Steven Levitt Official Home Page and Blog

So we have recently started using Skype (http://www.skype.com) to call my folks and video-conference with them. Why you ask when we live in the same city? well, appartenly the folks are addicted to seeing their grandson and cant stand not seeing him fore more than a day or two. As a result, I have had to use some technology to solve this problem. We downloaded Skype (free) form the site listed above.

I also bought the Logitech QuickCam® for Notebooks Pro. Its a great little camera and includes a built in Microphone. It looks like this:

It rests on top of the monitor, its really designed to clip onto a notebook lid but i like the small form factor so I got it anyway.

the strength of this thing is how easy i was to setup and use. Simple driver install and the camera was working. The tought part was setting up skype to use it. I had to chose “Video (Beta)” in the “Tools/Options” menu and select “Enable skype video”. Also had to select the webcam and set “Start my video automatically”
Also in “sounds” had to select the voice input to the webcam microphone. But from there on it its great. You can make free pc to pc calls with skype and do video conferencing. We video conference every so often and when we were on a trip to hawaii recently the folks were able to see their grandson.

So my skype id is stevendlevitt, install it and give me a shout.