Perhaps you鈥檝e bought a new phone in the January sales. Maybe you were just due an upgrade. Either way, I bet plenty of you have a retired handset lying inert in a drawer somewhere. You could sell it, but tech trends shift so quickly that it鈥檚 probably not worth the effort. Why not give it a new career as a remote eye?
First, grab your old device, be it Apple, Android or other. Then install a security camera app. There are plenty to choose from. Some let you watch your valuables, or just your fish tank, from anywhere in the world via a live video stream. Some do the watching for you: they send you a notification if the camera sees movement.
Advertisement
A not-so-Big-Brother use for that function could be to help correspondence chess players who like to play with physical pieces keep in touch. If each has a phone camera trained on their board, a notification would let them know not only that their opponent has made a move, but what it was.
But I prefer to customise with IFTTT (short for 鈥淚f This Then That鈥�).This easy-to-use online service lets you automate actions with an ever-growing list of devices and apps. The principle is simple. You have a trigger and an action: once the first thing happens, IFTTT takes care of the second. You need a security camera app that notifies you of motion in a way that can act as the trigger 鈥� sending an email, say, or saving pictures to a Dropbox folder. Then you can make IFTTT respond any way you like.
For example, if you want to know how much time your dog spends in your bedroom while you鈥檙e out, you just point your camera at the door and have IFTTT mark the time on a Google calendar whenever there鈥檚 movement. That would give you a daily chart of Fido鈥檚 comings and goings.
Or, surreptitiously point it at the cookie jar and have it send your partner an email to say you know they鈥檝e been stealing the custard creams (you could even include the photographic proof). Don鈥檛 blame us if it鈥檚 the end of a beautiful relationship, though.
This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淥ld phone, new tricks鈥�
