What to do with spare download bandwidth?

kureshii — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 22:57:09 -0800

Is there anything meaningful I can do with 10Mbps worth of spare download bandwidth? My ISP recently has an offer on a 10Mbps connection, under a 2-year contract. I've been thinking about getting a separate connection, mainly because the price is good and because I want a good upload bandwidth for torrent-seeding (don't ask).

That plan comes with 1Mbps upload bandwidth which, as mentioned, will be largely used for torrent-seeding. That leaves the 10Mbps download bandwidth largely unemployed. I will still be downloading every so often, but hardly enough to put more than the occasional dent in it.

This is where I need to pick your brains. Are there any meaningful projects out there requiring spare bandwidth, and if so, how can I contribute? Is there are other way I can put it to good use?

I've also been thinking about social network-related experiments and data-logging webcrawlers that would gather historical, social and other data (of course, ideally without maiming other servers), but have yet to think of a meaningful way to turn that into useful insights or conclusions.

If anyone has ideas on what to do with that download bandwidth (that would preferably leave my upload bandwidth alone), please hit me with them =)

Storing sensor data with video with Linux

phrontist — Fri, 07 Apr 2006 09:35:57 -0800

I'm looking for reccomendations for Linux PVR software for a security camera application. I want to be able to store a lot (limited only by hard disk space) of high resolution video from a 3 chip DV camera (which will go through a TV tuner card). So far this is rather standard, but I have the (unusual?) requirement of needing to be able to store a lot of metadata from sensors with the video. (more inside!) So for instance, I'd like to be able to jog through video and see what various sensors were reading at any given moment in the video stream. Some of the PVR systems I've seen use a MySQL database to store video (how exactly does that work, incedentally?) and I was thinking I could perhaps just insert my metadata into the database it used to store data. I, of course, don't know which, if any, of these systems would use a database structure conducive to this sort of thing.

The sensor data would not need to be polled at a particularly high frequency... maybe once every few seconds.

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What to do with spare download bandwidth?

Storing sensor data with video with Linux