Got my 100GB camera today — don’t need a zoom lens any longer!

I installed the camera in the front grille of my wife’s Toyota Camry.

Inconspicuous.  Another family car in another family-friendly shopping district.

Let the camera take random photos.

After marveling at the sharp details of carparks and tyres, I set the supercomputer to analyse the photos for trends.

There, before my eyes, were animals adapting to human behaviour, habits that I’d seen a thousand times but never paid attention to.

For years, I’ve observed the ebb and flow of birds as the days get longer and the average ambient temperature rises.

But those were birds foraging in suburban forests.

Rarely do I sit in a carpark for days on end and see birds repeat seasonal patterns.

But a camera and computer can do for me what I wouldn’t do for myself.

This afternoon, I figured out that house sparrows not only scavenge carparks for discarded food, they look for cars dripping water from air conditioner tubing.

They hop from underneath one freshly parked car to another in summer, taking tiny sips of aitchtewoh, flapping their wings, biting and scratching insect infestations in the heat.

Birds breathe through their mouths in extreme heat, just like us.

All this time, I was wondering how to water the hanging baskets and concrete planters full of tropical trees, hostas, roses and annual flowers around our front entrance and there it was staring me in the face for years — the water drainage pipe for our heat pump!

Thank you, little sparrows, for your inspiration.

Now to hook the heat pump drainage pipe to a small reservoir, use a toilet repair kit as a depth sensor that triggers a small waterfall pump to cyclically move the reservoir water from the heat pump to the flower pots.

On/off topic, with this mega-gigapixel camera, my stack of 32-to-256 MB USB flash drives are practically useless to carry photos around.

Time to turn them into mini-OS drives for the picocomputer systems running dedicated, specialised subroutines that I’ll tell you about one day when I’m really bored and want to explain how trees and vines can become memory storage and arithmetic units if you know how to take advantage of their seasonal changes.  Chlorophyll-based batteries are the best for these low-energy, solar-powered minisuperpicocomputers.  Swaying branches generate some power but not consistently enough to keep the battery/capacitor packs charged.

Will your idea rise from the drawing board?

Can a tree leaf charge your spray-on battery?