Got the camera working on the HP Ubuntu Server install. It was pretty seamless. Funny how all the Linux stuff seems to flawlessly work on HP laptops but its significantly more work on a Mac. Especially, since Mac is a certified Unix and the HP laptop came with Windows. But I can see how a cheaper device would probably incentivize more people to attempt installing Linux and fix more bugs.

I'm using the Motion library for video and motion detection. Here's my configuration:

stream_port 8080
stream_localhost off

video_params palette=15
target_dir /home/myuser/videos

width 1280
height 720

movie_quality 50
movie_codec mp4

picture_output best

I place this in ~/.motion/motion.conf. You can start up motion in the background using:

motion -b

And you can kill it by finding its PID:

pgrep motion

And then running the kill command. Assuming the PID is 1234:

kill 1234

I enjoy playing online poker for fake money. I found one of my old projects: a Poker Equity Calculator. It's a desktop application written with JavaFX that calculates your probability of winning a hand based on what cards you have, how many opponents you're up against, and the cards on the board. I wrote this about 9 years ago.

I used it again today and although its quite accurate it ended up losing me more hands than it won. I played solely based on the equity percentage and I've concluded that's not enough to actually win at poker.

Normally, when I play, I calculate an estimated equity in my head but also take into account the patterns of my opponents. This seems to give better results than just using equity.