OT-ish Key-ed paintwork

Has anybody got zoneminder up and running?

I got an old version up 12 months ago but was having no joy getting it to work with any of the tv cards i could find.

No, I solved my security problems by moving to a no-crime area ;-P

Thanks Ian. Confusing two things.

Steve

Yep, runs a work just fine experimentally - haven't rolled out enough cameras. Runs on Suse 10.1, built from RPMs

Steve

:¬)

Sorry if I went off on one. Hope you get it sorted.

Pete

ensure brain is engaged before putting mouth into gear...

I had a similar problem some years ago. Parked totally legally at work on the road in various locations but found the vehicle scratched badly at the weekend. As I parked in slightly different places every day and it was dark when I got back to the vehicle I had no idea who I was offending nor why.

I set up a normal domestic video recorder using a 12v battery and a 150w inverter. A 4 hour tape on long play gave 8 hours of recording time. The large domestic video camera was set up on a tripod using the useful gap between the parcel shelf roller thingy and the back seats of a 200Tdi Disco. The bulk of the camera was covered with an old jacket which looked as if it had just been thrown across the back seats.

I spent a long time in the evenings reviewing the days tape and charged the battery every night. I soon learned that passersby, including vandals, do not look into cars and I quickly taped the bloke doing it. The sound was quite distinctive and he could be seen walking very close to the vehicle such that he had to deviate to avoid walking into the drivers mirror. You can then see him putting something back into his pocket as he walks off. The police were quite impressed and nicked the guy, putting him in their marked car in broad daylight. He turned out to be 70 years old and a respectable member of the local community.

Sadly, the CPS said the evidence wasn't strong enough to prosecute as you couldn't see the key touching the car. He never admitted it and claimed the noise was from a nearby building site. I think anyone seeing the vid would agree he dun it guv.

Anyway, it cost me about 30 quid for the battery and about the same for the inverter ( both have since been very useful ), and a few 4 hour tapes. My excess cost me more, as did the loss of my NCB. Norwich Onion tried to sue him and he employed a lawer ( which I hope cost him a bomb ) which kept the ball in the air for two years. Eventually his lawyer said he had been dismissed and NU wrote to the perpetrator directly, threatening to sue. He simply didn't answer and after some attempts NU politely told me it wasn't worth their while to continue to chase him. By this time I'd rather had enough too, and considered that he had probably suffered enough so I didn't take him to the small claims court although it meant I lost some £200 directly and the increase in premiums due to the loss of the NCB, My out of pocket expenses and time would have made a small claim of about a grand had I gone for it.

I still have the tape, and we never found out why he did it. I can only assume he didn't like me parking outside or near his house but I assure you there was no obstruction at all, this can be seen in the tapes.

One interesting bonus was that I had sometimes found my drivers mirror folded in when I got back. The reason turned out to be plonkers parking opposite me and narrowing the road such that the buses had trouble getting through the gap. The tape clearly shows a bus driver leaning out of his cab and kindly folding my mirror back before squeezing through the gap.

TonyB

From people I know who live in crowded residential areas, it seems one of the areas that people quarrel over the most is parking, with some really odd complaints and super-picky people. Everything from people without cars getting possessive about their parking spaces to people brandishing tape measures and measuring bits of pavement that they don't even own and claiming that it's part of their garden etc. One friend had a lot of hassle from an abusive woman who used to raise hell if anyone parked outside her house, but she herself had two cars that she always parked in front of other people's houses, never her own.

The only time I've ever had any hassle was in the last week of the dreadful 6 years I lived in a city, a neighbour started banging on the wall right next to my head (a semi-detached) so I went next door to see if she was OK. Turned out she was decorating the house at 4AM, was asked to stop, said she would but carried on. Then she got snotty over parking spaces as she took offence at me having the gall to politely ask her to stop banging the s*it out of the wall next to my bed at 4AM.. I suppose I was just being inconsiderate ;-)

On or around Fri, 4 Jan 2008 22:22:13 -0000, "TonyB" enlightened us thusly:

This is why I always buy the additional legal protection on motor insurance cover - NU and the like can afford much more expensive lawyers than I can, and they really don't like being taken the piss out of, so if their lawyers can screw money from someone, they will.

Chap I had a low-speed head-on with tried it on afterwards, sending a claim through one of those no-win-no-fee-shark organisations, claiming for all sorts of things including whiplash (from a front-end collision at about 20 mph? I doubt it) and for the towbar on his car (eh? I can only assume that this wasn't covered on his normal insurance. Maybe he'd not informed the insurance of the modification... it's tempting to think that as a result his insurers refused to pay out, but that's not really likely).

Passed it all to my insurance people, who got their legal types onto it :-)

It's obviously not unusual then. He continued to scratch my car even when it wasn't parked outside his house, and another vehicle in the street, also not outside his house at the time. We very nearly accused the wrong bloke until I came up with the tape idea.

Funny thing was, he had loads of room on his drive, enough to park about 4 cars plus his garage. He had no pavement, his lawn came right down to the kerb. Unbeknown to all of us though, the council were planning to put in some yellow lines there which they did a week after he was nicked! I can only assume they did that due to complaints from the locals, but we've just moved a hundred yards further up the road.

TonyB