It’s amazing the amount of pain we humans go through because of vermin. No, I mean it. Sometimes the vermin is Jamie Dimon, CEO of a financial institution which engaged in mortgage fraud and bribery without a single care about the lives ruined or any resulting suicides. Other times the vermin is just a common criminal. Of course, the most respectable type of vermin is that critter which just digs a whole in your yard. They didn’t enter your yard with criminal intent, unlike the previous two category of vermin, they were just looking for a home near food.
Some years ago one of the farms we farm which just has a building site but no longer has a house with occupants got robbed. It was common vermin. Scrap metal price was high, economy was beaten down due to previously mentioned vermin, and there were metal things which would fit in the back of a pickup truck in a couple of the buildings. (Sweep augers and such were the small items if you must know.)
This got the landlord looking around for some kind of “security” system which didn’t cost too much and they landed on the idea of a game/trail camera. They played with it in their garage and took some really great pictures then hung it out at the building site were it could see the drive but was kind of hidden. We never found the scrap yard where the stolen stuff was sold and, contrary to the old adage, the criminals never returned to the scene of the crime. The trail camera manufacturer did not allow the use of rechargeable batteries and after they went through 100 or so D-Cell batteries they stopped using the camera.
Sadly, some other common vermin made a winter trip up a long lane on another farm we farm to pilfer things out of an old shed there. They were either “professional vermin” or had cased the place well before. They drug a 1950s era International Harvester V8 gas engine out of the shed with some kind of chain/cable (judging from the way the snow was plowed) then must have had a hoisting boom to lift it into the back of the dually truck. Yes, they pilfered a few other things too, but that should have turned up. We and the police notified every scrap yard for 100 miles and we even had the numbers off the engine. We had saved it when it started going bad in the old International dump truck because we found a good used one for less than it would cost to rebuild that one. IH V8 gas engines are as scarce as hens teeth now and were at the time of this robbery. That was a rebuildable block, it had no cracks, just some worn rings and bearings. While we finally gotten rid of the truck years ago, we kept the old engine because the collectors market tended to look for them.
STC-ADX trail camera
At any rate, we also purchased a game trail camera, perhaps the same model. It is/was a Stealth Cam which requires 8 D-Cell batteries. This pre-dates SD cards and has what looks like a PCMCIA slot for additional storage or something. The processor on the thing makes paint drying seem like a high speed operation. Laugh all you want but when you turn it on to “test” mode so you can get to the menu it takes around a full minute before you hear the second beep which means you can now push the menu button.
Oh, don’t go expecting that menu to jump up before your eyes on the tiny screen. You will wait anywhere between 3-15 seconds before you hear the beep and see the menu. Likewise for each subsequent button press. Don’t bother trying to set the date and time. Unless you choose a time at least 10 minutes ahead you won’t complete actually getting the time set.
Ah, the “driver” software. It only supports that obsolete Windows platform. It isn’t “driver” software anyway. You cannot change any of the device settings. It only allows you to transfer images from the camera to your computer, something Linux seems to do just fine if you are willing to wait until that second beep happens so it can be recognized as a storage device.
This camera took a few really great pictures in the office while testing it, but after it had been hung in the shed rafters it pretty much took pictures like this:
Bad stealth cam pic
I’ve tried the power on over night without batteries “reset” suggested by support. Now I’m waiting for high priced supposedly sacred batteries which have been deemed “most holy” and worthy of the camera because they will stop this from happening. Yeah right. I looked at the FAQ on their site for the newer game trail cameras they sell.
“We do not recommend rechargeable batteries only high quality…”
Dewalt 18v XRP battery
Seriously? In this day and age you cannot come up with a Dewalt type rechargeable battery pack that works with your cameras? Preferably not the actual Dewalt batteries because people would go walking through the woods to snag the batteries for use in their own power tools, leaving the unpowered camera behind, but even the non-tech savy people reading this that we have laptops, tablets and cell phones which all work with a rechargeable battery. For years many laptop manufacturers made “secondary batteries” which fit the spot occupied by the removable CD/DVD drive so we could get twice the battery life. I mean, for around $12 we can buy SMART ELECTRICIAN rechargeable work lights with a battery that lasts a long time and charges via a USB cable so why can game trail cameras not have rechargeable battery packs? Better yet, why can’t they work with off-the-shelf rechargeable batteries?
All of this hardship just to find out what kind of vermin so I can figure out the best way to get rid of it.
