Remember the webcam stuff I've been whingeing about? Well, it's finished. I've twice tried to write semi-reasonable posts about the rigmarole I went through to finish this project but the first turned into a hugely long essay that just begged to be read in a monotone, and the second was more or less swear words the whole way though.

So instead you get some semi-breezy geek waffle about feeling like I've just got out of jail.

Basically, I had to get two Nikon cameras talking to a PC. Turned out this was completely impossible.

Next, I tried using a Logitech webcam instead. This sort of worked. Ish. The last month has been spent cajoling the little bastard into doing what I want. Lessons learned?

1. Logitech webcams have stupendously, staggeringly bad image quality.
   
2. Logitech can't write TWAIN drivers for shit.
   

TWAIN is geeky. Ignore it. The image quality thing is actually quite bad, though. For the £90 Ruth spent on a Logitech QuickCam Pro 4000, she could have bought a 'real' digital camera with megapixel resolution that would have produced at least passable images. As it is, the Logitech camera provides grainy, pixelated 640x480 images. I suspect they spent more money coming up with the name than the technology...

In the end though, it all works: my two eyeball-esque webcams are now happily providing scrappy images with dubious colour palettes to the slideshow program I wrote, and I can now go off to France with a clear conscience. Barring any giddily exciting events between now and Friday, the next entry here will probably either from a French internet café or a French hospital. One of the two.