you want to relieve some of this weather induced stress by sharing in someone elses misery then consider,  what happens when you steal a snow shovel from a video surveillance installer’s porch?

From the Wall Street Journal article As Weather Worsens, So Do Manners:

Last week, during a storm that dumped nearly two feet of the white stuff on Chicago, someone took David Welles’s snow shovel from his front porch. The security cameras Mr. Welles keeps trained on his house showed a woman grabbing the shovel and using it to dig out her sedan.

The woman, whom he didn’t know, …