Monitor Your Home Using Yawcam

Are you planning to be away from your residence for a while? Need some budget monitoring from a distance? Try this.

Steps

Get Yawcam. There are many different offerings, having both pros and cons. Try looking for some easy-to-use, practical video capturing software,and reviews. One of these software suites that can sense movement is Yawcam (freeware). Use the software's Install Wizard to install the program.
Set up your camera. You may keep the camera near a computer or use a USB extension cord if you want to hide it. Hiding the camera will give a sense of security, as the intruders will not be aware that the house is monitored. This will help to capture their features in a better way. You need to make sure the camera can see some crucial parts of the house, preferably somewhere where anyone entering the house will naturally have the face visible and have references simplifying estimating a person's height for identification purposes.
Set up Yawcam. The software can store pictures when it senses movement , on recognizing any disturbance or movement ,the report can be mailed to the owner or can be uploaded to a web-server. Find your SMTP server to set up picture emailing. Once you have set it up ,it will be ready to use.
Watching from a distance. You can watch the result from next door or from across the ocean if you have set up the software correctly.

Placing the camera in a way that makes all captured images back-lit (like facing a sunny window or an entrance to a brightly lit room) is a bad idea since this will obscure the intruders face.
If you live with someone else, setting up such a device without telling them, may be illegal. Same is setting up such a device in another person's home.
Logging in with the same user-name to the SMTP server from Yawcam and the remote location may confuse the SMTP provider (invoke security lockout).
If you set up Yawcam to upload to a web-server, other people than you may be able to look at the captured images.
Images from a hidden camera may be inadmissible in court where you live.
Web-cams with LEDs that use regular light will be a dead giveaway at night if turned on. Some web-cams have IR LED's -these are not visible to the naked eye.
Very few "HD" web-cams are actually "High Definition" -most cheap "HD" web-cams uses internal software to blow up native VGA resolution (640*480). Capturing the native resolution is always better than capturing grainy/blocky, blown up, "higher resolution" images.