My wife will watch lots of shows that I like to watch, partly because she has similar tastes, but also because the shows I watch aren’t too awful (and there’s that whole marriage sharing thing …). One show I suggested a few months ago that looked like it might be interesting was the hour long show on BBC America, TopGear. It’s a car show. I could see her skepticism visibly when I announced it was something I wanted to watch together. "A car show?" Food shows, travel shows, dramas, even history shows she’ll watch, but a car show?

By the end of the first episode, after laughing and enjoying it thoroughly, she gave this show the "approved" nod and now looks for new episodes to show up on the DVR. Since we’re just catching up and watching some re-runs, we’ve been able to watch quite a few episodes recently.

Starting February 25th, 8pm et/pt, Top Gear’s new season begins to air on BBC America. Sure, they talk of cars that aren’t available in the states, but real car talk is only a small part of the show. The hosts make "car talk" fun.

I’ve used Blue Iris for several months now to monitor a few security cameras we have installed around our house. It’s a brilliant piece of software that works as well as many software packages that cost four to ten times as much (trust me, I’ve experimented and tested packages that were $500 US).

The key features for me that I needed:

• Runs as a Windows Service — even if no one is logged onto the computer, the application is still monitoring
• Runs on Windows 2003 Server (or Windows Home Server).
• Can send e-mail alerts when motion is controlled with a configurable options (like the maximum frequency of e-mails sent within a period).
• Support of my IP based cameras.
• Reasonable CPU usage (about 30-40% constant on my home server to monitor 4 cameras).
• Continually updated — not a dead product
• Remote access via a web page (the product does this well, but it’s not an attractive web page — just functional).
• Priced competitively — this product is priced almost too low — at $49.95 for the unlimited package.
• Stable — I haven’t had a single problem with the stability of the product in months.

It has tons of options for configuration:

Tons of settings for each individual camera:

Here’s the built in web application (it’s ActiveX or Java based):

It even works with my Airlink 250W wireless IP camera (with a few tricks):

Even though the main application user interface is not very "professional" — it’s a killer program and if you need something like this, I’d strongly recommend you consider it.

Windows only.