When I came across this tip at macosxhints.com today, my jaw dropped. It has to be the most brilliant use of the iSight yet. Seriously. It describes how to make your iSight snap pictures any time someone tries to log into your Mac and fails. Now you can catch your jealous roommate in the act.
It requires a tiny bit of technical knowledge, but the author of the hint has repackaged the required code as an installation package to make it easy. For those interested in how it’s done, it’s a little bit of a Unix hack. Basically, it uses a script that watches the end of a log for a failed login attempt and when the appropriate line is written, your iSight is invoked and takes a picture.
No doubt you could hack this even further to upload the pictures to somewhere on the net. That is left as an exercise for the reader.
Sounds great. However, two essentials for me are:
1. No noise on taking the photo
2. No iSight light on snapping either
Otherwise, a thief who knows he has been snapped is perhaps more dangerous than one who doesn't and may resort to more extreme measures to take the computer with him.