Security: Simultaneously Weak and Amusing

At the urgings of a friend, I recently set up a script that takes a picture (with iSight) every time the lid of his MacBook is opened. To be fair, the sense in which I actually did any work is quite marginal, as two tools — ImageSnap and Sleepwatcher — handle any aspect of the setup that might reasonably be considered complex.

As you might guess, ImageSnap is a command line tool for taking pictures with iSight. Likewise, Sleepwatcher is a system process that can be setup to watch for various events (e.g. startup, sleep, wake, ect.) and execute  specified external scripts when such events occur. Effectively, all I needed to do was compose these two helpful utilities to get the ‘security system’ up and running. Here is the bash script that Sleepwatcher executes on wakeup:

tre=`date "+%Y-%m-%d--%H-%M-%S.jpg"`
~/Programming/ImageSnap-v0.2.4/imagesnap
mv snapshot.jpg ~/Pictures/security/${tre}

To get Sleepwatcher up in the first place, setup launchd to run something like the following:

/usr/local/sbin/sleepwatcher --verbose --wakeup ./take_pic.sh

Of course, much more complex variations can be managed. For instance, if you think a mugging might be in the cards, then you can have the pictures sent to an externally accessible server (perhaps along with intermittent system screenshots). In any case, I recommend checking these tools out.